Was it ever supported? The response in the forum is "[a]t this time, Chromium is not supported for use with Google Cast." which doesn't explicitly say that support was retracted.
Original title, lest it changes:
Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast (productforums.google.com)
3 points by keeperofdakeys 1 hour ago
I don't have a Chromecast set up, so I'm not 100% sure on this, but my understanding is that Chromium users could cast using the Google Cast extension, and that Google did something (intentionally or unintentionally) to break the Cast extension and didn't fix it because casting is built into directly into Chrome now.
Yeah, you could cast with the Google Cast extension over Chromium.
And it's generally believed that Google moved the Chromecast-functionality into Chrome and away from an extension to not necessarily lock out Chromium, but rather to lock out other Chromium-based browsers which could use their extensions, so for example Opera.
Firefox and, I believe, Edge are also getting support for Chrome extensions in the foreseeable future, so this might have increased the incentive to lock out browsers that can use their extensions, too.
What is that speculation based on? Why wouldn't Google want more browsers to be able to Cast?
My opinion: I feel like this is a pro-user move with an unfortunate side effect of breaking/unsupporting an extension. If I just want to cast to my TV why should I have to hunt for an extension. I'd rather it "just work" via a context menu in the browser.
It favors a particular implementation (Chromecast) in a market where there are several competing standards and no established leader. Shouldn't Miracast, for example, "just work" as well?
I don't know of any competing standards. The Matchstick tried but failed (I think they had DRM problems). Miracast is completely different, it deals with video to remove displays where as chromecast (primarily) is about loading a URL on a remote display with some communication primitives.
I really wish there was a competing product/standard, but I don't know of one.
Miracast is a streaming endpoint. As in, you typically throw H264+AAC at it.
Chromecast, however, is amount remote controlling a secondary Chrome HTML canvas on the Chromecast, where the intended use is manipulating a <video> object.
You can cast a tab to your Chromecast, thus treating it like Miracast, but that is largely not what the Chromecast is meant for.
Example, I can have Youtube (the website or the phone app) cast a queue of videos to the Chromecast, interact with that queue from multiple devices, and even disconnect all devices, and the Chromecast keeps playing because it streams the video directly from Youtube, not my phone or browser.
Miracast cannot do any of these things.
In addition, the only functioning Miracast device I've ever discovered is Microsoft's Wireless Display Adapter. All the built in Miracast end point impls in TVs and such are utter garbage and usually don't work.
>What is that speculation based on? Why wouldn't Google want more browsers to be able to Cast?
You have to remember how Google's business works. Ads on search is a massive part (majority?) of their revenue. The main reason for Chrome existing is to direct people to Google search via the address bar.
Well, the bug report made clear that it worked before with the official extension and doesn't work now. It depends on how pedantic you want to be with "supported".
No one ever held a press meeting and officially said that Chromium is supported by Chromecast (Chromium doesn't even officially exist as a product), but you could use Chromium with the Google Cast extension and it worked, anyways.
So, yes, legally speaking Google is doing no wrong here, but morally speaking it's not that great.
This isn't a response from a Google employee, right?
My understanding is that there is some sort of volunteer programme for Google forums. (Side-note: Is there anything in it for the volunteers? How does Google convince them to do this?)
Pretty sure she's not. If you hover over the icon on her profile picture, it says "Expert - Google Products". I can't find an example, but as I recall they have something like "Google Employee" that leaves it in no doubt when it's an employee response.
Google rewards crazy active contributors with early access to certain experimental features of their products and access to special events or something. For a taste check out the Google Maps app's contributions tab for info on the "Local Guide" programme. IMO the title is misleading as the only way to get to the higher tiers is to visit a lot of different places, not to provide detailed info on a handful.
The new cast feature in recent builds of chromium is not working for me. It fails to find any devices. Looking at the debug output it says: "media router not defined."
Thank you! I don't know if this was up the last time I looked.
There are flags to gate the feature in the source-- looks like the iOS build excludes it. Going to leave a build running overnight and give it a look in the morning. If tearing it out works, I'll post a patch to the Debian bug report.
Disabling media router from source is apparently more involved than I thought it would be. Could have changed the default setting in a new user profile, but disabling it with a command-line argument is probably more like what I'm looking for here.
People really have any expectation from Google devices?
Even android which whole marketing is that it is "more open" only receives self-serving features. Btw, the access to chrome-cast is baked in the playStore service. So your app has to be compiled with full google play store tracking library to use it. ...i used to help maintain a version of fenec (firefox for android) that was build without chromecast support just because of this (and if you want it, gnu now maintains a better version called IceCat)
Oh, and even plain-open-source projects... there were 4 attempts to have an option to disable referrer on chromium. All of them reverted by google employers on unrelated commits. So even chromium is not that safe.
Usually I'm all for that everything made these days, should work across all browsers.
That said, the Chromecast was always named just that: Chrome-cast, after Google's proprietary browser. It was for instance not called the Web-cast. That's a pretty clear signal right there.
There's a thousand different browsers available to the curious user these days, but for years and years now the only (2?) browsers that have been supported was chrome and chromium.
Firefox for instance, has never received support. A big fuck you to what at the time was 25% of all internet users. The "fix"? Tell people to move to chrome (and how is Chrome's market share these days?).
This change just brings the amount of supported browsers down from 2 to 1 and the amount of unsupported browsers up from 998 to 999. Hardly a big change if you think about it.
Now... You have a proprietary browser, running proprietary nonstandard extensions to interact with proprietary online services and give them preferential treatment...
That's way beyond anything Microsoft did in the 90s to get the famous MSIE antitrust conviction.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the rumoured 4k Chromecast. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some interesting tech to support it they don't want to make public.
Edit:
Nevermind, it looks like Chrome lately has built-in support for Chromecast (I see it under the menu as Cast). From this, I can surmise a couple of things:
1. Google wants users to be able to use a chromecast out of the box without installing an extension. Can't fault them for that because believe it or not, not everyone knows how to do that. Or there's some limitation I don't know about in extensions that they want to get around.
2. This means that Google would either have to open-source the Chromecast functionality in the browser, or it has to maintain both the functionality baked into Chrome and the browser extension. So, they'd have to keep supporting a browser extension they'd not need for Chrome just to support Chromium.
I don't know.. May be a good compromise if possible would've been to bundle Chrome with the chromecast extension. But I doubt when someone came up with the idea of bundling Chromecast in the browser for purpose X, someone else in the team said: But think of Chromium!
I'm on my phone right now, and just skimmed that thread for about 10 seconds, but it reminded me of a commit I saw a few days ago when skimming another page for 10 seconds. All that skimming appears to be paying off. Maybe Batman is a skimmer too...
The original poster appears to be hit by a bug that was fixed by this commit, which is a part of the latest Chromium release. Just a bug that was fixed... no controversy.
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadOriginal title, lest it changes:
And it's generally believed that Google moved the Chromecast-functionality into Chrome and away from an extension to not necessarily lock out Chromium, but rather to lock out other Chromium-based browsers which could use their extensions, so for example Opera.
Firefox and, I believe, Edge are also getting support for Chrome extensions in the foreseeable future, so this might have increased the incentive to lock out browsers that can use their extensions, too.
My opinion: I feel like this is a pro-user move with an unfortunate side effect of breaking/unsupporting an extension. If I just want to cast to my TV why should I have to hunt for an extension. I'd rather it "just work" via a context menu in the browser.
I really wish there was a competing product/standard, but I don't know of one.
Chromecast, however, is amount remote controlling a secondary Chrome HTML canvas on the Chromecast, where the intended use is manipulating a <video> object.
You can cast a tab to your Chromecast, thus treating it like Miracast, but that is largely not what the Chromecast is meant for.
Example, I can have Youtube (the website or the phone app) cast a queue of videos to the Chromecast, interact with that queue from multiple devices, and even disconnect all devices, and the Chromecast keeps playing because it streams the video directly from Youtube, not my phone or browser.
Miracast cannot do any of these things.
In addition, the only functioning Miracast device I've ever discovered is Microsoft's Wireless Display Adapter. All the built in Miracast end point impls in TVs and such are utter garbage and usually don't work.
You have to remember how Google's business works. Ads on search is a massive part (majority?) of their revenue. The main reason for Chrome existing is to direct people to Google search via the address bar.
https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6349849?hl=en
So, yes, legally speaking Google is doing no wrong here, but morally speaking it's not that great.
My understanding is that there is some sort of volunteer programme for Google forums. (Side-note: Is there anything in it for the volunteers? How does Google convince them to do this?)
After a bit of googling I found you can revert back to using the old cast extension by following these instructions: https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6349849?hl=en
There are flags to gate the feature in the source-- looks like the iOS build excludes it. Going to leave a build running overnight and give it a look in the morning. If tearing it out works, I'll post a patch to the Debian bug report.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833477
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833477#44
Even android which whole marketing is that it is "more open" only receives self-serving features. Btw, the access to chrome-cast is baked in the playStore service. So your app has to be compiled with full google play store tracking library to use it. ...i used to help maintain a version of fenec (firefox for android) that was build without chromecast support just because of this (and if you want it, gnu now maintains a better version called IceCat)
Oh, and even plain-open-source projects... there were 4 attempts to have an option to disable referrer on chromium. All of them reverted by google employers on unrelated commits. So even chromium is not that safe.
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
I waited for an upgrade to Android 4.0 but it never materialized.
it still runs android 2.3 (custom rom, obviously), which is the latest one that google released the closed source hardware drivers for.
and people still insist android is open source.
That said, the Chromecast was always named just that: Chrome-cast, after Google's proprietary browser. It was for instance not called the Web-cast. That's a pretty clear signal right there.
There's a thousand different browsers available to the curious user these days, but for years and years now the only (2?) browsers that have been supported was chrome and chromium.
Firefox for instance, has never received support. A big fuck you to what at the time was 25% of all internet users. The "fix"? Tell people to move to chrome (and how is Chrome's market share these days?).
This change just brings the amount of supported browsers down from 2 to 1 and the amount of unsupported browsers up from 998 to 999. Hardly a big change if you think about it.
Now... You have a proprietary browser, running proprietary nonstandard extensions to interact with proprietary online services and give them preferential treatment...
That's way beyond anything Microsoft did in the 90s to get the famous MSIE antitrust conviction.
How come Google gets off scot free?
Edit: Nevermind, it looks like Chrome lately has built-in support for Chromecast (I see it under the menu as Cast). From this, I can surmise a couple of things:
1. Google wants users to be able to use a chromecast out of the box without installing an extension. Can't fault them for that because believe it or not, not everyone knows how to do that. Or there's some limitation I don't know about in extensions that they want to get around.
2. This means that Google would either have to open-source the Chromecast functionality in the browser, or it has to maintain both the functionality baked into Chrome and the browser extension. So, they'd have to keep supporting a browser extension they'd not need for Chrome just to support Chromium.
I don't know.. May be a good compromise if possible would've been to bundle Chrome with the chromecast extension. But I doubt when someone came up with the idea of bundling Chromecast in the browser for purpose X, someone else in the team said: But think of Chromium!
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/2962c9c21ab...
The original poster appears to be hit by a bug that was fixed by this commit, which is a part of the latest Chromium release. Just a bug that was fixed... no controversy.