I get asked about Chromecast a handful of times a month.
I have a Chromecast to test on, and I love the concept. I’d love to be able to support it with VLC Streamer.
Unfortunately, Chromecast just doesn’t work very well.
In my testing – it fails to play most streams (streams that play fine on Android, iOS and VLC).
I wrote in the forum a couple of months ago with more details for the technically minded.
I assume that Chromecast will get better over time, and I’ll give it a try again in a few months.
Unfortunately, my expectation of Chromecast is not necessarily one that the Chromecast team share. I expect Chromecast to ‘just work’.
If streams play on iOS and Android, then I don’t expect to have to battle to format them specially for Chromecast. Equally, I expect integration to be simple rather – whereas the Chromecast team expect me to implement a whole complex system of searching and communication.
For the most part – the Chromecast team response has been to refer to state that vlc streamer steams don’t meet the required specification and that any crashes are therefore not Chromecast’s problem.
You can see the lively discussion here. It’s one of the most +1’d posts on the ChromeCasst developer forum. I think that means I’m not the only frustrated developer.
As a Chromecast owner, I’m not sure what you can do. The fact is that Chromecast is hard to integrate – and doesn’t do a good job with HLS streams. Until the Chromecast developers fix that – VLC Streamer won’t be supporting Chromecast.