Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast
productforums.google.com
productforums.google.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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!
Original title, lest it changes:
Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast (productforums.google.com)
3 points by keeperofdakeys 1 hour agoAnd 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.
So, yes, legally speaking Google is doing no wrong here, but morally speaking it's not that great.
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?