How do you stream to a Chromecast from the Web UI

[apastuszak]

Wasted an hour looking for this. It's clearly listed as a feature on the website. I can't find ANY way to do it and no documentation on how this feature is supposed to work. Some help would be much appreciated.

[acroyear]

It is located to the right of the "next" button in the lower frame. In addition, like any Chromecast from desktop, there should be a button located along the address bar of the Chrome browser.

If your version is older than 51 (or maybe 52 beta, I can't recall), you may still need to install the Chromecast extension for Chrome if you haven't already.

Note: it only works in Chrome and Chromium. It won't work in Firefox, IE, or Safari. I've successfully cast Subsonic from Linux and Mac.

[alphawave7]

Running ChromeOS dev channel, and we now have a Cast entry in menu, rather than relying on extensions, fwiw.

[acroyear]

Running ChromeOS dev channel, and we now have a Cast entry in menu, rather than relying on extensions, fwiw.

I knew it was coming, couldn't remember what version. Guess that's 53, not 52beta.

[apastuszak]

I was using Firefox. Switched to Chrome and saw the cast icon.

Little confused why Chrome is needed. Doesn't casting connect the Chromecast directly to the Subsonic server? The browser shouldn't matter. I should be able to cast and playlist and reboot my PC and it should keep playing the whole time.

[alphawave7]

Running ChromeOS dev channel, and we now have a Cast entry in menu, rather than relying on extensions, fwiw.

I knew it was coming, couldn't remember what version. Guess that's 53, not 52beta.

Affirm..
Version 53.0.2785.4 dev (64-bit)
Works great.

[acroyear]

I was using Firefox. Switched to Chrome and saw the cast icon.

Little confused why Chrome is needed. Doesn't casting connect the Chromecast directly to the Subsonic server? The browser shouldn't matter. I should be able to cast and playlist and reboot my PC and it should keep playing the whole time.

Chromecast is the receiver/device and the 'caster'. The caster protocol is Chrome-specific, proprietary to Google, and they have not opened the source code up (in fact, they have hardware-generated flags that break any attempt to reverse-engineer the protocol).

Casting works two ways. One: the source (an app, the chromecast app on your phone/tablet, or a tab in the Chrome browser) transmits a URL to play, along with other metadata, and the Chromecast device either uses a built-in player (Subsonic works this way for music at least), or a dedicated, registered html5 client app off the web, to play it. Chromecast only accepts the URL to play from a supported casting app or browser, and for browsers, that's just Chrome itself and its open-source base Chromium.

The second is that the contents of the browser tab are just streamed, as-is, to the device. The latter is horrible for performance, of course.

You can't just "leave it running". The device sends progress updates (how far into the file it is, if it has finished playing it, etc) back to the source tab/app. It detects if the source has ceased to be connected, such as you closed the tab or the browser, and immediately terminates the stream and allows another device/browser on your LAN to control it.

Not my rules. That's just how that device works. Nothing in Subsonic can override any of those settings. Even service workers (a new html5 feature for background processing) can't keep the connection open because the cast is associated with the tab, not the web page.