Casting Broken

[felmey]

Casting does not work even when chrome://flags/#cast-media-route-provider and set the flag to Enabled. (It does work in standard Chromium and Chrome on same computer/network.)

https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-wiki/faq#how-do-i-enable-chromecasting

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to 'Cast' in ungoogled-chromium under three button drop down menu.
2. Watch it fail to find with 'No devices found' pop up message.

Expected behavior Expect the browser to find the same casting devices that all the other apps find on the network.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS/Platform and version: Arch Linux
• ungoogled-chromium version: Version 84.0.4147.105 (Official Build) Arch Linux (64-bit)

[Eloston]

Hmm, perhaps casting behaves differently on Linux than Windows? @bigmudcake @leso-kn Any ideas?

Does a packet capture reveal anything? I think you should see some mDNS traffic.

[felmey]

mDNS is definitely making it to the machine... when I used standard Chromium it works. While ungoogled-chromium couldn't find any of the casting devices, I opened up chrome on the same computer and it connected to casting devices immediately.

[bigmudcake]

I tested on Windows 64bit build 84.0.4147.105 and casting is still working. Maybe some library or make flag is missing on the Linux build. I will try and test a Linix build in a Virtualbox (Ubuntu) at some point.

[leso-kn]

For me it's working on Linux (Ubuntu 20.04, with the latest version from the apt repo)

@Eloston Yes, capturing the mdns traffic should in theory reveal packets related to chromecast, but I did not check for the alternative cast method with chrome://flags#cast-media-route-provider enabled.

[felmey]

I just tried it again with and changed "chrome://flags#cast-media-route-provider" from enabled, to disabled, and to default, with a relaunch in between. I still got the "No devices found" message after each attempt. I checked in my Chrome browser and it was set to Default.

[Eloston]

This is probably related to patches/extra/ungoogled-chromium/fix-building-without-mdns-and-service-discovery.patch and GN flags enable_mdns=false and enable_service_discovery=false. In addition, #1152, will further break Casting. These changes fall under the objective for privacy enhancement.

To fix Casting, I think we need to re-enable those GN flags and add a new flag to chrome://flags so we have the option to satisfy privacy and Casting use-cases. For the time being, I am inclined to leave Casting and related technologies broken because we've already been doing so for a while.

Help would be appreciated to write the patch for chrome://flags.

[felmey]

I don't disagree with leaving it broken. I only brought this up not working specifically because the FAQ instructions for enabling casting wasn't working for me. Thanks for looking into this though.

[drewthor]

This also occurs in macOS where the "Play on TV" button does not show on chromecast supported sites like YouTube.com. Effectively direct casting to chromecast functionality does not work. The only workaround is to cast the tab itself but that results in lower bitrate video and worse performance. Would love for the option to have a flag that fixes this.

Screenshots Ungoogled-chromium:

Chromium proper:

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS/Platform and version: macOS 11.2
• ungoogled-chromium version: Version 88.0.4324.146