Also Re #2:
For me it didn‘t resolve the issue. It still pauses randomly after a few seconds. When hitting play again the video buffers and won‘t start playing.
Regarding #1
There are a few things at play, if you cast from Plex Web, the now playing info should be correct shortly after starting playback (initially it may report “Direct Play” incorrectly) If you cast from Android or iOS, it doesn’t update. (both of these issues are being tracked and worked on)
Regarding #2
This is a two part issue, both on the server-side and Chromecast-side. The server fix will be in the next PMS beta, and the Chromecast side bug is being worked on.
I am tracking both of these points and the related issues, and will let you know when I have something to share from development. 
Another users with the same problem. The dashboard and tautulli report direct play so I’m not sure if it’s transcoding really despite the phone where I’m casting from has the quality limited to 1080p 8Mbps
I just started experiencing this issue today.
To be clear it is transcoding, it’s just that a bug on iOS/Android when casting result in the dashboard not reflecting that it is transcoding, if you look at the PMS logs for a “Job running:” log line you will see it is in fact transcoding to the requested quality. This will be fixed in an upcoming iOS /Android release.
Gday
The issue is that it causes playback and resume to fail etc.
You seem to pass it off as a non important issue but I can assure you it has left most chrome cast devices somewhere between semi reliable and I’ll start looking at Netflix again.
Forgive me, I didn’t mean to come off as “passing it off as non important”, I just wanted to let you know that transcodes are indeed happening behind the scenes, even if Now Playing doesn’t report it.
There are a few bugs are are tracking and have fixes that we are working to get into upcoming releases.
Please keep an eye on the release announcement threads for iOS, Android, and Chromecast for when the issues are resolved.
Any updates to the problem with the different streams being interpreted as only one, when streaming to chromecasts?
I still have huge issues with this and the direct playing when in fact transcoding is happening.
Same issues here. I thought that Tautulli was the culprit. After checking my Plex Media server backend I saw the same behavior.
When 2 independent Chromecast streams are active on different user accounts, the sessions appear merged into one. Both showing direct playback as well.
The removal of the termination of paused streams after x minutes on the server at least makes Chromecast usable again.
I see there was an update for Plex for Chromecast today. Can anyone confirm if it fixed the issues here, especially the one SwiftPanda16 brought up about the API returning completely wrong info?
The last update I see was from October 17, Version 1.18.1.1973. The Chromecast buffering issue seemed to be caused by a setting under SETTINGS>NETWORK>Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than X value being populated with something other than 0, which is default. That fixed it for me.
The Chromecast user stream sessions that are appearing as direct play are also confirmed to be transcoding, it is just a cosmetic thing with a fix coming from Plex soon.
Regarding the issue with 2 or more people use a Chromecast on different IPs and separate accounts. The symptom of the 2 sessions merging and the dashboard playback cycles on the same playback tile in Plex between the 2 files being played continues on my setup under the public release.
The latest update for Chromecast seems to have fixed the issue for me, I now see when Chromecasts transcode (the cosmetic issue) and Playback merging is not an issue anymore. Logs now show Chromecast sessions having unique IDs rather than the undefined ID shown before.
Oct 30, 2019 18:14:33.512 [11684] DEBUG - Statistics: (1ghcphkg949xhcdup79s9eh5) Reporting active playback in state 1 of type 4 (scrobble: 0) for account 1
vs
Oct 01, 2019 22:52:06.572 [2600] DEBUG - Client [undefined] reporting timeline state paused, progress of 513000/1733000ms for guid=, ratingKey=26800 url=, key=/library/metadata/26800, containerKey=, metadataId=26800, source=
I was able to confirm it is fixed as well. Streamed to two different Chromecasts at the same time. They properly reported each stream, showing transcoding info, etc. Now I just need to find a way to clean up my Tautulli stats since the bug created hundreds of thousands of entries.
Can anyone confirm that we can use the “kill stream after paused for X minutes” again without it causing chromecast streams to stop?
Yes this should now be resolved with the current Plex Media Server release.
I may have a related question for my ds419+: I have a movie with pgs subtitle. I have configured PMS for maximum bandwidth. In house this movie plays fine on my Android mobile and PMS says it’s direct play. When casting to my Chromecast PMS says it’s transcoding. I don’t understand why and more over the movie is distorted.
Chromecast is not capable of displaying PGS-subtitles directly, and therefore the server needs to burn them into the videostream before it is sent to the Chromecast. Use SRT if you want your Chromecast to display them without burning them. The reason your movie is distorted is probably because you are transcoding the stream (because you need to burn the subtitles), and that is not lossless. Android (aka your phone) supports Direct Play of PGS subtitles.
Thanks for the explanation. When I select srt subtitles it plays well on CC. As an experiment I selected srt and optimized the movie for mobile. The resulted transcoded movie also plays well. When I do the same for pgs, the transcoded movie is distorted. The same happens for other movies with ass/ssa subtitles. Does Plex have issues when transcoding movies with those kind of subtitles or is this a setting?
If you are using srt subtitles, it may not actually be converting the video so there is no change. Using a PGS subtitle forces a conversion. Check your quality settings to see what the resulting transcode is set to.
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