Elephant in the room: Plex on Chromecast

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Ok, so lets address the elephant in the room.

When is Plex going to treat Chromecast like the popular streaming device that it is?

Support for Plex on Chromecast has been atrocious - it is missing many basic features that are available on almost every other client. One major issue that’s at the very core functionality of Plex has existed for years.

So what are some of these issues? Let’s start with the biggest issue with Plex on Chromecast:

1. x265 Transcoding on Chromecast. (<<- This now works. Apologies and thanks!)

2. Files with 5.1 Audio fail to play
In the same vein as the above issue- Chromecast fails to play any file with 5.1 Audio. Seriously? The thread in these very Plex forums has 9,000 views, 160 comments and has been an issue for 9 months.

3. Live TV
Available on almost every other client in some form or another. Not available on Chromecast. Why?

4. Auto Adjust Quality
Once again, available on almost all other clients, but not Chromecast. Why?

I’m sure there are plenty of other unaddressed issues with Plex on Chromecast.

Considering it’s one of the most popular streaming devices on the market, the lack of attention and bug support for Plex is atrocious and needs to be rectified ASAP.

Many users in these very forums, and Reddit, are moving over to Emby and Jellyfin due to the lack of basic client support by Plex. Some attention to the very basics of what Plex is supposed to do will reverse this exodus of customers to competing platforms.

I’m sure this post will be ignored by Plex Staff (do you even read your own forums?), and will be left unanswered. But I’m writing this post with some small hope that someone, with some sort of influence within Plex, reads this post and applies pressure internally to rectify the lack of support for Plex on Chromecast.

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Aaaannnnd crickets… No surprise.

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The inability to playback 5.1 audio is incredibly annoying. I’m really not happy that I’m paying for Plex Pass and STILL have to manually transcode files before they will play on my chromecast. The entire point of Plex is that it SHOULD automatically do any transcoding needed to playback on my devices.

I’d really like to see this fixed ASAP… faster than ASAP, the next update please!

-A displeased paying customer.

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Could you clarify this? There have been a variety of 5.1 issues in the past. The most recent one, which led to devices that do support 5.1 not being detected properly so we were falling back to stereo, was fixed by a Chromecast firmware update.

What exactly happens when you try to play a video with 5.1 audio? How does it fail? How are you manually transcoding?

I don’t think that I could give you a specific reason that will help alleviate the lack of these features, but we are aware that the Chromecast player is behind in parity and are working to catch it back up to the rest of our players. The lack of Live TV is definitely a glaring hole in feature support.

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I don’t expect an answer, but I’ll ask anyway.

How big of a priority is adding Chromecast support? Is it 3 months out? 9 months? 2 years? A pipe dream?

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Are you referring to Live TV? It is one of our current priorities. I won’t give any dates or timelines, but we’re actively working on it.

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The workaround used to be- “Chromecast Tab Mirroring”, now that is broken for live tv, it seems like in the last week or so? :frowning: :frowning:

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Specifically casting the tab from LiveTV worked a few weeks ago. Now it does not. :frowning:

It will appear to start, then throw this error. Before it would play correctly, and even mirror just the video correctly previously.

26%20PM
26%20PM938×533 82.3 KB

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Chrome greater than ver. 72 requires https for casting

If you are having problems casting when connecting through chrome to a local url, just connect to https://<local ip address:32400/web/index.html# instead of http://:32400/web/index.html#

Been fighting this since the last chrome update, and the lightbulb finally went on that my cached local connection shortcut was the problem

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If I cast the desktop, it only does video, not sound. Does yours do this? Are you able to get both audio and video to cast from live tv?

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We’re nearly the month of May. I thought this was a current priority?

@elan Can you provide an update on this much anticipated feature?

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Priorities had shifted around over the past couple months and work on the feature had to pause for awhile, but it’s still on our radar. This is why we don’t like to provide timelines or hint too much at the future. It’s still very much something we intend to support.

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Eric,

Not giving details or deadlines I can appreciate but not giving any information is just annoying. With no information I can’t tell if Plex wants to provide the service/fix but hasn’t yet, wants to provide the service but is blocked by a third party, or has no plans to provide it at all.

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@ericmatthys can we get an update?

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Is there any way to know what the team is currently prioritizing?

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We do not publicize our roadmaps. No update on this recently, unfortunately. :frowning: It’s still something we want to do, but other features are taking priority for the moment.

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i understand the hesitation to share a roadmap, with things changing and moving and fear of committing too early.

but there is a roadmap, on purpose or not, we know from these statements that chromecast is currently NOT on the near future roadmap.

By not talking about what IS being worked on, and only commenting on what isnt, we basically just have a roadmap of things we arent going to see for a long time if at all.

Plex is a service, with monthly and lifetime subs, asking users to fork over that money with the only promise being what Plex ISNT working on.

this policy should be revisited.

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Is this back on the roadmap? The advertising of Live TV support is very misleading and the primary reason I purchased a lifetime plex pass.

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LOL considering how badly they broke Chromecast recently don’t hold your breath.

Whatever they broke, it causes a bunch of different issues. This sucks because it is leading to people making new threads with slightly different titles and details because their experience with this issue is just slightly different, but they are all part of this same thing that Plex broke with chromecast in the last month or so.

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Also curious about how serious devs are about Chromecast functionality. This has been well over a year (if not 2) of live TV being a thing, and not being able to cast. I’m really beginning to regret my purchase if the only feedback we get on the matter is “we’re working on it”.