Problems with Chromecast in Chromium on Linux (working!)

After too long without being able to cast to my speakers, it was time to get it up and running. Started off with starting the avahi-daemon and getting mdns up and running. That made me able to find the chromecast device in the local mDNS group, but Chromium saw nothing.

Assuming you have chromium installed already. My version information:

$ chromium --version
Chromium 57.0.2987.133

Install packages

# pacman -S avahi nss-mdns

Edit nsswitch.conf and add mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] just before resolve on the hosts: line

[...]
hosts: files mymachines mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns myhostname
[...]

Configuring my firewall. This is only neccessary if the default outgoing policy is deny or reject.

# ufw allow out to any port 5353 proto udp

Start Chromium with custom flag to enable Media Router Component Extension or enable it in Chrome through chrome://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension. The command line argument may or may not work, but the flag sets it for sure.

$ chromium --load-media-router-component-extension

This is where chromium segfaults and dumps its core

kernel: Networking Priv[1668]: segfault at 10 ip 000055a8a812aac8 sp 00007ff4c872ed30 error 4 in chromium[55a8a6331000+8833000]

If you previously set the flag manually in chrome://about:flags you can revert it by editing ~/.config/chromium/Local\ State

$ sed -e 's/load-media-router-component-extension@0/load-media-router-component-extension@1/' ~/.config/chromium/Local\ State

This is the current state of Chromecast support in Chromium. I have seen some people around the net getting it to work, but their setup is uknown. This post will be updated when I get it to work properly again.

Working in Chromium 59.0.3071.115 (as of 2017-07-10)

Works again!

References

• http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Avahi#Obtaining_IPv4LL_IP_address
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Chromecasts_in_the_network_are_not_discovered
• https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51832