dashcast.load_url now changes the Chromecast’s media_player device to state ‘off’. It used to change the media_player to ‘on’ on my Google Hub. Is anyone else working through this change?
In the new way, is there a way to detect if Dashcast is showing on my Hub? State ‘off’ doesn’t doesn’t distinguish showing or not showing. I’d like to restart it when I detect it’s not showing.
This changed when I upgraded from 2025.7 to 2025.12.
I dug through the code a bit. Dashcast is part of the pychromecast GitHub project. It’s a “controller” in that it can order the Chromecast do take action, much like the HA media_player is a controller.
Relevant to my problem, the media_player gets state change message from the Chromecast, eg. to state “playing”. Whether the Chromecast app never sends such a state change or the media_player doesn’t act on it, I don’t know.
The DashCast HA/pychromecast implementation and the DashCast Chromecast app implementation haven’t had a serious PR in over 5 years. The media_player also hardly changes. I haven’t had much luck in pinning down what caused this change.