Google Cast receiver

Hi,

It would be great to be able to cast to Home Assistant using Google cast and then send that stream out to any device.

I found the following repository https://github.com/vbaicu/mMusicCast it only works for YouTube but it supports Linux, I’m not knowledgable enough to implement it myself but I’m sure there would be a lot of demand if anyone could.

Is this even remotely possible?

Thanks

Leapcast seams to be written in python and supports the V1 Chromecast API which only YouTube maintains support for sending too so that could work maybe? https://github.com/dz0ny/leapcast

Leapcast doesn’t seem to function at all however i just tried mMusicCast on my windows PC and it worked perfectly it’s written in node.js not python but i was reading this post where oriziv made a node.js addon using docker. Therefor if anyone with expoerience in node.js can modify mMusicCast to just pass on URL to Media Extractor it could work.

Not that I’m capable of helping with your request, but could you give me an example in which this is useful? The way I understand what you are planning to do is playing some media in some app (let’s say Netflix), but instead of sending it to your TV you send it to Home Assistant, and then Home Assistant forwards it to your TV.
If I got that correctly: what’s the benefit of this in your opinion if you have the choice where to send the media right under your thumb anyways?
You would just introduce an additional hop for the media to pass. And if Home Assistant should be a “renderer”, it would have to re-encode (transcode) the content to serve it to another renderer. That would be a waist of CPU time and would even downgrade the quality of the media. For example: you send a 4K stream from Netflix to Home Assistant, Home Assistant pretends to be FullHD only (for performance reasons), and then forwards it back to your 4K TV in Full HD. You would have lost all the great detail you get from 4K. And this is not taking into account the loss in sound quality.

I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean, so please clarify what your intentions are. I’m just being curious. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

Hi,

I want to achieve whole house audio streaming with cross platform support. Home Assistant has the ability to serve media via both Amazon echos and google homes but I want to send data to home assistant via Google cast.

Also I don’t want HA to transcode just get the audio stream URL via google cast and then send it out to multiple audio playback devices, it would also be nice to have volume and time control through HA but not sure if that is possible.

Just voted +1

any news on this subject?

1 Like

Voted +1 for this one.
I also found this useful to have virtual chrome cast device. I have a bunch of AirPlay speakers, but Android users are unable to stream music to it out of the box. Virtual chrome cast device would allow them to do so. There is a project called AirCast - Home Assistant Community Add-on: AirCast which adds ability to get virtual AirPlay entity to stream to Google cast devices from iOS devices. It would be nice to have a reverse AirCast.

2 Likes

This would be great indeed!

+1

This might even allow us to bypass the volume and device limits that Google was forced to put on its devices/speaker groups.

Creating speaker groups within Home Assistant that we could then cast to and control would awesome.

TL;DR: I would use it as a Chromecast Audio device for my “dumb” speakers.

I can see 2 use cases here:

  1. Use your HA machine (eg. your Raspberry Pi with it’s HDMI port) as a Chromecast device for those who have dumb TVs and don’t want to pay for a dedicated Chromecast dongle.

  2. Use your HA machine (eg. your Raspberry Pi with it’s 3.5mm Jack port) as a Chromecast Audio device, since those are discontinued, but the need for those is still pretty high (see the insane prices at which secondhand Chromecasts Audios are sold)

Third usecase:
Use HA as a bridge between the chromecast system and any medieplayer in your system, like connected HEOS players.

+1 to that!
I have Home Assistant as Proxmox VM on my home server and I have my stereo hooked up. So far I’m able to stream Spotify but I’m particularly interested in streaming YouTube music from my phone.
The only solution I came across is in Volumio, allowes me too stream YouTube and YouTube Music. But it’s not very stable, sometimes it works, sometimes doesn’t.

+1
I am looking for a way to stream my audiobooks to multi room system. it is located in the basement so i just need a stream to google cast virtual device to route my audio wherever I want.

+1
It would be perfect for system that doesn’t support casting. ( Big stare at sonos for Android users)