I’m probably not the first to do this, but I haven’t come across it on the 'net so far. I just set up a “dumb” speaker to be “Chromecast-able” by plugging it into an older, surplus, video Chromecast paired with a audio demuxing device (in my case, it was a $3 HDMI to VGA converter that had a 3.5mm audio out.)
I had to plug into a TV first to do the Google Home setup, but once that was done, I plugged it into the VGA adapter (that goes nowhere, video-wise) and plugged the 3.5mm into my speaker. I like it better than using it with Bluetooth since now I can assign it to a group (and the audio is less prone to drop outs, though that probably could have been fixed with a better BT adapter) AND with the AirCast add-on I can stream Apple stuff easily too. Before this, I hadn’t realized Google had discontinued their Audio device and now they’re going for a premium on the resell market, so even if you were buying a new Video Chromecast for this purpose it’s cheaper than a lot of the Audio Chromecasts out there.
I love the Chromecast audio. I bought a pile l of them when they were 15 a pop and now have cheap and effortless while home audio. All these years later and there’s still really nothing else like it on the market.
This is a great hack, btw. I have at least one old Chromecast lying around and I would have never thought of this. You know, another thing this would be good for is casting YouTube videos to audio devices. I used to cast stuff to my kitchen speakers from YouTube, but the audio devices no longer appear in the list of devices I can cast to in that app.
I’ve been tossing around this idea as well. I was thinking about doing this with either a Roku or Chromecast.
What made you go with vga instead of component?
Nothing more than that’s what I had on-hand, lol. I was looking online at other demuxing solutions, and then a VGA converter came up in my search, which reminded me I had one already!
