Plex Cast Control: fix next/previous for Plex on Chromecast

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Plex Cast Control: working next/previous controls for Plex on Chromecast / Cast speakers

I built a small custom integration for Home Assistant that fixes a specific Plex + Chromecast annoyance: next/previous track controls often show as unsupported or fail when Plex is casting to Chromecast / Google Cast speakers.

Repo:

What it does

Plex Cast Control creates proxy media_player entities for your Cast devices. You use the proxy entity in your dashboard instead of the original Cast entity.

When the Cast device is running Plex, the proxy adds working:

  • Next track
  • Previous track

When Plex is not active, the proxy mirrors the original Cast entity and does not force Plex-specific behavior.

It also exposes direct services:

  • plex_cast_control.next
  • plex_cast_control.previous

Why

The generic Home Assistant Cast media player often reports that media_player.media_next_track and media_player.media_previous_track are unsupported during Plex playback, even though Plex Cast itself can handle next/previous through its own Cast namespace.

This integration uses the Plex Cast namespace directly.

Install

For now, install through HACS as a custom repository:

  1. HACS → three-dot menu → Custom repositories
  2. Repository: https://github.com/RoLoTo/hass-plex-cast-control
  3. Category: Integration
  4. Install
  5. Restart Home Assistant
  6. Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → Plex Cast Control
  7. Select the Cast media player you want to wrap

You can add one proxy per Cast speaker, Chromecast, or Cast speaker group.

Example card

type: media-control
entity: media_player.living_room_speaker_plex_proxy

Notes

No Plex token is required.

This is Plex-specific. It does not try to fix generic Chromecast controls for other apps.