ChromeCast is such a frustrating product. It does exactly what I want in theory. In practice I have to wait 10 to 60 seconds to get it to connect, or reboot my phone. I've started giving up and just using the computer attached to my TV.

I don't think I've been having the particular Wi-Fi issue described in the article, but ChromeCast has been just slow and flaky in my experience. I've had both v1 and v2. It seems to have problems with older phones, but that's not the only problem.

mDNS on Linux with Avahi doesn't seem particularly reliable either (e.g. pinging a Linux box from a Mac.)

Computers barely work :-( I guess this is why Apple insists on owning the whole stack. The compatibility matrix becomes tractable.

Lots of anecdotal experience in this thread about how bad Chromecast is so I'd like to offer my opposite:

Chromecast has been one of the nicest additions per dollar for my home. It has been working well for me for a year or so. I even used it today (for the first time in a week or more) while cooking and it worked like a charm first try.

The only real problems I've had with it, I switched hardware, but used the same SSID and it was confused as all heck. To its credit, though, so was my "Smart" TV. I gave up and just used a new SSID and everything worked again without all of the weird-ass problems.

Got a pixel 2, Chromecast and a Google home and now have lots of wifi woes. The timing being exactly after the pixel 2 (turned in cast and home before, didn't have problems).

Edit: turning of guest mode on all cast devices makes things better (less wifi dropouts) but still bad. Turning of wifi on both the android phones in my house has cleared up the wifi problem (which was really annoying as even spotify kept failing to stream with phones on wifi).

I wonder if Google employees need to test their consumer devices outside the googleplex where the internet is super fast and the industrial grade networking gear deals with such issues automagically.

It's blamed on MDNS packets being spaffed out at high speed. I've got 3 Chromecasts of various flavours in the house and have never seen this behaviour. Has anybody else had the problem?

"...If your router vendor has not released an update for the issue..."

Ah good, I feared Google needed to update their devices to stop DDOS-ing my home network, luckily for them they don't get blamed and we think that the router vendors should add more robust DDOS-protection.

Interesting. I have 2 Google Homes (1 regular and 1 mini), a Chromecast and a Chromecast Audio, and a Pixel 2. I haven't noticed any particular network issues.

My network is all Ubiquiti gear. A USG, switch, and AP AC Lite. I have the private WiFi on the same network as my desktop PC and Steam Link. My home lab is on separate VLANs. Other then that its a pretty default configuration.

Not home right now but when I get home I shall look into it a bit more. Curious if whatever update thats causing this hasn't rolled out to Canada or if the Unifi products are handling it better/some special way.

I haven't noticed this problem. I've got a Chromecast v1, Chromecast Ultra, Home Mini, Pixel phone, and Google onhub + WiFi mesh, plus a bunch of other non-google devices. Perhaps the Google routers are able to handle the burst? I do wish that Chromecast was in general a little faster at connecting / playing etc.

Well, this certainly explains why my wifi has been feeling pretty iffy for the last couple of weeks.

There was an awful lot of mDNS traffic coming from the (new to me) Google Home, and the two android phones, and mythtv (0.27) was sending every couple of seconds too. Running this tcpdump helped me track it down.

    tcpdump -n host 224.0.0.251 and port 5353

For the phones, in settings / google / cast media controls, you can turn that off, I also turned off 'nearby links' in the google menu, in case that was related.

I've got a pretty good ($100) TPLink router and a 100Mbps Comcast connection in my 1BR apartment. I can almost never find the 5Ghz channel and get constant drops on my laptop, particularly the Linux one.

I've got a 1st Gen Chromecast, a Google Home Mini, and a Pixel XL.

Sounds like this is my culprit. Finally.

I thought it was the fios router just being shitty but I believe that I've been experiencing this issue aswell.

Sounds like this issue affected my household as well. Been having wifi issues after bringing Pixel and Pixel 2 on to network with Google Home. Initially thought dropouts were due to so many neighbors in proximity.

I have a Google Home and a Pixel 2. I didn't have problems until we added two Google Home Minis. It's knocked out 5G on the Verizon Quantum Gateway router and 2.4G drops out every now and then.

Interesting, my wifis been terrible since christmas, ive had casts and a google home for a while but my partner got a pixel 2, the first android device in the house. Could be it!

Weird, I have a Chromecast and Google Home but have had no problems, though I do have Google Wifi...

I was doing some home automation stuff with Node-RED and spotted that when I tried to figure out when a Chromecast was online - mDNS using ZeroConf would blow up Node-RED for no apparent reason, using SSDP worked OK. Now I know why...

1. My Chromecast is far less reliable than it was a mere 3-4 months ago. I regularly am unable to cast from my desktop and have to resort to my phone. YouTube, especially with multiple tabs, on desktop is a nightmare to use with the Chromecast.

2. I'm basically desperate to find something to take it's place. I'm tired of the Apple-ification of Google, and I resent having to boot up Chrome just to be able to cast a video (they have it locked down to where they effectively control both sides of the infra, such that Firefox can't implement Chromecast support).

Not sure if it's the Chromecast.

> Normally the device should send a couple of packets every 20 seconds, but in recent Android versions the apps sometimes send large bursts [...]. The longer the device has been in sleep mode, the more packets are send.

I wonder if it's a side effect of aggressive battery optimization in the newest Android version (Deep sleep/Doze, etc) where packets are withheld intentionally to only be delivered in bursts and have the wifi/radio sleep in between. Naturally, Pixel get updated first.

edit: typos

Does anyone know if Google is aware of this and is working on a fix?

Has anyone found a good way to troubleshoot and confirm these suspicions? This aligns with our experiences as well since adding more Chromecast devices and Google Home devices.

I love Chromecast but a few issues keep making me sad.

1. Casting a photo from Photos app, pressing Android back button makes the TV screen go black. Have to remember to swipe left or right instead, or use in-app back button.

2. Photos on 4k Cast-enabled TV are shown in horrendous quality. It's definitely not 4k and compressed as hell with contrast loss. Same for videos.

There used to be a ton of race conditions in YouTube TV app but those are thankfully fixed.

I use to have my Chromecast plugged into my TV so people could stream videos and photos easily to share with people during gatherings. We use Roku for streaming. Then we took it on vacation and forgot to plug it back in. I realized the reason our WiFi was so awful in that room when I eventually plugged it back in and everyone started complaining.

Now it is only ever used for vacation.

I am also having issues with chromecast and WiFi, weird slowdowns that never happened in the past. Casting pandora to the audio’s and mini’s always has problems. The phone will eventually start playing different songs than the cast, and at this point you are unable to control or reconnect to the cast. Like others I assumed this was a app issue.

I use DD-WRT so there won't be a router update to fix this.

I love my three chromecasts, however I can't really put up with this bug.

What to do?

Got a chromecast, and my phone has a lot more trouble connecting to it than it used to have. Sounds like this might be the issue. Hopefully now that it's been identified, it'll be fixed.

I set all my chromecast/ home devices (9 devices) to have an assigned IP from my DHCP router (ASUS). Situation has definitely improved. But still not perfect

It would certainly seem like both the Chromecasts and the routers are misbehaving in this case, no?

I'm fairly certain a similar issue is being caused by the Wii U.

I have 7 Google home minis, 2 Chromecast Audios, 3 Chromecasts. Everything has worked fine up until a month or so ago. I've been using Chromecast since its initial launch and have never had these issues until now.

Google severely broke something recently, that's for sure. We had a Christmas party and I gave up playing music because it kept dropping off every few minutes. It seems like it has improved the past few weeks, but still pretty shoddy.

imho, routers either handle this somehow or drop packeta. because mdns is higher level protocol than wifi and mac, router should not deal with those.

also, with same hardware what happens there is whatsapp/hangouts video call? its about firmware

I've done a LOT of chromecast development/hacking. They are to put it politely, unreliable.

Google employ a small number of people to write TCP/IP core stack functionality. This is not a 'twenty hundred fiddy' people problem, its a six rising ten people problem.

The core issue is: how do we get the team in question to acknowledge and respond, with a timely code change?