I think casting from the web browser has disappeared?

[Jeffalo]

So I got my Chromecast as a gift when it first came out, and ever since the beginning (or near it), I have cast Google Play movies & shows with a cast button that appeared on the Play web page that was playing the video content. A few days ago, that button disappeared. Luckily, I had already installed the cast Extension-- oh right, casting is now built into Chrome, no extension necessary-- so now what I do is just cast the web page that’s playing the movie. Alright, fine. Except, unlike the old way of doing things, now the movie is playing on both my laptop & the TV, although the laptop one is muted, which is good. It’s not a real problem that I’m casting from Chrome instead of the Google TV app, although I wonder if I’m just missing the new way of doing things?
And there may be a slight, almost unnoticeable, rare lag in the audio or video when I do it this way, as opposed to the old cast button that appeared in the video content. (what I refer to as “native casting”) OH-- as I was writing this, I was casting Spaceballs to my TV in the background, and it played fine, until it just randomly kept pausing. I hit play, it plays for about a second, pause, and did that again twice more. So I stopped casting and had it play only on my Windows PC, which ran smoothly. That pausing never happened under the old native casting.

Using the Google TV app from my Android 15 phone, the native casting button is “hidden” (until I tap the screen) right there at the top of the playing movie, next to the subtitles and full-screen buttons, just like it used to be. And there hasn’t been a lag yet, which is the expected behavior since it’s only playing in one place, not two. So casting from my phone works as expected. 🙂

From my Android 5.0.2 tablet’s Play Movies & TV app (the old version of Google TV)… hm, there’s no cast button in the app, so I’m starting a movie, and… OH, “Play Movies & TV is temporarily unavailable [-1].” AHA-- a clue! So that may be why my trusty cast button disappeared, some sort of system issue! Is that what’s going on?
Many thanks for any enlightenment y’all can shed, along with pointers as to how I could’ve answered this on my own!
--Jeff K.

[rachelcantor]

I am not sure if Google unintentionally deprecated the native Chromecast support in their web player. I would suggest downloading the video and casting it using another cast-enabled video player.

Sorry I couldn't find anything suggesting this was intentional on their part or not. Hope this helps.

[Jeffalo]

I tried Casting the entire webpage playing The Matrix from the Chrome web browser... and at one point the sound got choppy and then stopped altogether.  This NEVER happened with the built-in native Cast button that used to appear at the top of a movie or TV show!  …  I stopped Casting and restarted and the sound was fixed for the rest of the movie.

Are all 1st-gen Chromecasts experiencing this?  I could see that being a somewhat-plausible outcome, although that’s not a good look for Google if they stop supporting older devices.

Thank you, rachelcantor, for taking a swing at it, I appreciate the effort.  So when you say “I am not sure if Google unintentionally deprecated the native Chromecast support in their web player”, are floating the idea that Google intentionally deprecated the native Chromecast support for Play content in the Chrome browser?

And, sorry, but I have no idea what you mean by “I would suggest downloading the video and casting it using another cast-enabled video player.”  Videos on https://play.google.com/movies and https://www.youtube.com/ just don’t download-- those are both streaming-only services I believe.  Now, true, since maybe your point was just to use a different device, when I started playing The Matrix on my phone and used the native Cast button which is where I’d expect it to be, yes, it played fine on my TV.  Also, the native Cast button still appears in YouTube.com videos, in both the Chrome browser & the Android app, and still works as expected.  So as far as I can tell, the Cast button seems to be missing solely from video content played from https://play.google.com/movies in the Chrome web browser.

Jeffalo