Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Here you are welcome to report any Cast bugs you may have encountered

if you know of a workaround, it would be great if you would mention that too
ceemjay
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:07 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by ceemjay »

I have now installed it on a second PC - my home server - and it works fine and it has the same version of Win 10 as my laptop with the problem

From both I can successfully cast from Chrome to the Google Home from both and cast -url "https://www.soundhelix.com/examples/mp3 ... Song-1.mp3" works on both.

So it's only -text and -file that dont work on my laptop. I have write access to Temp and turned off the firewall completely and I can see that CAST has copied the file into Temp. I assume that the boing I am hearing on the Home when it doesnt play is an error beep of some kind so it knows the cast has failed.

Hope that helps
RobLatour
Site Admin
Posts: 1003
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:43 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by RobLatour »

Well, I guess the good news is that the problem is localized to your laptop. The bad news, is this is going to be really hard to debug.

Knowing that the file is copied to your temp directory ok is a big help, but unfortunately rules out the one potential problem I can think of that is behind what is happening given all you have now said.

As a shot in the dark, can you please try reloading Microsoft's dot net framework version 4.6.2 on your laptop, you can get it here:
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/d ... ime/net462
ceemjay
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:07 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by ceemjay »

It actually started working! Not too sure why but the things I did that most likely fixed it were as follows:

Rebooted the PC - didn't do that originally after installing CAST
Checked ping times to the Home device - initially they were very long
Disabled any unused network interfaces on the PC - cast -inventory reported the IP address of the PC as 169.254.*.*

No idea which of those, if any, fixed it or something else entirely but it's working fine now.

Thanks to Rob for his concern and assistance - both in this forum and by email
seank
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2019 10:22 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by seank »

Last night I banged my head on the wall for an hour or so then morning it dawned on me what the issue was.

So my computer has multiple network adapters and it looks as if cast has the potential to bind to the wrong adapter. This causes the URL that it sends to the google home devices to not respond.

In my example it sent http://172.17.251.209/file.wave to the google mini instead of the IP address of on my LAN which is a 192. address. For now i disabled my second nic which breaks access to my second network.

Rob could you add a switch to specify the IP address for the PC running the cast software just in case the computer has multiple NIC's?

Image
RobLatour
Site Admin
Posts: 1003
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:43 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by RobLatour »

interesting, what was the command line command you issued that didn't work?
seank
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2019 10:22 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by seank »

I tried a couple things.
  1. cast -inventory
  2. cast -device "Office Speaker" -text This is a test using one device name << would hear a ding but nothing would happen
  3. cast -ip "192.168.10.78" -text This is a test using one device name << would hear a ding but nothing would happen
  4. cast -device "Office Speaker" -text This is a test using one device name -port 9696 << would hear a ding but nothing would happen
  5. cast -device "Office Speaker" -text This is a test using one device name -debug << this would ding the speaker but show a timeout
  6. cast -device "Office Speaker" -url "https://www.soundhelix.com/examples/mp3 ... Song-1.mp3" << this worked
  7. Disabled Second NIC
  8. cast -inventory (image below)
  9. cast -device "Office" -text This is a test using one device name << Worked
My assumption is that you're sending the IP to the google mini to tell it where to get the .wav file. Maybe the wrong IP is being sent on where to download the wav?

Image
RobNH
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Dec 01, 2019 9:04 pm

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by RobNH »

Aha, thanks for the idea! I was having the same problem, disabled my other network interface (VirtualBox), and cast started working. I'll second the request to add an NIC binding option.
RobLatour
Site Admin
Posts: 1003
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:43 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by RobLatour »

sorry seank, I lost track of this thread until RobNH made a post.

I don't see "Office Speaker" in your screenshot, is it on a separate network - or did you just black out part of the screenshot (I do see "Offi" on an earlier screenshot)?
DepthQuartz
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed May 27, 2020 12:25 pm

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by DepthQuartz »

It is a shame this was never resolved. I am having the same issues but I do not know how to do a NIC. All I get is a bing from my google home but never the speech portion. It does not understand the commands I give it, nothing.
seank
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2019 10:22 am

Re: Cannot cast a text to my devices. Only to my own PC speakers.

Post by seank »

Hey Rob,
All my speakers are on the same subnet but I notice that the inventory is missing multiple speakers in my home. I think it might have something to do with Google Cast Groups. For now i just specify the IP's since my speakers have statics.

I completely forgot about this topic until i set this software up on another windows 10 computer that had hyper-v enabled at one point. Once i disabled the 3 other NICs that got created i was able to use the cast.exe application again.

When the issue occurs you'll hear a ding on the speaker but nothing else will happen. You can probably reproduce the issue by just enabling hyper-v in windows features.

Hope this helps,
Sean K
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