Casting FLAC to TV via Chromecast does not work

Support
1

App version

Production

Issue description

Hi,

I’m loving Symfonium, it’s all I ever wanted to play my library.

There is one thing though that doesn’t work well, and I suspect the problem is with the app, not the TV.

Whenever I’m listening go FLAC tracks and start a chromecast session to my TV, the TV shows a Fullscreen Symfonium logo, then the playback UI with the album art and playback position as 0:00, a spinner spins very briefly and then it kinda crashes because I’m brought back to the Google TV home screen.

This happens both when the FLAC file is streamed from my local media server (Navidrome), but also for local files, downloaded to my phone’s internal storage.

I have temporarily installed another casting app for Android and it cast a FLAC from internal storage just fine to the same TV, so I suspect the issue is on the app side.

When this happens the cast icon also turns red with an exclamation mark.

As a workaround:
Use another app just for casting (nobody wants that!)
Enable transcoding for the cast device, which pulls my pre-transcoded opus 128K collection, which then works fine. But I’d rather cast lossless of course.

I’m using 14.1.0

Thanks!

Device type

Phone

Media provider

Local device

Steps to reproduce

  1. Start playback of a FLAC file (happened with 24bit/96kHz but also 16/44, e.g. Dani California by The R.H.C.P.)
  2. Start casting to a Google tv (I have a TCL one, FWIW)
  3. Wait for cast UI to appear on TV and prepare to hear some sound from the TV
  4. Nothing plays and cast session ends. TV goes back to home screen, symfonium shows an exclamation mark on the cast icon which now turned red

Additional information

Another casting app cast the same files without issues (same conditions, local device storage, same bitrate).

I have shared logs via the in-app share feature, when prompted I entered “andreaippo” as identifier for them.

Hope this helps

Thanks!

I searched existing issues first

on

I understand that logs are mandatory

on

Log upload name / description

andreaippo

2

As the duplicated issues this is a bug on the Google code side on the TV that happens on some OEM devices. Symfonium use the default Google code as the receiver.

The usual fix is to uninstall the latest patches on the Cast / Chromecast package on the TV.

3

There are no updates to uninstall for that package.

Also, the same issue happens on the Sony TV with Android TV in another room.

Isn’t this something that can be fixed on the app side? Or is there a big report to Google?

4

On the Sony TV, which is older, there was an update installed. I removed it and it works now.

The problem with this is that it’s a workaround. Newer TVs will probably ship with recent firmware including the latest Google Cast app/package, so what’s the solution for that case?

5

This is something for Google to fix, the FLAC file is sent untouched to Google code that then crash in their native code. (You can check a bug report /log cat on the device to see).

There’s not much workaround I can do on my side that would still use to to date secure Google code without transcoding to something else.