How my Chromecast breaking was the best thing that ever happened to my TV

As detailed in my recent self-hosting update, I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi running OSMC and Kodi as my frontend for TV recordings and for locally streamed media from Emby, since moving into the new house. We’ve supplemented this with a Chromecast to allow us to access Netflix and a local streaming service Lightbox. This has worked well and integrates with Home Assistant reasonably well, so I can automatically dim the lights, etc. when we are watching TV in the evening.

That was until the Chromecast started behaving oddly.

It started as occasionally corrupted audio when starting a new stream (basically the audio would sound like everyone had been breathing helium). Each time this occurred it was remedied by rebooting the Chromecast, at first by cycling the power, then as the problem persisted via a Python script wired to a button in Home Assistant. This went on for a month or so before things got worse.

The next problem was the Chromecast just flat out refusing to load anything from Lightbox. I spent an evening debugging this to have the thing fall off the network and refuse to come back. It must have automatically recovered itself because the next day it was back and working fine. Then a couple of days later it started to have similar issues again, only now with various HDMI picture issues (not detected or video stained pink).

Clearly it was on it’s way out (suspiciously it was just over a year old, which puts it just out of warranty). Having had enough I unplugged the thing and started to look for other options. Having paid $109 for it to last only a year, I wasn’t happy to buy another Chromecast (I had bought the Chromecast Ultra, but only because it was the only model with built in Ethernet).

Aside: The insidious Chromecast ecosystem

As someone who generally prefers FOSS options wherever possible and has no love of DRM, I’ve always had issues with the Chromecast. That said, as someone who wants attain the media I watch via legal means I appreciate that it allowed me to do that. I also liked the ability to control it from my phone as well as play/pause/stop streams via the TV remote and the aforementioned integration with Home Assistant. Basically, I saw it as a necessary evil.

What I didn’t appreciate is what it does to your phone. Before you have even set the thing up you have to install the proprietary Google Home app (why it can’t have a web interface for configuration I don’t know), then every streaming app that supports it is proprietary (even the Emby one), which left me with a gaggle of proprietary apps on my phone which is mostly otherwise populated with Open Source apps from F-Droid. This severely limited my ability to go GApps free, which has been something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time.

So if I could find another option that didn’t rely on my phone, I could get rid of all these horrible apps (some of which I even have to have Magisk installed in order to persuade them that I don’t have root access).

Meanwhile, back at the plot…

Faced with replacing the Chromecast I had two options. The first was to plug the not so smart TV back in to the network and use the built in apps. This was sub-optimal as it didn’t integrate with Home Assistant, couldn’t be controlled from my phone and the Lightbox app on that TV has broken at least once (in fact I don’t even know if it works now, since I went back to using the Chromecast instead).

The second option was to get Kodi to do it all (I guess there was really a third option which was to go out and find some other streaming device, but I really didn’t want to waste my money again).

Kodi To The Rescue!

To cut a long story short, I managed to get everything working with Kodi over the course of a Sunday afternoon. I already knew there was a Netflix addon (requiring Kodi 18), which I’d been meaning to try, but I didn’t know of a Lightbox addon. A quick search turned up Matt Huisman’s Lightbox Addon, which works great (I’d already used his TVNZ OnDemand and 3NOW addons).

Getting Netflix working turned out to be a bit of a pain, since I had to upgrade to the Kodi 18 Alpha release. I followed these instructions, which didn’t work to start with, but that turned out to be down to a corrupted SD card (weirdly the card was fine in normal use but didn’t like installing new packages). After grabbing a new card and restoring from a backup image I was able to update successfully and install the Netflix addon, which works flawlessly.

The Good

Overall, I’m really happy with this setup. The alpha version of Kodi is surprisingly stable (on par with the release version from my experience so far but YMMV), notwithstanding a couple of bugs which I’ll come to shortly. Netflix and Lightbox work pretty much flawlessly and I’m appreciating the newly unified and simplified media system. I’ve already started implementing further integrations with the home automation, which will be the subject of another post.

The Not So Good

I mentioned above that there are a couple of bugs, but I actually suspect that both issues I’m seeing are down to a common cause. The two issues I’m seeing are both related to TV recordings from TVheadend, with audio sync issues as well as raised RPi temperatures on HD recordings and dropped frames on SD recordings. I still need to get around to updating to the latest nightly release and gathering the debug logs required to submit a proper bug report, but since the TV is a ‘production’ system I haven’t got to this yet. This is the kind of issue, that whilst annoying, isn’t a show stopper and that I would fully expect to be fixed by the final release of Kodi 18.

The only other not so good point is that whilst the Netflix and Lightbox plugins are excellent, navigating through the menus is a little slow. I’m putting this down to the need to fetch the listings over the network every time and probably even scrape the respective websites. I would assume that neither site provides a proper API given how generally hostile streaming services are to third party integrations. Perhaps this could be mitigated either in Kodi or the addons by caching the data for a period of time, since it doesn’t change that often. This definitely isn’t a criticism of either of these addons, I’m impressed that they work as well as they do given their adverse environment. Luckily playback in both is flawless.

Conclusion

Again, I’m really happy with this setup. It’s finally given me an almost 100% Open Source (less the binary blobs required for Widevine DRM) media setup, which doesn’t compromise on functionality and sources all the content via legal means. Kodi gets an undeservedly bad reputation in the media for being a platform which enables piracy, something which the project developers have quite rightly distanced themselves from. Having more addons for legitimate services will help to give the platform a better name (of course if the media industry would wake up and just offer DRM free media at a reasonable cost [i.e. not the same price as a physical copy], that would be even better – but I don’t see that happening any time soon). The most annoying thing about this bad reputation for me is every how to guide for Kodi advertising VPNs (of varying levels of dodgyness) at you, as if the copyright police are going to bang down your door for using Kodi with your own media or a legitimate streaming service.

I’m finding this setup to actually be more feature full than the previous set up. This is obvious when you think about it, since with everything running through Kodi all my media benefits from the huge amount of work that has gone into that project over the years. Whereas, with the siloed approach taken by the individual streaming services they are all doomed to reproduce features that may be in competing services or have been features of established media players since the beginning of time. One really nice feature is that Kodi will make the full metadata of media playing via addons available via it’s various API’s which means that remote control apps can see it, but also that it gets pushed through to Home Assistant. This was hit and miss with the Chromecast (Lightbox would provide some metadata, Netflix would provide none).

Basically, this setup is what the smart TV was meant to be, before the interests that compete with producing the best technical solution got their hands on it.

I mentioned earlier that I’m already planning a follow up post to this one. The upcoming post will detail some of the integration work I’ve been doing to integrate my media setup with Home Assistant. Please stay tuned for that in the coming weeks. Until then, bye.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *