Android app opens cast.ente.io when casting to Google TV when self-hosting

[invidian]

I have setup self-hosted Ente instance and it has apps.cast URL configured to my URL, which I can confirm by getting /remote-store/feature-flags endpoint. However, in Google TV logcat, I still see that when I'm trying to cast, it incorrectly hits the cast.ente.io host, which I can confirm on my webserver, as I don't see any traffic coming from my Google TV.

This then causes "Device not found" toast in the app and "Failed to get public key" for device in museum logs.

Relevant fragment of logcat:

01-31 23:01:56.320  5503  5503 I cast_shell: [0131/230156.320283:INFO:cast_core_application.cc(100)] [432a516b, APP_STATE_NOT_STARTED] Application created: app_id=F5BCEC64, display_name=Ente, post_data_len=0, launch_from=TYPE_URL, launch_source=https://cast.ente.io

It seems something in the mobile app is not wired properly to use custom URL?

EDIT:

It seems the same issue occurs when trying to cast from web to TV.

[vicky-bs]

Something seem to be wrong with cast although it's configured correctly. I had raised it already. The Dev's need to check.

[invidian]

Eventually, I figured what's wrong and I managed to get it to work, although this is not configurable right now from the code perspective. I started looking into https://ente.io/blog/introducing-cast/ which gave me a hint on how it works. So I followed the tutorial from the blog post, registered for Google SDK, registered my Google TV as test device and then found that while registering the app, you need to put the URL of the app, which is the "hardcoded" cast.ente.io which I was missing.

Putting my domain there and replacing App ID F5BCEC64 from the codebase to my own made it finally work, although I'm not sure if this is going to work on all Google TV devices. I did publish my app there, so maybe that's sufficient.

It would be great to have this documented that this is required for making cast work while self-hosting.

I'm guessing Museum could take App ID in configuration and serve it to clients to use, as it seems the only communication which is happening between casting device and Chromecast is only the App ID. Unless there is some way to pass API endpoint there while starting the cast.

[mnvr]

Thank you for outlining the steps you did, this will help others. As you mentioned, the current "app.cast" URL in the museum configuration allows the "manual" casting to be configured, but not the "automatic" casting (chromecasting) since that requires registering an app ID with Google. If someone does register a new app, museum could also similarly provide an "app.cast-id" configuration flag where this app ID could be injected.

The issue though is that the app ID is also part of a static plist file that needs to be bundled with the mobile app, so this is not something that can be changed dynamically (at first glance).