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Comment by balloob | Hacker News Reader

Author of pychromecast here, the underlying library that this project uses to control the Chromecast.

I wrote this lib initially for use in Home Assistant, https://www.home-assistant.io

For Home Assistant I made a rule that all device drivers are stand-alone Home Assistant agnostic Python packages. That way more projects can use it.

Glad to see that strategy is working out and it powering projects like this

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Thank you for pychromecast, balloob.

I know there's no real requirement but I wish projects like this would give attribution where it's due. This project benefits hugely from pychromecast but there's nothing in the readme mentioning that. Just seems a bit off.

Isn't there a workaround to get Chromecast to accept user changes in DNS settings. Maybe use DHCP on the user's router to suggest user-chosen DNS servers. I have forgotten. The big show stopper with Chromecast is that Google makes it difficult for the user to set their own DNS servers. As I recall, with the early Chromecast models, users could replace the Google OS with a modified one that let users choose their own DNS servers. One technique used a Teensy. Subsequent Google updates I believe closed off that option.

And thank you for giving us not only pychromecast but home-assistant :)

Thanks for your work on pychromecast, I've looked and it's the best supported library for working with Chromecasts out there. It was also pleasant to integrate into this project.

Does the pychromecast project use semantic versioning? I've had to pin the library to a specific version after running into an API breaking change on what would be a minor or patch update to 7.X if the project used SemVer.

It would be incredible if there was a way to use mpsyt to watch Youtube videos with your library.

It's possible if you hook something running Kodi up to your TV.

Here's some example code I wrote, in the form of a few ZSH shell scripts:

https://github.com/chbarts/kodi-command-line

The logic should port nicely to other languages. In particular, it shows how to do things like playing a YouTube video using either the URL or just the hash, plus, of course, a way to play videos on the computer you're running the commands from.

Thank you for the library, but I wish you paid more attention to the backwards compatibility and didn't break it that often. The unannounced changes recently broke mkchromecast twice in different ways.

By the way, even the pychromecast examples broke with those updates. Very frustrating to see as a 1) user of mkchromecast, 2) user of pychromecast, 3) maintainer of both in Debian

It's always awesome to see early, potentially unfruitful decisions workout in a project.

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