Casting to Chromecast Audio, Google Nest Mini and Google Home Mini is flaky

[ojigi]

For quite some time (since I moved 1.5 year ago and reconfigured my network AX68U + AC68U mesh node) my Google devices haven't really worked with casting.
Devices sometimes takes for ever to show up (both in Spotify and Google Home). More importantly, when I try to cast it often does not work, comes on after a minute or two.
But worse, it comes and goes. The sound will drop, come back etc. It's the same for all 4 devices (Google Audio + 3 x Google [Nest|Home] Mini.

I'm, guessing that there is some setting on the router that is not compatible with these devices. Does anyone know?

 

[drabisan]

First and foremost: you're combining 2 different technologies, AX and AC, and that's never a good idea! It's bad on so many levels...devices can get confused by getting different beacons with different specs.
Second: narrow your investigation - one single Google Mini and check if that device is connected to what network device or it is roaming.
I would definitely turned down good old AC68U and troubleshoot with a single Mini device that can only connect to AX68U. Don't use Roaming Block. Just turn down the node for few hours/a day, accept the coverage gap. But at least you'll be able to do a troubleshooting in a non-confusing way.

 

[sfx2000]

Chromecast is always odd, as troubleshooting goes down basically three paths, and the last one is the router...

From the Chromecast dongle - WiFi coverage for that is paramount - the radio itself isn't very good, and it's usually hidden behind the big screen

WiFi issues are the biggest problem... so sort that first...

The next issue is the source itself - are you casting from a mobile phone, or from Chrome on the desktop?

And then the router - Chrome casting makes the most of multicast/anycast, and also Bonjour/Avahi for service discovery, and leverages the heck out of IPv6 for link local and multicast/anycast (e.g. fe80::/10 and ff00:/8).

IPv4 - watch the ICMP settings on the router for snooping and proxy - proxy should be disabled for most, and snooping might be helpful for switching, but be mindful of those settings on the wireless interfaces...

Last note - if I recall, many of the Chromecast dongly things are dual-band, so be mindful of things like "smart connect" and roaming enhancements....

Much of this also considers that the SSID's for the Source and the Chromecast are a single SSID, as SSID defines a WiFi basic service set - if there are multiple SSID's in place, this means different networks at the application level, so the Chromecast being on one SSID, and the source being on another could be problematic with device discovery...

 

[kryptto]

I had used an 88AX for the longest time with similar issues with chromecast, what my research found out, too many wireless devices killed chromecast. I have/had 60+ devices on many bands - even though the devices were Google assistants and Google chromecast speakers I was WAYYYYY overtaxed on the AC band with all the neighbors competing AP's and my own wireless design. The purchase I made last year was the GT-AXE16000 becuase of the 2 5GHZ bands where I could put my streaming devices on one band, and put the others on another like, cameras on 5GHZ 1 and streaming chromecast devices on 5GHZ 2. Just a piece of my experiences - right or wrong seemed to work perfectly for me. I cant control the high density of 5GHZ traffic near my home, so break up the workloads, and everything works perfectly.