Videostream for Chromecast is a Chrome app that lets you stream videos from your local computer to any Chromecast available on your network. It works flawlessly for as long as I can remember until recently where the screen just hung there after I selected the video file to stream and didn’t go anywhere.
Reinstalling Videostream didn’t help, nor resetting the Firewall settings. I used VLC’s Chromecast support for a few times but it doesn’t always work as smoothly as Videostream. So, I did some research and found the cause and fix eventually, thanks to this Reddit post.
Basically what happened is that Google has mode some updates on the UI of the casting function in recent releases. Because of the change, Videostream couldn’t properly call up the UI that lets you choose a casting device. Fortunately, you can disable this UI change through Flags.
Open Chrome and go to chrome://flags/
Search for Views Cast dialog flag and switch its setting from Default to Disable. To prevent future breakdown because of the UI change, you can also find the Upcoming UI features flag and disable it.
Restart Chrome browser, and open Videostream to try again. It should be working by now. The UI cast dialog box pops up with all available Chromecast devices listed for you to choose from.
