>Plus it's a fully Linux environment that I can fine tune as desired

You are not the Chromecast's target audience.

I'm so glad someone else is aware of this fact. Every time I see someone blatantly not the target market I think back to that dude that shot down Dropbox because he could do everything they were planning on his Linux box.

Dude should have been asking for a ground floor share holding job rather than shooting it down if he was able to so easily do it

> I don't want to cast from the cloud.

It certainly helps battery life for your mobile device to step aside as soon as playback has started. When casting video it doesn't matter even if I turn the device off.

You know, UPnP has media renderers, servers and control software as three separate matters. This is already a solved problem.

And, well, I had controlled mpd running on my desktop machine (that has the speakers connected) and streaming from my NAS from my N900, like, 5 years ago. Replace desktop with something like rPI and the tech is here.

UPnP and DLNA are a disaster of incompatibility and terrible usability. I've tried to use various UPnP/DLNA audio streaming hardware for almost 10 years and they have all had terrible issues. Most required the device controlling streaming to always be on, which is terrible for battery life and plain broken on tablets, etc. that go to sleep. Some only worked with Windows 7 media player's 'play to' command. I had to go through crazy setups like running multiple different UPnP services (bubble UPnP) just to make virtual UPnP devices that fixed bugs in my real UPnP devices, and even then things would mysteriously stop working.

Stay very, very far away from UPnP/DLNA. It's borderline false advertising IMHO to claim it streams music.

if you're using android, i suggest you try bubbleupnp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.... It doesn't seem to have the problems you describe, and it's also very happy to send stuff to a chromecast instead of a DLNA renderer. I could see how it's possible that your renderer is the cause of the problems, and that can be harder to replace since it's probably embedded in your TV (I've only used chromecast and samsung TVs).

I've actually had little to no trouble with DLNA overall, using among other things the ReadyDLNA server for a sparc readynas and rygel on ubuntu. i suppose it only takes one bad implementation among the components in your setup to ruin the whole experience, but i've been pleasantly surprised over the years how well it seems to work.

bubble doesn't have the best UI, but it's not bad, and there are other apps that are prettier (allcast comes to mind). in the past i would have totally agreed that most upnp controllers i had used had TERRIBLE usability, but most of those were embedded in A/V equipment (TVs, receivers), and what A/V equipment have you ever used with a good UI?

Can a UPnP renderer pull audio from a cloud service requiring login and authentication? Genuine question.

Some cloud services get around this by accepting a single-use auth token in the URL for the media file/stream.

Why would you need to explain it?

That's nice. This lets normal people do it.

Its possible to have things on your LAN other than mobile devices.

To be clear, you can cast from desktops, laptops, or anything that can run Chrome.

And you can stream from a local device. See plex.

I have my own Plex server with a couple Chromecasts hooked up throughout my apartment (two televisions and one connected to an HDMI port on my stereo for audio-only). It works fantastically well, allowing me to switch where things play-back as I move from room to room. And, like you said, it's linux, so I can do what needs to be done in regards to automating / organizing my media collection.

Plex is pretty awesome for casting content on your own network if you haven't looked at that.

Chromecast accepts URLs to LAN resources. All you need to do is expose your files over HTTP (I do this with my NAS and it works fine).

What app do you use to do this?

I just use Chrome to browse my directory listing and use AllCast as the handler when I tap on one of the links. There are others as well.

If you're using Android, you can just mount your shared directories with samba and can cast through a player to chromecast. I also have a htpc and its a much better solution overall.

It's not casting from 'the cloud', but from a server. And that server can be any device on your local network. Thats how it can receive any media on your LAN.

Well, there's Plex, but that's slightly different... I've been thinking of taking some of the work from mediacenterjs, and the chromecast stuff for node.js and coming up with a media center that outputs to a chromecast device, and controls via a phone/tablet.

Eh, the lack of gigabit ethernet makes it a pretty poor NAS.

Don't get me wrong, I like the RPi, but you can spend $25 more and get a much better NAS board.

Have you heard of Subsonic? The web client supports casting, and so does the amazing paid firm of the Android client, Dsub.