Podcast #991: Locast2Plex and Chromecast Whole House Audio

Whole House Audio Journey with the Chromecast for Listener Matt As a teenager growing up in the 80's I had a subscription to Audio Video Interiors magazine. I would marvel at these huge custom home theaters with in-floor console CRT Runco projectors and AMX or Crestron controls. Fast forward past the Beastie Boys cassettes and Van Halen CDs, once MP3s hit the scene and you could store vast amounts of music on a computer, I was cobbling together homemade systems connecting computers to amps around the house. Then Google Chromecast and their Chromecast Audio 'puck' came to market. I purchased an AudioSource 'auto-power' on Amp from Amazon, plugged the Chromecast Audio into the RCA jacks and I could pull up music on my phone and cast to the amp from anywhere in the house and it would turn itself on and just play. In the early 2010's if you were hosting a party and you just pulled out your phone, hit play and all the speakers in the house kicked on, it was like magic. But that was just one amp with a Niles 6 zone speaker selector. What if you have multiple rooms and amps that you want to tie together? Google announced that they were creating the concept of a Speaker Group, where you could add multiple chromecast devices into a group and sync them together. This I thought was going to be the Holy Grail of whole house audio, no more amps everywhere just get an AndroidTV with Chromecast, add a good soundbar / sub and then when you have a house party, use the Speaker Group to sync all the rooms. I also have an Onkyo amplifier with Chromecast built in which you could also add to the Speaker Group. I got all of this to work, I have a game room with a Hisense Android TV and soundbar, the main living area Onkyo with builtin Chromecast, and an Audiosource amp with Chromecast Audio dongle for outside. (Quick side note, my love to Monoprice, they have an in ground subwoofer with 4 satellite speakers that sounds great and passes the outdoor Decorating Committee standards). I put the Game Room Hisense TV, Onkyo with builtin Chromecast, and the Chromecast Audio into one speaker group called "Whole House" and it was amazing.... until it wasn't. You see, while Google likes to 'give-th' Google will also 'take-th' away when they feel like it. Suddenly things started dropping out of the Speaker Group, I couldn't see my Onkyo anymore, the HisenseTV was gone. As a software engineer I dug down in my bug hunting skills but could not find anything different in my network that had changed. Until someone posted a discussion in Reddit from a Google Tech (yes someone actually found a Google Help Desk person) that read: It appears that Google is no longer going to support Speaker Groups with third party hardware. While you can individually cast something to the Hisense TV or the Onkyo amp, you can no longer put them together in a group to play the same music. I was so angry and frustrated that Google had removed a feature that worked, I almost jumped over the fence into the Apple walled garden... until I realized it would cost $800 for 4 AppleTVs... which is more than a 75" Hisense TV. So I bought another Chromecast Audio dongle off Ebay for $50 (the full retail price in 2015), hooked it up to the Onkyo and I'm somewhat back in business, other than having to manually turn on the Onkyo. But it's sad that I had to purchase a discontinued device to get everything to work the way I wanted. I know there are lots of options, the Apple-verse, Amazon Fire world, Sonos. The problem I find is that once you have invested so much into one eco-system, it is so hard to switch out. Locast2Plex  A couple of weeks ago we received two emails from listeners asking if we had tried locast2plex. Locast2plex turns your locast account into a virtual tuner for your Plex Server. We thought, fantastic! However, it's not as simple as turning on a setting and bam you're done. There is some heavy lifting that needs to be done. We go through the steps. This is not an instructional segment but more of an inventory of what you need to do if you want this capability for your Plex server. Before we get into the steps you might ask what does this get you? Good question! There are two selling points for going through this somewhat complicated process. First, it allows you to record all your locast local channels using the Plex DVR and second, it gives you access to your locast local channels anywhere you have an Internet connection. There is a third reason as well. ALL the locals from your area come in and they never fade based on atmospheric conditions. Step 1) You need to download the locast2plex script from github. The "code" comes as a zip file that contain configurations and other files needed to run as a python script. You will need to have an always on computer that is running the script. This is what actually simulates a physical tuner.  Step 2) designate an always computer to host the script. We chose an $35 RaspberryPi. They are quiet and barely use any energy. We are not discussing the setup of a RaspberryPi in this post. But you can buy them preconfigured from Amazon for less than $50. Step 3) uncompress the zip file. We renamed the folder to locast2plex for simplicity Step 4) update the file config_example.ini with your locast user settings. Then change the name of this file to config.ini. You will also need to know the ip address of the computer hosting the script. We updated our router to always give our hosting computer the same ip address. If you don't do this you will need to update config.ini each time the hosting computer gets a new ip address. In config.ini update the ip address of the host computer.  Step 5) Open up a terminal window and navigate to the locast2plex directory. Then run the following command python3 main.py. That starts everything and downloads the channels. If you are successful you will see "Locast2Plex is now online".  Do not close this window or your tuner will stop working.  From here we move to your computer that is running your Plex Server. Step 6) On your server you will need to add the locast2plex tuner. There is a LiveTV & DVR setting under the MANAGE section of the server settings. Here you will add the tuner. You will have to manually input the ip address of your host computer and be sure to append a :6077 to it so Plex knows which port to find it at Step 7) input your local information, country, zipcode etc. This will allow plex to download the channel guides for your area Step 8) watch! This is pretty complex to do if you are not comfortable with computers.  As stated before it's nice to be able to watch every channel and record them as well. The quality is decent but not as good as the IPTV streamers. Still having access to your locals while on vacation is a plus. Locast only costs you a $5 a month donation and Plex is free. So you have nothing to lose.