Options to extract Audio from Chromecast, now that Chromecast Audio has been Discontinued

It is sad to learn that Google has discontinued their Chromecast Audio. One of their best inexpensive devices that could be plugged to any receiver or speaker via RCA/line-out or mini-toslink (digital) connectors. I have been using them for almost 4 years, 3 of them enabled as Multi-Room, allowing me to stream music around the house.

I believed so much on this concept, that I gave one to my parents, one to my brother-in-law, and another one to a very good friend. Showed them how to use it with Spotify, YouTube Music and Google Play Music.

Google shall continue carrying their standard Chromecast, which starting on Gen. 2, allow for Multi-Room Audio.

There might be folks still interested on extracting just the audio portion of the stream, to feed to a receiver or any other device, using the standard Chromecast.

There are options out there. Below a few:

HDMI to HDMI + Optical Toslink SPDIF + 3.5mm AUX Stereo Audio Out:

Offering more than just audio, this could be an option for anyone trying to extract the audio portion before connecting to another HDMI cable.
Outputs: Toslink, mini-RCA (3.5 mm), HDMI (pass-through).

Amazon Link.

HDMI to RCA Audio Video AV CVBS Adapter Converter:

Pretty basic connector that converts the signal to composite audio and video. With any RCA cable anyone should be able to feed the audio portion to a receiver.
Outputs: RCA video and Stereo Audio

Amazon Link.

HDMI to VGA Converter Female to Female & 3.5mm Audio:

Fairly simple Connector that has an analog audio out (mini-RCA), and also a VGA input on the other side.
Outputs: Stereo mini-RCA (3.5 mm), VGA

Amazon Link.

Do you have any other recommendations? Let me know in the comments below.

AT&T Fiber Gigapower 1 Gbps Internet Service

It was unfortunate to learn that BeIN Sports was dropped by Xfinity, and I had to figure out a workaround. No other cable or dish operator provided the channel, and I did not want to install a dish on my roof either. I had to reuse the existing cabling at home. The only option was streaming (any service that provided BeIN Sports Connect).

I needed a service with no data transfer cap, and I had two options. AT&T Fiber 1000, and Xfinity Gigabit service.

The table below shows the pricing, contract and speed information.

ProviderPriceRebateSpeed (Mbps)
Down/Up
ContractETF***
AT&T$90$150**1000/10001-year$180
Xfinity$82*
None1000/352-years$240

* Included the price of leased equipment
** Engaged on a chat session and got offered an additional $100 
*** Reduced for every month of service

The information depicted is for South Florida, Broward county. It could vary be region.

It was an easy pick for me. AT&T offers a symmetrical service, with uploads maxing out at 1000 Mbps. And I am on the hook for just 1 year.

The AT&T technician ran fiber cable from the street all the way to my outside wall, installed a fiber to Ethernet box (which is located inside the house), and reused the phone cable that already ran to a junction box I had inside the house already (the phone cable was Cat 5e Ethernet).

Fortunately, my house is already pre-wired with Cat 5e network cables, and had already in place 2 wired access points with 802.11ac Wi-Fi. I swapped out my old Xfinity router with the new one AT&T provided, and plugged in 4 Ethernet cables to the network ports provided. The router serves also as DHCP server and as a 802.11ac access point. The network ports feed to the 2 additional access points (which also have 4 gigabit network ports, each), as well as the security camera system and my son’s gaming computer.

I changed the router internal IP address, and reconfigured the Wi-Fi SSIDs, to make the migration transparent. All 38 or so devices continued to work without any issues.

I was skeptical in the beginning, as I was not sure if the Cat 5e cables would sustain gigabit connectivity. To my surprise, they do, and it is consistent.

The 802.11 ac access points provide speeds that vary between 180 to 480 Mbps. They are just fine for streaming and laptop/smartphone connectivity. All heavy duty processing are performed at hard wired equipment, including my main desktop computer.

I am very happy with the service thus far, and having a symmetrical service is fantastic. The very first day I was able to upload 1 TB of video files to my Google Drive. Previously it would have taken me several days (capped at 10 Mbps upload speeds before).

If you are tempted to get AT&T fiber 1000, they are providing 2 additional access points that create a mesh network, for free. 802.11ac + 802.11n bands.

I do believe that streaming is the future of TV service, and cable has its days counted.

Happy streaming.

All of the sudden Facebook for Android stopped working [U-Verse]

Starting this week, Facebook for Android stopped working while under my home network. At first I thought it was just an issue with my Access Points, and rebooted. It did not fix the problem, so I went ahead and rebooted my main router running DD-WRT. Still with the same issue, I decided to reboot the U-Verse gateway. Unfortunately nothing seemed to fix the problem.

I performed some research online and found out that by changing the MTU size of my main router, it might fix the problem. I went ahead and plugged in 1492 instead of the default 1500; done. It fixed the issue immediately.

I wonder why it started happening all of the sudden as it never gave me any problems with the MTU size of 1500 for at least a couple of years. My guess, AT&T made some changes.

Go to this link for instructions on how to get the best MTU size.

Ping Test

Analog Intercom/Buzzer stops working with VoIP – Future Nine [fixed]

Quick post here regarding my Voice over IP provider, Future Nine, and the Analog Intercom/Buzzer at the front gate of my community. When someone dials-in from the main gate, I need to pick up the phone and press 9 to open it. It has not been working as of late, and the only way to circumvent the challenge was to reset the Linksys VoIP box. It would last a few minutes.

My current internet provider is AT&T U-Verse. The VoIP box is plugged directly to the U-Verse gateway.

Future Nine replied to my concerned and suggested to make these changes under the advanced tab (LAN port, default gateway IP – http://192.168.0.1/admin/advanced)

SIP Port: 15060
Proxy: incoming.future-nine.com:15060

I am currently testing the changes, and will update with results in the next few days.

Update 02/22:

The service is now working properly. It seems that AT&T blocks port 5060 for their own VoIP service.

Spotify does not play track links from Facebook [Solved]

I never had a chance to figure out why I couldn’t play tracks  from Facebook or Spotify Play Button at home. After further research I found out that my DD-WRT flashed router had the “Deny DNS Rebinding” option enabled. Spotify needs to resolve *.spotilocal.com to 127.0.0.1.

In order to resolve it, I added this command to the DD-WRT startup options:

sed -i ‘s/stop-dns-rebind//g’ /tmp/dnsmasq.conf
killall dnsmasq
dnsmasq –conf-file=/tmp/dnsmasq.conf

Everything is good now, fortunately.