Phone loses contact with chromecast during youtube playback

[electricpete]

Sometimes I find about 20 youtube videos and add them to tv queue in youtube on my phone (playing on tv)

Then I'll do other stuff with my phone while the videos pay on tv. In the beginning, there are playback controls in my notification pull down shade, so I can pause the playback whenever I want.

But eventually, the notification controls go away. The videos keep playing in the t.v., but I have lost my ability to control them (pause etc) from my phone.

Does this happen to anyone else?
Does anyone have an idea what triggers the phone to lose connection with the chromecast playback?

 

[bg4m3r]

It's been a problem in general for me, but it's gotten better with recent updates. Still disconnects though. In your case it could be an out of memory issue where your phone is closing the process to free up memory for whatever else you're doing. What if the phone is just sitting?

 

[electricpete]

Hmmm, you might be on to something there. I haven't really noticed whether it is less likely if I use my phone for nothing other than playback controls....don't do that often but will start trying that and see how it acts. I had experienced a few problems with running services being killed after I upgraded to Lollipop (Tasker was launching tasks erroneously accompanied by a Tasker event log entry indicating restart, swipepad gestures sometimes didn't activate). These symptoms seemed to go away when I subsequently started rebooting my phone daily (every time I'm about to get in the shower... makes it an easy and convenient habit), but process stats still indicates I still spend some time in "critical" low memory condition sometimes even within a few hours after reboot.

If it happens again, I'll check out the time running for youtube and chromecast in my running services display to see if there is indication of kill/ restart.

 

[electricpete]

I wasn't able to narrow down the cause when using my S4. After the problem happened I went into my phone apps manager and looked at time running for youtube app and other apps... there was no indication that anything had been killed based on "time running".

BUT, since I upgraded from my S4 to my Nexus 6, the problem has not recurred after many hours of youtube watching. So it seems there is some difference between the S4 and N6 and I'm inclined to think memory was the problem.

What a difference! It's a much more enjoyable experience when I can use youtube / chromecast the way they were designed. (Build a long queue list and then move on to other things, while still being able to go back to queue list anytime to pause, delete, add, and of course... to skip ads)