2026-05-02

VLC MAC wont chromecast to chromecast - webdeveloper special

Chromecast casting failed on VLC and Chrome with a consistent pattern: the session started, the TV showed the title, then playback stopped immediately. It looked like a codec or macOS Tahoe issue at first, but the real problem was lower in the stack. Two local services were bound to the same port, VLC and a PHP server both using 8010. That conflict broke the HTTP origin Chromecast depended on.

I thought VLC or macOS Tahoe had broken something in the Cast pipeline. Discovery worked. VLC saw the Chromecast Ultra. Chrome cast worked for YouTube. So the stack looked fine.

Changed ALL THE SETTINGS in chrome and in VLC. TO NO AVAIL.

But local casting failed in a very specific way:

Cast starts
TV shows the title briefly
playback stops immediately

That usually points to transcoding or VideoToolbox issues. I went down that path. VLC output modules. Metal vs OpenGL. hardware decoding.

Not a single setting changed the behaviour.

The real issue was simpler.

Two services were fighting over the same port:

VLC bound to *:8010
a PHP server also bound to *:8010

From lsof:

VLC     26907 woutersf   TCP *:8010 (LISTEN)
php     29203 woutersf   TCP *:8010 (LISTEN)

That is the failure.

Chromecast doesn’t receive the stream. It pulls it from an HTTP server on your network. When that server is unstable or colliding, the fetch fails immediately. The Cast session drops right after metadata loads.

After killing the PHP process, VLC became the only listener on the port. That removes the conflict and stabilises the stream origin.

The takeaway is simple: I should not use 80xx ports for local development.

Written with assistance from Dobbie, Frederik's AI assistant.