Hello. I'm new to this subreddit. I'm coming here cuz I'm a bit angry from how unusable my chromecast is.
I have this chromecast, I think it's generation 3 (it's a dark one, with no remote) and about a month or two ago, the youtube UI updated and it removed 99% of its features. It's just a video player now. I was fine with it, but there have been problems that has not been fixed for around 5-6 years that I don't understand how they haven't fixed yet, considering they cared enough to still "update" it:
After an advertisement, the subtitles icon greys out and disables subtitles on a video that had them enabled.
After an advertisement, the volume breaks and shows up disabled (why would it need to be disabled?) and a hard reset doesn't fix it, neither by unpowering the chromecast, or force-closing the youtube app & clearing cache.
Advertisements aren't automatically skipped after 6 seconds now (or 16), they are 90+ seconds long and it requires me to pull up my phone to manually skip them. This is a problem, because the youtube app on my phone does a hard restart every time the screen turns off, and I need to pair again. And by the time I pair my phone to the chromecast, the first advertisement ended and I have to wait an additional 6 seconds for the *next* ad.
After an advertisement, the quality button is completely disabled. It says it's ""unavailable"" when obviously it's just glitched.
Same with subtitles and quality button, the speed control is fully disabled but it's not because of an ad. It's just always disabled. I guess it makes sense because the chromecast can barely keep up with 60fps 1080p video. (BUT IT WOULD BE NICE TO LOWER THE QUALITY SO IT CAN KEEP UP HUH)
The chromecast is slow, which is understandable (even though it worked well before), but that seems like it's bad memory management. Because subtitles lag the whole thing. It's just subtitles. It stutters a lot and it would be nice to lower the quality, as I said before. But the youtube app refuses to give quality. Which I don't understand why disabling those buttons are a thing in the first place.
It is no longer possible to pair with TV code. Which is a bummer as well. This was once they removed the whole youtube TV UI.
I'm at my breaking point right now. I really gave this thing 100 chances over many years for it to improve. But it didn't. It never did. In fact, it's even worse now. And there are alternatives, like... an HDMI cable connected to my PC, but none are as convenient as tapping a button on your phone and having the video show up on your screen. Plus, I really don't like throwing fully-working hardware to the trash. The hardware is good, but the software is just garbage.
So... is it possible to flash the OS on this thing to an older version, or maybe flash a different OS so all these problems potentially go away?
I don't know if this is the subreddit to ask this question. If this is not the place, my bad. I just wanna know if this thing can be saved.