How I fixed my buggy remote control for our Google Chromecast device

The actual name of the device is actually “Google Chromecast with Google TV (4K)”. It must be one of the worst product names ever.

Anyway. For some time now, the remote control to our Chromecast has been acting weird. If you pressed a button once, it would register it anywhere from 0 to 15 clicks. And sometimes with a delay for about a second or two, and a short click would sometimes be registered as a long-click to make things as annoying as possible.

This resulted in all kinds of fun stuff that you didn’t intended to do, making it unbearably painful to use our Chromecast.

I blamed the app SmartTube at first. Even though it made no sense that an app could cause these issues, but it was the only app that I experienced these issues with. However. It turned out that I just don’t use any other app enough to have encountered the issues anywhere else. Heh.

While I’m not entirely sure what the actual issue was, I managed to solve it by switching the HDMI port back on our TV (from the port in the middle to a port further away). I don’t know if it was the port itself, or if it was something close to the port that interfered with the device, somehow.

PS. If you’re not familiar with SmartTube, it’s the best client for YouTube. While it requires a Google-account, it comes with a lot of customisability, as well as quality of life features like automatically skipping sponsored segments and removing clickbait titles with crowdsourced titles that doesn’t suck. The app is available via F-Droid.