Octopus Overlords

Have the latest version of the Chromecast, the one with the remote, where you load the apps onto the device. Yesterday something strange happened. We were in the middle of watching a show on one of the streaming services, when the app crashed (this Chromecast being crash-happy, I notice). Went to try and resume it, but it ended up being a completely different episode that played. And I'd figured out afterwards that it ended up playing the next episode in the list, as if everything had shifted one episode. The title and descriptions all fit the precedent episode in the list, ie I'll be episode 5's title and description, but play episode 6. And sure enough, today as we watch another episode, it's playing episote 7 but listing as the 6th. The 5th episode that we'd been watching when it crashed is acting like it doesn't exist. I've never seen an issue like this before on a streaming service. I'm thinking caching issue. But not exactly sure how to rectify it.

This might seem too obvious but when my (older) chromecast crashes, I sometimes have to give it a hard reboot. I pull the power from it for about 5-10 seconds, then plug it back in.

That's literally the only troubleshooting I do with mine. No firmware updates (if that is even a thing on these) or anything else.

That was the only thing I could think of as well. But I didn't want to post it because it felt too obvious. But it was probably worth stating. I'm also lazy...

...how far the 'General Computing' subforum has fallen...

Oh, that's something I've tried, and believe me I wouldn't have posted if I felt it would be fixed using that obvious fix. In fact, I unplug mine whenever I don't use it, as I had a Roku stick over heat during a heatwave that cooked it. But this is an issue that's persisted, likely because of the onboard storage. One thing I noticed about this issue is that while the app is ad-based, the ads wouldn't play at all, even though you could see the ad counter running in the bottom left corner super-imposed on the show itself.

But I found where the app cache is located. Under System>Storage> App Cache. Cleared that, and seems like it fixed it. So if anyone has a 3rd-gen Chromecast/GoogleTV and are having issues, clear the app cache.