Why is Brave contacting 239.255.255.250 on its own

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1

Description of the issue:

Brave is sending outgoing connections to 239.255.255.250

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Launch Brave
  2. Watch Little Snitch catch Brave connecting to 239.255.255.250

Expected result:

Brave has no business making any connections that I did not tell it to make

Brave Version( check About Brave):

Version 1.29.76 Chromium: 93.0.4577.58 (Official Build) (x86_64)

Additional Information:

Someone asked a similar question on this forum in March 2019, but as with many other support questions, it was never answered.

2

It looks likely that it is indeed the Chromecast (ā€˜Media Routerā€™) support.

There used to be a switch for it in Settings that was easy to find. I wonder if itā€™s been enabled by default due to an upstream Chromium change maybe? Thereā€™s a bunch of options relating to it in brave://flags but itā€™s not clear to me whether any one of them might shut it off completely.

So, I think itā€™s that, but I am not sure how to shut it off anymore and Iā€™m guessing weā€™d need to fiddle with some of those flags to narrow it down.

Maybe an oversight for the switch to go away?

3

This is indeed related to the Discovery and Launch Protocol, used by the Presentation API and Chromecast. Chromium 93 included a change which unconditionally enabled the feature, meaning our Settings toggle was no longer useful.

Can you confirm that youā€™re seeing this network activity prior to any Cast request?

1 Like
4

Our team has reproduced the issue, and filed the following (see link below) to track progress and developments towards improvement. Thank you again for reporting this behavior!

2 Likes
5

Thanks for your help here @sampson!