[Closed] Thoughts on Google Chromecast?

Brilliant. Get one.

You can have mine for £20 - it's gathering dust.

If you want to watch iPlayer/Netflix etc on a big telly, that is - that's what it's for.

Mine's gathering dust too. But thats cos its left stuck in the back of the telly. Very dusty round there.
Use mine a fair bit for casting Bt Sport from iPad to my tv. Pretty good if that's the sort of thing you want to do.

Yeah, very good. I like lining up a load of YouTube videos and watching them. You can also cast any video file on your PC via the chrome browser by pressing ctrl + O and selecting the file you want to play.

Same price from Wuaki.tv with an hd tv series thrown in. I got mine for £18.99 with True Detective. No obligation to subscribe or buy anything else.

https://chromeshop.wuaki.tv/uk/checkout/index.html

V good piece of kit IMO. Works well with the usual sites and recognised TV players as well as a lot of lesser known sites/apps.

Strangely ours is very reliable when streaming from the iPad but less so from my laptop.

Defo worth £30. Be prepared to hack your router settings if you can't get it working though. I don't have the link to hand, but it took me about 2 hours to figure it out.

Brilliant bit of kit, very simple, bit limited but does what it does well. More features coming too.

My Nexus has now added a 'cast screen' option to the menu which lets me mirror the screen so you could use that to read mails but still need to use the phone screen to navigate.

Streaming from laptop must work differently. Whereas the phone hands the stream over to the chromecast which then handles it (phone could even be turned off once the stream started) the laptop supplies the stream, so depends more on laptop power and WiFi. It's crap from my poor laptop, OK from my Mrs' better spec machine.

Gravity slave - there are two modes of operation.

1) You go to a video and click the cast icon in the video window itself. The Chromecast dongle then streams the video itself from the internet independently of any other device.

2) You cast a tab from a browser - this displays whatever's on the browser tab.

Both 1 AND 2 work from laptops. Look for the cast icon in the bottom row of icons in the video window. You can still turn off the laptop as you do with the phone, but you need to click on the chrome icon at the top of the browser window to regain control once you turn it back on.

Mine turned out to be a 5 minute wonder! Summer TV is pretty rubbish so that means more chunes to enjoy. 8)

molgrips - yup, 1) works on YouTube but for Redbull TV, Vimeo etc there's no cast icon, so need to use cast tab and the performance is definitely affected by the machine I trigger the stream from.

Got rid of my sky box, got a Chromecast, Netflix subscription (plus hola for US VPN), a now TV box with entertainment and movie package and free access to BT Sport. £50 outlay and £19 a month gets me more TV than I could ever hope to watch. On demand streaming is the future of TV and Chromecast is so cheap it is silly not to get one if you are into streaming TV/music/photos...

Did I catch something about them not working with BT home hubs ?

Right, I'm def going to get on...

[url= https://dabble.me/cast/ ]Vidcast[/url] is a website that make a chromecastable(?) stream from sites that haven't implemented it. Only tested it on vimeo myself, worked perfectly though, which is nice for the sites that haven't got up to speed yet.

molgrips - yup, 1) works on YouTube but for Redbull TV, Vimeo etc there's no cast icon, so need to use cast tab

Ok fair enough, but people are adding direct casting abilities to sites all the time, and Google just made the API public so expect lots of support soon.

To answer mugboo's question. Ours works fine with a homehub 3. In fact streams more reliably than a tablet or laptop. Pretty good for the money IMO.

Yep, got mine working on a bt homehub. No faff beyond plugging it in and following on screen instructions.

Thanks chaps 🙂

Ours worked fine for a while, then for some strange reason stopped,rebooted everything - phone, chromecast, hub and still wouldn't work.

Working really well for the apps that are enabled. Laptop isn't as good but good enough for quickly sharing something on the screen (watched the road race on it) as the API is public it shouldn't take long to get more and more aps enabled.

My laptop is permanently plugged into my TV via a HMDI cable and is my media hub

Apart from allowing me a bit of freedom to unplug the laptop and use it in different parts of the house, does Chromecast offer me anything else?

(There'a couple of Android phones and tablets in my house as well but only one of them <I think> has the ability to 'cast' - the others are too old)

Apart from allowing me a bit of freedom to unplug the laptop and use it in different parts of the house, does Chromecast offer me anything else?

Not tried the likes of Play Movies/Music yet but I'd expect it to work well. Also need to have a look at Plex to see if that is a good alternative to XBMC.

I'm not as impressed with the Casting from the laptop but that seems to be more to do with the laptop end of things.

Ultimately for the price why not give it a go. I'm going to take mine away with work this week and see if I can rig it with a phone hotspot or Hotel Wifi to watch stuff on the Hotel TV.

The red bull TV android app allows you to cast from a phone/tablet. It's a bit flakey, but I did manage to watch ratboy win at leogang on the big screen 🙂

Apart from allowing me a bit of freedom to unplug the laptop and use it in different parts of the house, does Chromecast offer me anything else?

Well it allows you to browse for the content whilst the machine is on your lap, rather than having to faff about with remote controls. Then you can continue browsing Facebook or whatever, or shut the machine down. If you have a media centre then it's less useful of coure.

Things that I've found work really well..
YouTube obviously
Pandora
RedBull TV (when buffered)

This is all well and good, but what everyone really want's to know is, what about grumble?

Haven't had good results casting 4OD from the laptop browsers - very stuttery. Can't try from the tablet browser as it hasn't got Flash and the 4OD app doesn't cast. Already have Iplayer and Netflix on Virgin so no real benefit there.

If you have a chromecast, get Videostream ( http://www.getvideostream.com/)!! Makes it twice as good. Allows you to stream any video file from your laptop.

The red bull TV android app allows you to cast from a phone/tablet. It's a bit flakey, but I did manage to watch ratboy win at leogang on the big screen

so have they finally got around to sorting support for casting live shows then? It never used to work. this is a nice development...

Does it work with Eurosport Player yet?

If you have a chromecast, get Videostream ( http://www.getvideostream.com/)!! Makes it twice as good. Allows you to stream any video file from your laptop.

Localcast does the same thing for Android phones as well.

Also for android, I'll say "Showbox" and leave it at that.

I also assume it is only useful if you have 'broad'band speeds greater than 600k in the evenings .... sigh.

@xherbivorex - now you mention it, I might have been watching the replay. Still, if redbull get their act together and you can avoid social media for a few hours it's not bad!

My kids love ours, mainly as they can watch YouTube minecraft videos on the TV in our bedroom.

Those people suffering performance issues with casting from Chrome browser - it's a computer performance issue, not Chromecast.

When doing it that way, the computer has to encode the screen image and wi-fi it over to the Chromecast, which takes a lot of processing if you are watching a movie. When casting from an enabled app, the phone/tablet is effectively a remote control, then the Chromecast takes over the streaming directly over the wi-fi.

Can I read email from my phone on the TV? You can cast your chrome browser web page to the TV, so if you access your email via web mail then yes. If you want your phone screen to come up verbatim on the TV, assuming your phone has screen mirroring like the Samsung S4 you can get a netgear ptv3000. I use the chromecast with the bubbleupnp app on my phone. I can then play media from my PC or NAS to the TV. On its own we used it to watch led zeppelin music videos from youtube when friends came over. Its pretty cool. Get one 🙂

Am I correct in thinking videostream and local cast and pretty much all other direct streaming apps are only available to android?

You operate the chromecast from an android device or Chrome browser in a PC. Not sure if it works on Chrome browser on other platforms.

Can I read email from my phone on the TV?

if you have a nexus 5, then the last android update included a beta of "cast to screen" which allows you to send whatever's on your phone screen to the chromecast, so the answer would be yes, you can read email from that phone on your TV.
not sure if they've rolled it out to other devices yet.

Now avaiable from Tesco's for 18 quid, but only for the next couple of days..