Google Chromecast
- Thread starter Corsi
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Sorry to be a fanboy, but...
4 stars on Amazon, #1 selling electronics product on Amazon
4.3 stars on Best Buy
Engadget: 8.1 average expert review, 8.4 average customer review
I suspect you could've probably found someone to buy yours if you'd tried.
AlNipper49 said:
4 stars on Amazon, #1 selling electronics product on Amazon
4.3 stars on Best Buy
Engadget: 8.1 average expert review, 8.4 average customer review
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/30/google-q4-2013-earnings-call/
I suspect you could've probably found someone to buy yours if you'd tried.
That it got a 8 in video quality shows you the depth of schmuck that they polled.
And of course it's selling well, it's $35. I bought two bottles of beer for about that much last week. If people want something decent to stream home media then they'll probably be willing to kick in the extra $25 for a superior device. You need to be functionally retarded to prefer a Chromecast over Roku (if you're not rolling your own). If you're a college kid who wants to play SE youtubes or watch Netflix (and be the only one watching it as you are controlling it with a phone) then it's probably fine.
And of course it's selling well, it's $35. I bought two bottles of beer for about that much last week. If people want something decent to stream home media then they'll probably be willing to kick in the extra $25 for a superior device. You need to be functionally retarded to prefer a Chromecast over Roku (if you're not rolling your own). If you're a college kid who wants to play SE youtubes or watch Netflix (and be the only one watching it as you are controlling it with a phone) then it's probably fine.
AlNipper49 said:
This doesn't make a lick of sense.
In any event, the overwhelmingly positive reviews disprove your theory that it only sells well b/c of the price -- people would give it poor reviews if they got it home and it performed as poorly as you claim.
And, of course, if Roku was as obviously superior as you claim, they wouldn't have done this:http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/05/tech/gaming-gadgets/roku-streaming-stick/
Haters gonna hate.
What are you guys using as far as internet service while using chromecast? I live in the sticks and recently just got 4g service. My choice for provider is sattellite net (had it, hate it), wireless hot spot, and for a while pdanet foxfi. Cant use foxfi pdanet anymore so we have been using a hotspot for a year now. We seem to bust the gb limit everymonth. Once the 4g came available here (late december 13) we've really started to have crazy high bills because of going over gb limit (5gb). We're not sure why since we cant stream movies. I guess what I'm trying to ask about is whether or not anyone uses is from a wireless hot spot and what kind of costs/data usage are you incurring.
I got one a month ago and i'm underwhelmed. I thought that you would be able to "cast" data directly to the dongle. I guess that's not how it happens. To cast a laptop browser, the data goes from the wifi hub, to my laptop, back over the wifi, and then finally it goes to the dongle. Maybe it's that the wifi in my house is wimpy, but there is a constant delay of 2-3 seconds to cast from my lappy to the TV. And it pauses and skips. Nip, does the Roku skip one of those trips over the wifi?
Guapos Toenails said:
I'm not sure that's the case if you are "casting" from a tablet or phone (I'll concede it might be the case with a computer). I "casted" a video from Youtube a couple weeks ago then had the Youtube app crash which caused me to lose control of the video (couldn't stop it). I went to the point of rebooting the whole tablet, trying to reset the connection to the dongle, etc. Through all that, the video kept playing on the TV without a blip. To stop the video, I had to reboot the dongle. It certainly gave me the impression that the video was going straight from the wifi router to the dongle without detouring through the tablet.
Red(s)HawksFan said:
That's exactly what happens when casting from a mobile device. The audio/video are being streamed directly on the dongle. As you noted, you can go so far as to reboot your device and the video will happily continue playing. The only thing that will interrupt the video is to kill the casting from the device - and the occasional buffer.
It is different on the laptop, however. That does a mirroring of the desktop, which requires several jumps on your network for the image to reach the television. Simply working on your desktop doesn't cause much of a delay but playing a video from the desktop is extremely painful (there are ways to improve the efficiency but, as of right now, it doesn't do much). That is definitely the big limitation of this device.
Guapos Toenails said:
The Roku is basically a PC connected to your TV for the big stuff. If you are one of the rare people who wants to stream from you phone (inexplicably - it's a battery hog) then you can also do that and mimic how the Chromecast works. (I haven't tried it yet in full disclosure -- I prefer the Plex interface for most things)
I should have said that I love the casting capabilities from my phone...Google Music, Youtube, etc... That works beautifully. But I don't have my terabyte of home/kid movies on my phone. I was hoping that I would be able to cast to my TV from my home-network hard drive (via my laptop). I could do it for probably under $100 now, but I was hoping to do it for $35
Or XBMC, which is a little easier interface to figure out than setting up Plex and will help organize your library and do desktop playback for you as well as acting as a DLNA and SMB server.
Plex is more lightweight/flexible once you get it sorted out and will handle transcoding if you need it.
(ps3mediaserver and mediatomb are 2 more options; the former is set up to transcode everything to a ps3-friendly format out of the box, the latter is the most powerful and flexible of the bunch as well as the toughest to set up).
Plex is more lightweight/flexible once you get it sorted out and will handle transcoding if you need it.
(ps3mediaserver and mediatomb are 2 more options; the former is set up to transcode everything to a ps3-friendly format out of the box, the latter is the most powerful and flexible of the bunch as well as the toughest to set up).
MLB.tv adds Chromecast support.
http://chrome.blogspot.ca/2014/04/plaaaaay-ball-now-casting-live-with.html?m=1
http://chrome.blogspot.ca/2014/04/plaaaaay-ball-now-casting-live-with.html?m=1
fyi....I can access the game using Chromecast via the At Bat app on my tablet but not MLB.tv on my laptop.
Anyone have any tips for streaming video from a web browser to Chromecast? I'm on a Win 7, 2nd gen i7 processor and an N wireless network (DD-WRT) with 4 bars out of 5. Netflix works fine, but streaming from Chrome sucks. Its lagging and audio is off.
Casting your browser to your television is one of Chromecast's best features. Unfortunately, it's a complete and utter failure when it comes to video. Playing video from a dedicated app works seamlessly because it loads the content directly to Chromecast. When playing video from the browser, on the other hand, the video essentially has to load twice (once on the desktop and once on Chromecast). This lends itself to the lagging and audio issues you described.
Apparently there are some registry settings you can fool with - which might marginally improve the quality, rendering the video only slightly less unwatchable - but I've never seen anything approaching a real solution.
Edit-In other news, casting my MLB At Bat app works like a fucking charm. The video quality is slightly lower than that of the PS3 but that seems to cause it to buffer less.
Apparently there are some registry settings you can fool with - which might marginally improve the quality, rendering the video only slightly less unwatchable - but I've never seen anything approaching a real solution.
Edit-In other news, casting my MLB At Bat app works like a fucking charm. The video quality is slightly lower than that of the PS3 but that seems to cause it to buffer less.
Ok so all I want to do is watch my pirated torrent .mp4s on my new Vizio smart TV...codec isn't supported on .mp4s over 30min long on either the PS3 Media Server or TvMobilo.
Will a Chromecast allow me to do this using the Plex interface? And is there a better way to do this? For some reason I'm struggling here.
I have a Macbook Air, and my external hard drive is formatted to that,I tried plugging that directly into the TV's usb and it doesn't recognize the files, it will only recognize NTFS or FAT32 formatted XHDs. I want to avoid lugging my ps3 into the family room, and just want a simple interface that my fiance and I can use. Googling the subject is exhausting.
My thought is Plex thorugh Chromecast, but if there is a better option I'm all ears.
Will a Chromecast allow me to do this using the Plex interface? And is there a better way to do this? For some reason I'm struggling here.
I have a Macbook Air, and my external hard drive is formatted to that,I tried plugging that directly into the TV's usb and it doesn't recognize the files, it will only recognize NTFS or FAT32 formatted XHDs. I want to avoid lugging my ps3 into the family room, and just want a simple interface that my fiance and I can use. Googling the subject is exhausting.
My thought is Plex thorugh Chromecast, but if there is a better option I'm all ears.
I use Plex through Roku. The Chromecast is a horrid device, do yourself a favor and just buy something that works.
AlNipper49 said:
Seconded. Either Apple TV or Roku is fine. ChromeCast is great b/c it's cheap, except for the troublesome fact that it doesn't work.
And apple tv will allow streaming of pirated .mp4 files ? Cost isnt a factor really esp a diff of just 25-50bucks
I'm still amazed what a shitty device the chromecast is.johnmd20 said:
I brought my appletv down to the basement and it's a dream compared to the google device.
southshoresoxfan said:
The wdtv live smp has the best codec support for local streaming of anything I've found. I've yet to find a file it won't play.
AppleTV doesn't support 8x8 dct, b-pyramids, and some other h.264 extensions in .mp4 files, it used to not support high profile but I think that's been addressed recently. It also sucks at streaming .flv (it buffers the whole thing, which is fine on a short video but sucks for movies) and has limited .mpg support for mp2 files depending on how they're encoded.
The Roku has problems with native playback of some DTS/surround sound tracks (passthrough works fine, but if you don't have surround then decoding to stereo is sometimes flaky if there isn't a 2nd stereo audio track). h.264 playback was pretty limited on mine. This is what I got first, but I wound up returning it since it couldn't play about 10% of my files without transcoding (which sucks).
Thanks guys. Sounds like the wdtv live is getting first crack. As nice as apple tv looks i already have the smart tv w all those functions i just want to stream my personal collection
Yea i have a vizio m series. Rumors are swirling about a plex app but its yet to surface and my loaded w content ex hard drive is useless at the moment due to the codec issue. Worst case i can always flip the wdtv for a few bucks if plex doss appear soon
If i were you I'd just throw the HD onto your PC, throw Plex on there and buy an older Roku for now. I'm guessing since we're dealing with codec issues that you're not looking at pumping out 1080p, so a gen2 Roku should suffice. Or if your Vizio is on the wall you can get a Roku stick.
That's what I did and it worked out perfectly.
I have a pc dedicated to it, but it also runs Sick Beard and Couch Potato which feed into SABNZBD. Once the files are downloaded they are dropped off in their final destinations (Sick Beard has a script that ties in with sabnzbd, Couch Potato scans a download directory). Plex then scans those directories every hours or so and when it finds something it downloads all trailers, cover art, theme music, etc automagically. It's really pretty insane at how tight it is.
That's what I did and it worked out perfectly.
I have a pc dedicated to it, but it also runs Sick Beard and Couch Potato which feed into SABNZBD. Once the files are downloaded they are dropped off in their final destinations (Sick Beard has a script that ties in with sabnzbd, Couch Potato scans a download directory). Plex then scans those directories every hours or so and when it finds something it downloads all trailers, cover art, theme music, etc automagically. It's really pretty insane at how tight it is.
AlNipper49 said:
I do the same with XBMC for streaming to my WDTV Live. It scans in real-time as files are added, and pulls down all the cover art/fan art/metadata/trailers/etc. The XBMC display is pretty awesome:
Movie view (clicking the film reel plays the trailer, I have theme music turned off but it's an easy option to turn on):
TV show overview:
Episode view:
My music collection's a little more haphazardley organized:
Streaming devices are obviously limited by their own built-in displays.
My chromecast is working great with mlb.tv this year. I am casting to my kitchen tv from my chrome browser on my laptop. For travel, I'm trying to get the mlb at-bat app to cast from my phone. It seems clearly designed to do so, so I got chromecast on the phone, and it shows up on the mlb app and is attempting to work, but no luck. The circle just keeps turning, and in some cases it gives up and a message appears on the telly that owing to Error Number 3, I need to try again in three minutes. Now, my phone is cheap (a Huawei), but the mlb app works perfectly on it. Anyone else have trouble casting from a phone?
p.s. Over two hours later, I suddenly got it to work, on a video of a game aired earlier in the day. Google tells me that folks are having lots of trouble with Error 3, but for some reason it's working now. It will be interesting to see if it will work with a live game tomorrow.
p.s. Over two hours later, I suddenly got it to work, on a video of a game aired earlier in the day. Google tells me that folks are having lots of trouble with Error 3, but for some reason it's working now. It will be interesting to see if it will work with a live game tomorrow.
I got a Chromecast a couple weeks ago for my kitchen TV and it works perfectly. I basically only use it for YouTube and MLB.tv, and cast from my Nexus 7. I'm impressed, and actually a little perplexed, as to how well it works with MLB.tv. I get flawless HD picture on the TV when casting from the Nexus 7... which doesn't get HD on MLB.tv. Eh? Anyways, it's been well worth the $35, at least so far. I don't know if you guys are hilariously hyperbolic, or if Google has been pushing updates or something, but it works fantastic.
I should add that I'm using the power adapter and not the USB port for power, if that makes any difference.
I should add that I'm using the power adapter and not the USB port for power, if that makes any difference.
