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Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

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Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friends or family don't need to have bought into the Apple ecosystem.

Ok, but they need to have bought into the Google ecosystem. I can't stream from my favorite music app to a Chromecast... That's not really an advantage.

Uh, no, that's not true at all. Chromecast works with Netflix, Pandora, etc... None of which are part of the "Google ecosystem". And you can cast from just about every device.

Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#252
post #225
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played with Chromecast for about a couple weeks and just yesterday remembered I had totally forgotten about it. It's a typical Google product, released just after leaving Alpha state, marginally decent, of limited and disjointed utility, and generally poorly executed. Judging based on Google's history with, literally every single thing they have done, we are approaching peak internal support and attention with decl…

"Hey, anyone want to watch a movie together?" Everyone pulls out their phones to flip through Netflix to make suggestions. You all agree on a movie and then someone hits play. Done. What are you even talking about "social".

I mean social, as in pre-Facebook social, you know, >1 person interacting and engaging with each other, their environment, and sharing an experience in the real world, e.g., looking at the same screen, seeing the same thing, implicitly sharing their mutual interests through queues like "click on the details for {movie title}, I would like to see what it's about". I know it's confusing that I didn't mention pushing each movement and thought to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr, but there used to be a time when social meant a singular level interaction between humans within physical proximity to each other.

Your rebuttal does nothing to improve my original point. You and all those around you are digging in their phones doing things unseen by everyone else, and also maybe even excluding those who do not have a device, or even just haven't downloaded that specific app.

I have a perfect solution to bridge that gap. But that's for another time.

Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#253
post #108
post #93

Now if Chromecast just didn't suck so horribly. I mean, who doesn't like blurry resolution and dropped connections.

Maybe your Chromecast has a weak WiFi connection? Try moving it a bit with an HDMI extender (one comes in the box with it). The Chromecast can do 1080p and full quality audio. It's not a limitation of the device.

One, how the heck did I end up with a negative score for my comment? Didn't even know that was possible.

Two, granted, the fuzzy content usually clears up somewhat nicely after a few seconds of progressive reconstruction of the stream, but am I the only one that has noticed rather striking image quality issues? So it's technically "1080p" but if that image has been optimized and compressed and is washed-out looking, which I find is the case, then what does it matter.

I was also referring to the main "screensaver" images on Chrome. Can those not be higher quality and resolution? They sure as heck don't seem 1080p and they are static images, why can't they be high resolution? I want eye-candy damn it? Ever seen the seemingly higher resolution images on Apple TV? Especially when you tie it to Flickr? (no, I'm not in the Apple cult)

Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#254
I'll point out that while the article touts its "blazing-fast Intel Core-i7", the likely reason that they chose an i7 is not that it is blazing-fast, but because currently, generally speaking[1], the i7 line is the only one that includes IRIS graphics, which is an IGP that is pedestrian by the standards of discreet GPUs, but quite impressive in terms of integrated graphics solutions. While all of the i7 processors that contain IRIS graphics are very fast from a compute perspective, that's not likely the reason they chose Intel's premium line.

That is to say, the i7 is still a compromise in performance, but has the great advantage of having pretty good graphics (which they need for high def video streaming) without requiring a huge discreet GPU, which in turn allows for a very small overall package. I'm not saying that it's a bad tradeoff, actually I recently bought a laptop that makes this exact tradeoff, but I think that it's a little bit intentionally disingenuous to tout its top end CPU performance when it's likely that this was only a secondary or tertiary factor for choosing this CPU.

I know it's marketing, and of course they're going to put i7 on the front of the tin because it's associated with premium-ness. Just pointing out why in this case it's kinda BS.

[1] Apple managed to convince Intel to integrate IRIS graphics into i5 branded processors for the late-2013 Macbook Pros, but it's the only place that I've seen non i7 line processors with IRIS.

Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#255
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screen mirroring on Apple TV works well, assuming, of course, that you're on a Mac and the OS lines up.

That's a very expensive assumption for most people

Poll's a little old, but most HN readers use OSX: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674

Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#256
post #12

I made my local video transcoder server and browser to play any kind of video on the Chromecast, it was working real good, now I can publish it (was not allowed before)

I have made my application public: https://github.com/mustafaakin/cast-localvideo

Re: Chromecast now open to developers with the Google Cast SDK

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also a brightscript/roku dev here. There's a nice code color plugin for sublime you can use and it's a bearable platform to develop on. Definitely use the console to just send the debug build up to the device and start debugging. It's really not that bad. Probably took me about a day to get used to it. Honestly, as long as you stick within their control schemes you're fine. Trying to break out of the roku app control…

I don't know how it is on the newer versions, but BrightScript was always very, very slow. Much slower than you would expect. Most of the time it never matters, since you are calling out to compiled object code that exports APIs for complex tasks, but when it matters, it matters. For example, implementing CRC32 (no built-in shift operators!), or minmax for game AI (for Reversi of all things, it's not like there's tha…

There's a certain point of "good engineer's" career where they want to make their own language/vm. I'm 99% sure this is what happened here. It's always a train wreck.

They really should have used lua. It would have been very simple to put in and it's robust enough and efficient for small memory devices.

While I appreciate the power/flexibility/efficiency of js it is no where near as efficient as lua. Lua keeps things as ints until they aren't needed etc. Very much build for embedded systems almost. I'm probably biased in that I've worked on a lua VM for mobile handsets for a few years.

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