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Moments in Chromecast's history

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Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#311

Post by paxys »

NobodyNada wrote: post #286
ravenstine wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't AirPlay only good for screen casting as opposed to casting videos directly? My conclusion was that it's not feasible to use AirPlay to cast a video at the full frame rate and sound synced.

AirPlay can do both. There's a "screen mirroring" button in Control Center that streams your phone screen to the TV, but if you tap the AirPlay button on a video player or in the audio device selector, the TV will stream the video directly from the server at native resolution and FPS, without going through your phone (you can turn your phone off and playback will continue).

Depends on if the video source itself supports Airplay or not. Most don't.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#313

Post by resource_waste »

kemotep wrote: post #273
ravenstine wrote: post #251

Chromecast used to be a great product. I had my gen 1 Chromecast for the last 10 years until recently when it got fried by this piece of crap TV I plugged it into. It was exactly what I want in a device: Do one thing and do it well. I decided to replace it with a new "Chromecast" device to find out that it bears next to no resemblance to the original. Today's Chromecasts are just wannabe Roku devices with actual cast…

I’m pleasantly surprised by Apple Airplay. I can cast anything from my iPhone or iPad to my TV, they just need to be on the same WiFi. The original Chromecast was really good at just letting you cast anything to a TV.

Sign-in required?

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#314

Post by vel0city »

ghaff wrote: post #91
woodrowbarlow wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the phone/browser lock-in is largely due to lack of a standardized and open protocol to stream content in this manner. in the wireless-display-sharing ecosystem the chromecast is unique in that, when possible, it streams content from the original provider on a local client rather than relying on mirroring your device's display. this gives a better user experience but required participation from each service provider.…

I was at my brother's on vacation and we were sharing some vacation pics. The mirroring worked pretty well but I do wish there were a straightforward way to just cast a browser to a TV in a standard way.

In Windows, you can press Win+K to pull up the Cast menu. Lots of smart TVs and streaming devices will work with it. You can mirror or extend your display to it.

This is through standardized protocols.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#315

Post by jmull »

I thought this bit from the replacement device marketing was funny:

> And thanks to Gemini technology on Google TV, you can now get full summaries, reviews and season-by-season breakdowns of content, so finding your next marathon-watch just got easier.

They know it needs to be "AI powered" but they can't figure out anything that actually needs modern AI, so it's relegated to doing ordinary internet searches.

It's interesting, though, because there are existing sources for this content, like IMDB and wikipedia.

I wonder if the real point is more about selling ads while avoiding having to cut a deal with those existing sources. An LLM can essentially "launder" content so that, in general, it's hard to determine the sources for any given response. (There are plenty of individual examples where you can tell exactly what the primary source was, but those are the exception.)

I suspect the quality of the LLM-generated content will be worse than existing sources, but since the real point is to avoid sharing ad revenue, not providing good content to the user, that will probably be fine. It content doesn't need to be good, just good enough.

Welcome to the AI future! It's a lot grubbier than I expected.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#316

Post by packetlost »

ravenstine wrote: post #251

Chromecast used to be a great product. I had my gen 1 Chromecast for the last 10 years until recently when it got fried by this piece of crap TV I plugged it into. It was exactly what I want in a device: Do one thing and do it well. I decided to replace it with a new "Chromecast" device to find out that it bears next to no resemblance to the original. Today's Chromecasts are just wannabe Roku devices with actual cast…

I switched to iPhone, in part, because Chromecast's casting protocol was so unstable. It just... stopped working consistently. AirPlay seems to still work rather well, but it was substantially more expensive and doesn't really work with non-Apple devices (though the remote mostly alleviates this).

Idk, I think the real issue was it was probably "too complicated" for the average consumer. The type of person who is sitting at a TV probably wants something with a remote that behaves independent of their phone, not relies entirely on it for it to work. I love Chromecasts, but I can see why they're going away even if it makes me sad.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#317

Post by Yizahi »

ravenstine wrote: post #251

Chromecast used to be a great product. I had my gen 1 Chromecast for the last 10 years until recently when it got fried by this piece of crap TV I plugged it into. It was exactly what I want in a device: Do one thing and do it well. I decided to replace it with a new "Chromecast" device to find out that it bears next to no resemblance to the original. Today's Chromecasts are just wannabe Roku devices with actual cast…

My first Chromecast was the current one, and I honestly don't get what the issue with it (except VLC streaming) and the wall wart which is kinda expected given the SoC power. I've logged in Google acc and every app acc exactly once a year ago and since then it just works autonomously. And I have all modern streaming, my local streaming from ISP and youtube in one place on any outdated TV which are present in all rentals here. That was the point of it, right? To add smart tv functionality to the old tv.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#318

Post by apitman »

shiandow wrote: post #131
apitman wrote: post #118

Too bad they're not killing the Chromecast protocol as well, then maybe the world would start moving toward a simple, open protocol for casting.

What does a protocol for casting need that UPnP/DLNA doesn't provide?

If I have an MP4 video file sitting in cloud storage somewhere, does UPnP/DLNA provide an easy way for me to use my phone to tell my TV to play that file? Also same question but for Netflix.
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