less wood behind worse arrows
Moments in Chromecast's history
451–460 of 609 posts
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Miracast is not content-aware, it's just a standard to stream a video over Wi-Fi, competing with Intel Wireless Display (and other proprietary Wireless Display implementations) The beauty of the Google Cast protocol is that you can hand over meta-data as well as the actual source-URL to the receiver and it can initiate the stream directly. > the fact that google dropped it from stock android kind of says it all - the…
Most major vendors add it themselves because google refuses to put it in stock. Samsung calls it smart view, for instance. My phone calls it screencast. I use it every day and the experience is decent. Google just didnt like the competition from an open standard i guess. but, they dont control what vendors do. I dont want a proprietary content aware equivalent. There is no beauty to sending metadata separately. There…
> Most major vendors add it themselves because google refuses to put it in stock. Samsung calls it smart view, for instance. My phone calls it screencast.
No, as said, vendors add it themselves because the core functionality is now provided and maintained by the vendor of the device-chipset. A generic AOSP ("stock") implementation was proven to be inferior to a custom Miracast component tailored for i.e. Qualcomm DSP/GPU, that's why AOSP didn't continue maintaining it.
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#453> Google TV Streamer (4K) Oh, so they're just rebranding and not making it a dongle anymore....
I suspect that being a dongle is part of the appeal of Chromecast for many people. At least I definitely don't want more visible external boxes behind/next to my TV, especially if they don't even need line-of-sight to the remote since that's all Bluetooth anyway these days.
> I suspect that being a dongle is part of the appeal of Chromecast for many people.
Exactly. Also: I just want to watch stuff. I don't want AI or smart-home features.
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your second paragraph for a lot of reasons and product lines of theirs. But -- I decided a while ago to bite the bullet and go whole hog on using Google everything for my personal life (for better or worse). The decision was either to avoid them entirely or resign and buy into the ecosystem. I have a Pixel, my home uses Nest, I use their cloud storage personally, their AI, etc. FWIW it is a better experi…
The problem is that Google makes it hard to go all-in on their products even when you want to. I was an early user for Google Apps for Your Domain, which was a free version of what is now Google Workspace that you could use with custom domains. I signed up for Google Play Music with that account. Then they introduced Google Family, with app sharing and a family plan for Google Play Music, but you couldn't use Google…
Yup - G's aggressive at transitioning out enjoyable functionality to whatever their new hotness, their next direction, is that they want to push.
I feel much more like The Product is the Consumer with G, vs Apple.
To me Apple product- / business-approach seems torn between capturing the audience with delight vs high prices to achieve profit.
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#455This is not the same thing. My Chromecast dedicated device would put a default nice picture, then wait for a cast. Google TV and this new device displays advertisements, store, and more. I hate it. It's the last google thing in my house. When it dies, google will be gone from my house.
The only “google” thing in my home is a nest. That’s only because G acquired the company years back. Only thing they added was forcing users to migrate Nest account to G. Honestly might disconnect the nest from the network. But only keep it connected and segmented from rest of network for remotely changing the temp from my phone. One of these days I’ll “hack” (explore) the device so it doesn’t rely on Nest/Google API…
Last I looked, there was essentially no good programmatic route into local Nest control, unlike most home automation devices which use wifi/bluetooth/zwave/zigbee. I replaced my Nests with a couple of $25 Centralite Zigbee thermostats and drive it via HomeAssistant running on a Raspberry Pi, and I'm significantly happier with it than I ever was with the Nest.
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sit…
> I switched to iPhone, in part, because Chromecast's casting protocol was so unstable. It just... stopped working consistently. I had a similar problem with some (Android phone) apps. Casting a movie, and after half an hour or so the app would lose its connection to the Chromecast. Which meant you couldn't control (e.g. seek backward/forward) the movie anymore without restarting it (the movie). This didn't happen wi…
Yeah, that was a common issue with me. I had significantly worse issues though, my chromecast would hard lock and/or have very strange visual glitches that required a reboot to fix, typically about 10-20 minutes into playing something. That's if I even got to that point because half the time it would just refuse to actually play anything without a reboot 95% of the time I went to use it.
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your second paragraph for a lot of reasons and product lines of theirs. But -- I decided a while ago to bite the bullet and go whole hog on using Google everything for my personal life (for better or worse). The decision was either to avoid them entirely or resign and buy into the ecosystem. I have a Pixel, my home uses Nest, I use their cloud storage personally, their AI, etc. FWIW it is a better experi…
> The decision was either to avoid them entirely or resign and buy into the ecosystem. An easy choice that you somehow managed to get wrong?
Criticality without reasoning ...
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still do this all the time from my desktop PC with Chrome. As far as I'm aware you can cast any tab, or even your whole desktop.
ahhh... when i try to Cast from my desktop to my Roku, i see the Roku as a destination, but only "Available for specific video sites". i think it must be that the _Roku_ is restricted as a Cast[ing] destination. my Chromecast HD is in a drawer so i can't test it right now. so using a real Chromecast, it still is possible to Cast any tab at all? damn, i should get that Chromecast back out! thank you for the correction…
Yes, it is still 100% possible with the real Chromecast. My TV also has an option to cast to it (not sure what it uses under the hood) but it is similarly restricted.
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll echo what other people are saying, that you should just not connect the smart tv to your wifi, but I am nervous about smart TVs that ship with cell chips to connect to the manufacturer's servers when people don't hook the device up to wifi. I'm not sure how to determine which models do or don't ship with cell chips.
That's not a thing. Do you seriously believe OEMs would ship a 4G/5G modem and bundle an unlimited data plan with low margin consumer electronics, just to earn a few dollars per year from ads?
And man, oh man, wouldn’t we all just love a device with a free cell modem and a data plan ripe for the hacking?
IOW, if it has been done, hackaday, et al., would have already shown us how to bypass the weak obfuscation and get free data. Or at least an article on “my new Samsung TV has a cell modem that they don’t advertise. ‘da fuq?”
Re: Moments in Chromecast's history
#460I wonder how they'll fuck it up.
I have one and I've never used the 'cast' feature. I only run the apps for the streaming services i watch plus VLC.
Somehow I think this will be impossible in the new and improved version...