591–600 of 609 posts
Is there any substitute for chrome cast audio? I love being able to play in sync audio to the group of receivers I choose throughout the property, using any amplifier. I’m not even using the digital optical input and I love them
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I find that hard to believe... "Cast" is a pretty ubiquitous term and, anecdotally, Chromecast is almost always the device I find when traveling. Probably selection bias on my part, but I'd expect most people to be aware of Chromecast unless they're over the age of ~70 and fully Apple-oriented. Seems like throwing away a perfectly well known brand.
I travel quite a bit and I've never encountered one. Never even seen one at all. I've heard of Chromecast because I go on tech sites, but they're suspiciously absent in my bubble of reality. I'm an Android and Linux user too.
I ask because when I have travelled for work, it's the corporate hotels that have often baked a Chromecast into their TV experience, even to the point of sorting out their wifi network so you're only able to cast to the screen in your room. Their splash screen offers "live TV" or the option to "stream from your phone".
They often don't shout about the fact that it's a chromecast doing the work, but the telltale standby screen that shows up when you're not casting something normally confirms it.
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> We had this coming. Over the years, the various chromecasts in our house are slowly getting worse. I had the sense they are cutting costs on the software and servers powering these devices. I can't imagine they will get better. It seems smart devices always crap out after a few years. I am regretting buying my Samsung TV last Fall because it's already slowing down. It takes 5 seconds to load the options menu.
Just plug an external streaming box into it and move on. Embedded apps were always a dumb idea. Double bonus - disconnecting the TV from the 'net will stop their spying on you too.
How much of this is an "end" to Chromecast and a rebranding of Chromecast to "Google TV Streamer"? It seems like the bare-bones experience of a Chromecast being tied to a phone (or browser) is getting replaced with an Apple TV like experience. If this is the case, it might be a (rare) example of a good branding shift from Google. I have had two Chromecasts (the original and an Ultra) and I feel like both were hampere…
Newer Chromecasts ship with a remote and do not require a phone. Multiple people can be logged in too.
Makes sense. Chromecast is built into most tvs. That way they can eliminate the hardware costs and focus fully on software. The tv manufacturers will be happy to work with them as they, hopefully, will get a share of the ad revenue too. Also this is the first product they killed that I agree with.
Except that means that you'll have to hook the TV up to the internet instead of just connecting a dongle to it (which means the TV may spy on you and/or display ads), and when they inevitably stop supporting it you'd have to replace the whole TV instead of just a dongle. At least there still is a separate device you can hook up, at least for now, though it's more expensive, clunkier, and packed with a bunch of needle…
Yes, video streaming can be done easily nowadays. But finding a multi-room audio solution that works across different brands and also on offline devices was my main reason for getting into chromcast.
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miracast is open isn't it, and has reasonable adoption from smart-TVs? (I think everyone has their own slightly incompatible versions of it though.) [EDIT] I've just seen discussion on why it's not equivalent in response to this comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41171297
A nice feature of Chromecast is that the device was really just a remote control. After starting a show it would continue even if your phone caught fire. This is obviously great for battery life but also means that multiple people can control the media (works great for YouTube where multiple people can queue videos, play, pause, etc...) I would love to see something like Chromecast but open. 1. MDNS to find the displ…
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"Google TV Streamer" pretty exactly describes what this thing does. It's from Google, and it streams things to your TV. "Chromecast" was more puzzling. What's "Chrome"? Isn't that a browser? What does this have to do with anything? And what is "cast"? Does it broadcast something? Etc.
On the other hand, "Google TV Streamer" also describes Chromecasts and is immensely less memorable or distinctive. It'd be like if Apple decided to rebrand Macbook to be "Apple Laptop". Sure, it's accurate. It's also crap.
You get used to it. They also called the Apple smartwatch "Apple Watch" from the beginning, and nobody is complaining. So "Apple Laptop" or "Apple Phone" would be just as good.
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I have no idea why they think that "full summaries, reviews and season-by-season breakdowns of content" is even a feature worth mentioning. The going value of that on the current market is $0. Heck, at times it's negative, you have to go out of your way to avoid the info if you don't want it. And there is no way whatsoever that this is happening locally. A $100 device is not spontaneously ingesting video, running spe…
> A $100 device is not spontaneously ingesting video, running speech-to-text on it or advanced video analysis, and processing it all down to a summary for you. You're clearly underestimating the 2021 SoC in it. It does 20 GFLOPS!
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Would you mind expanding? How do you use it? Even a DIY link would be great!
You mean how do I use it for streaming? That changed over the years and I haven't been using it for streaming the last months due to circumstances. But if you are looking for suggestions, then I would point you to DietPi as OS and Kodi as media center. You can configure it to dierctly boot into Kodi, and if you use NewPipe as YouTube client on your smartphone, you also get a convenient option to play videos on Kodi.…