3 ms·
The sender and receiver SDKs have mature APIs for playing video. The session and media channels/objects are well documented and leveraging them on your custom r
by potench 11y ago
The sender and receiver SDKs have mature APIs for playing video. The session and media channels/objects are well documented and leveraging them on your custom receiver ensures far easier integration on the senders (iOS, android, and web). If you venture out of the cast-a-single-video experience, it can get pretty complicated as there are best practices for how to handle multiple senders, how to fetch a playlist and continue autonomously if the sender disconnects without stopping the cast, and maintaining a good user experience on all senders that represents current state of receiver. You could (and would be advised to) handle all this via the provided "media" channel.
More to the point of the article, there is also a custom messaging channel, you can create your own interactive experience (the receiver is just a website displayed in a chrome tab). Here's an example of tic-tac-toe: https://github.com/googlecast/Cast-TicTacToe-chrome https://github.com/googlecast/Cast-TicTacToe-chrome.
You can already develop a custom receiver for an in-store search feature or something more interactive and playful.
You can connect to it via the same wifi.
I don't understand what additional value nfc provides in this case as you'd still need to maintain an open/persistent connection to the receiver from the sender, would nfc be able to provide that?
- endergen 11y agoThe problem is Chromecast requires the phone to have a Chromecast SDK using app on it anyway. Additionally you couldn't communicate without having a wifi connection, at least without proxying over the internet which is slow. The closest thing to this would be to have the NFC auto open a webpage that is already paired to the app on the screen so that you can then use the custom web page's UI to send control messages to the TV via internet relaying.
- acgourley 11y agoWhat if the chromecast was allowed to transfer wifi network details (either for a secure or unsecure) network over NFC for the phone to temporarily connect to? That's a cool feature even if you don't plan to use the chromecast.
- evook 11y agoI'd throw away my chromecasts immediately. It's hard enough to maintain filter rules to not let this little guy phone home too much.
- endergen 11y agoPs. I've thought about these experiences a lot as I built a company on it pre-chromecast era: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/brass-monkey-acquires-emotely-to-help-turn-your-smartphone-into-remote-controls/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/brass-monkey-acquires-emote... See early prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4
- evook 11y agoActually, the SDK is pretty easy to use. I wanted to directly fetch the streams of a major movie site and without visiting their site at all. Implementing a session rejoin when the casted device switched (E.g. android, windows or linux) was done in about 5 Minutes, in overall it just took about 1 hour to completely write a webapp from scratch for a video site who's user experience otherwise would not allow me to endure searching for videos and requiring to jump through a bunch of hoops to cast an HR movie directly. An experienced programmer should be able to do this even faster, since I am a sales guy. Don't let the bunch of documentation overflow you, most of it is trivia.