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This is fantastic as Chromecast support was one thing keeping me from dropping Chrome entiredly. I have a real love/hate relationship with Chromecast. I love it
by fredley 8y ago
This is fantastic as Chromecast support was one thing keeping me from dropping Chrome entiredly. I have a real love/hate relationship with Chromecast. I love its minimalism and simplicity - you just pick something you want to 'cast' and off you go. Whether there's a handoff to stream directly to the TV or it's directly casting from the device is seamless (unless there are bandwidth issues with the latter). Videostream[1] works really well for video files.
However, recently it's got a lot worse. For some reason universal notifications of casting devices stopped coming up on my Pixel. That meant navigating back into the casting app, which may have lost its connection, or using the Google Home app to switch something off.
Also the fact that some content providers put annoying blocks on their apps (not just Amazon - some broadcasters in the UK prevent you from streaming live content), and all that means is you need to cast your tab/screen instead of using app-handoff (see bandwidth issues, above).
It's so close to the perfect streaming device that the ways in which it fails hurt that much more.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-google-ch/cnciopoikihiagdjbjpnocolokfelagl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...
- Kuinox 8y agoYou can use LocalCast to cast any video from your phone or internet.
- miohtama 8y agoI assume it has to re-encode the content. Can you get any decent quality this way, as my gut feeling is that you need beefy CPU/GPU to maintain the framerate?
- throwaway9d0291 8y agoPhones have hardware encoders, the same ones they use for recording video in your camera app.
- rkangel 8y agoLocalcast does not transcode. If you've got MP4 video then it works well, otherwise the chromecast can't display it. Videostream managed by the parent comment on the PC does transcode and so is much more accepting.
- Kuinox 8y agoI never seen a video in the browser not displaying on my chromecast yet. The chromecast can read a lot of encoding...
- rkangel 8y agoI would guess that the chromecast supports the same set of video formats that the video tag in Chrome does - H264, VP8 etc.. If you download a video encoded differently (e.g. DivX) and then try to play it using localcast, you can get issues.
- ComputerGuru 8y agoMP4 is a container, not a codec. You probably meant h264?
- rkangel 8y agoYes, you are being more precise where I was being vague. What I suppose I meant was that in practice, if it has a ".mp4" extension then it'll usually work, and if it doesn't then it usually won't.
- olyjohn 8y agoVLC on iOS will transcode any content that the Chromecast can't handle. It does suck down some CPU, but my iPhone 6 keeps up with it just fine. I can pick just about any file from my SMB share and stream it to the Chromcast from my phone. Still a bit buggy though.
- brlewis 8y ago>Chromecast support was one thing keeping me from dropping Chrome entirely For me it's that and the printing UX. I use a printer almost every week and often open Chrome just for that purpose.
- geocar 8y agoThat's funny. I print a lot, and I hate how Chrome does it. I use Safari (not Firefox) though. What do you like about it?
- brlewis 8y agoChrome shows me a preview of what's going to be printed and lets me fit to page or scale. Firefox gives a print dialog that doesn't even have a preview button.
- maaaats 8y agoIn Firefox, if you select "Print..." from the hamburger-menu (not Ctrl+P), you get an interface similar to the one in Chrome. Not sure why it's not the default. (Or File -> Print Preview)
- ccozan 8y agoThank you! User of FF since ever, never used that menu item, looks very very good with the preview.
- antsar 8y agoWtf! It never crossed my mind that that "Print" might be different from the "Print" in the File menu, or the "Print" triggered by "Ctrl-P". Why?!
- arwineap 8y agoI honestly think that UI was pulled from microsoft word/office. It's been about a decade since I've used microsoft products so I'm willing to be wrong, but my understanding was that the print button was a shortcut to print document now, and the file print would take you to a print dialog
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zymhan 8y agoWhat kills me about Chromecast now is that you _have_ to log in to a Google Account to manage any Chromecast devices. Previously you could manage them without signing in if you wanted to.
- romseb 8y agochrome://cast works fine for me on MacOS/Chrome 71 without being signed in to a Google account.
- jedieaston 8y agoYou need to sign in to a Google account to configure one, though. I think that's OPs hangup.
- StavrosK 8y agoI wrote a library for casting things, called catt: https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt/ https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt/ It supports youtube-dl so you can just do `catt cast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ` https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ` and it will work.
- dmix 8y agoThis looks great. I was using the awful "Videostream for Google Chromecast" chrome app which I found was pretty buggy. I'll give this a shot...
- StavrosK 8y agoI've been using it a lot and it works very well, but it's a cli app. You can get a Chrome/Firefox app that gives you a button on your browser bar and sends the URL to whatever page you want to catt, that's a good way to cast anything youtube-dl supports to a Chromecast.
- dmix 8y agoIt amazes me that Google hasn't made a similar pieces of software for viewing x video format... The fact you have to use weird 3rd party stuff just to watch a movie you downloaded is strange to me. It would instantly make Chromecast 10x more useful. But Google is focused with keeping it for streaming sites and browser pages only for some reason. If they want to keep people using the stuff that has ads on it, then you have to make sure it works for every other scenario too. Otherwise people will replace it entirely.
- GuyPostington 8y agoVideostream is great.
- mrintegrity 8y agoTry the latest version of VLC, which now supports Chromecast. Works better for me
- saghm 8y ago> For some reason universal notifications of casting devices stopped coming up on my Pixel You should be able to re-enable them; if you want to enable them just on your phone, you can go into Settings, then the "Google" category, then "cast media controls" and then toggle the setting there. If you want to enable them for the chromecast as a whole to all phones, you can go into the Home app, click on the device, click the "settings" gear on the top right, and then toggle the "Let others control your cast media" setting. (My roommate has a Chromecast, and I had to disable the notifications on my phone because I occasionally accidentally paused or unpaused what he was watching)
- bubblethink 8y ago>Also the fact that some content providers put annoying blocks on their apps It's not so much a block as the fact that adding cast support needs explicit buy-in from the content provider and whatever else that entails since it's not some open protocol. And that's generally OK. We more or less moved from flash to standard videos. We'll, hopefully, also move from all these rubbish dongles to something sensible.
- mrintegrity 8y agoThe latest version of VLC (3.# iirc) now supports Chromecast, under video > renderer menu. Works much more smoothly than Videostream in my experience
- daemin 8y agoIt's nice but it doesn't support sending subtitles to the Chromecast device.
- CobrastanJorji 8y agoWhat's universal notifications?