4 ms·

well, they no longer produce the "display-only" Chromecast in favor of their "Google TV" sticks with Remote etc. Not that much of a shock here, the market move

well, they no longer produce the "display-only" Chromecast in favor of their "Google TV" sticks with Remote etc. Not that much of a shock here, the market moved on from simple wireless display dongles. Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use. Would be great to be able to run your own custom Receiver-device without needing a Google certificate...

davidmurdoch 2y ago
The market didn't move on, the manufacturers found a better way to put ads in front of eyeballs.
- jerlam 2y ago
  The "Chromecast with Google TV" main upgrade for my use case (watching YouTube) was to introduce longer ads. For that reason I've lost faith in this product line and this rebranding (and price increase) guarantees I won't be getting one of these.
scarmig 2y ago
> Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use. Matter Cast in theory exists, though afaik Amazon's the only big power really pushing it.
pydry 2y ago
miracast is a decent standard. i'm not sure why we'd need chromecast's proprietary equivalent as well. the fact that google dropped it from stock android kind of says it all - they clearly think that chromecast isn't good enough to compete without being coddled.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Miracast is for streaming a video feed from a device. This is horrible for battery life, AV sync and cannot deal with things like HDR content and remote input. Cast and Airplay makes the device itself fetch and play content, with local control and importantly much better display and video manage. (AirPlay and Cast both support screen sharing, but that is not the main use case.)
  - pydry 2y ago
    The practical upshot is the same. Whether I get my TV to play a youtube video or play it on my phone and cast, it still plays, at least with wifi 6 (earlier versions were flaky). I also DGAF about battery life. If im watching TV, I have power nearby and im not moving anywhere. Id be charging my phone anyway.
    - arghwhat 2y ago
      The practical upshot is not the same in any way or form. Miracast is complete garbage for video content. With one solution, you get good quality playback (including anti-judder from your TV), correct color handling (e.g., 10-bit, HDR, Dolby Vision, whatever), HDMI CEC volume control from the “source” device, and remote control support on the TV. With the other, you get recompressed content at random source resolution with improper frame pacing (TV cannot so anti-judder of a re-compressed 3:2 pulldown source), poor AV sync, a color space likely crushed to 8-bit with incorrect gamma, no integration and a device that is throwing its battery out the window - even if you don’t feel like you need your battery, Miracast still has no redeeming qualities for this usecase. Miracast is great for presentations and other scenarios that strictly need screen mirroring though.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  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 - they clearly think that chromecast isn't good enough to compete without being coddled. Google had a basic implementation in AOSP to kickstart things, but when being deployed to the market it turned out to be too cumbersome and complicated: 1. Each vendor had to certify his device for Miracast implementation with the Wi-Fi Alliance. 2. The Miracast receiver (sink) was buggy in many TV-sets and often didn't even work well with devices from the same vendor (i.e. Samsung Galaxy with Samsung TV) 3. Mobile Chipset vendors (Qualcomm, Mediatek) started to provide their own Miracast implementations to make more efficient use of their HW-architecture 4. Power-consumption of Miracast was too high (the device has to encode it's display content into a H.264 stream) In the end Google saw the potential to deliver a good experience with a cheap dongle and took matters in their own hands. Miracast on AOSP was not maintained further because it was anyway not used by any major device-vendor (Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola)
  - pydry 2y ago
    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 is beauty in having a dead simple way of mirroring whats on my phone that will play any kind of video.
    - rickdeckard 2y ago
      > 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.
lxgr 2y ago
> the market moved on from simple wireless display dongles. Has it? Then it must have left me behind somewhere. My Chromecast does 4K, Dolby Vision, runs Android TV, has a usable remote. What needs to change? There's no newer A/V standard available anyway! I literally couldn't think of anything else I'd want it to do. (Google could, of course, and it's somehow "AI", even though that probably just runs in the cloud anyway?)
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  > My Chromecast does 4K, Dolby Vision, runs Android TV, has a usable remote That's what Google calls "Google TV" now, a product which still exists. During the transition they called the dongles "Chromecast with Google TV". Now the "Chromecast" part of it is discontinued and its all "Google TV".
  - lxgr 2y ago
    It still seems to be called that: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv So that's not going away? I really can't tell from TFA. The entire thing seems like a hot mess – the link I was hoping would explain why I'd want AI in my Chromecast successor is dead/404 as well in the "Google TV streamer" announcement (https://blog.google/products/google-nest/google-tv-streamer/ https://blog.google/products/google-nest/google-tv-streamer/).
    - rickdeckard 2y ago
      > It still seems to be called that: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv From what I understand, this is the product they mean with "we're ending production of Chromecast, which will now only be available while supplies last." They kept using the "Chromecast" brand just for dongles, and are now discontinuing all dongles in favor of a single new product. My guess is that they reached a point where it's more economic to merge the GoogleTV reference design (ADT-3, ADT-4) with their Dongle-line and create a single box which serves both purposes...
- 2y ago
solarkraft 2y ago
Fun fact: There was a guy who managed to extract the keys out of one of the earlier Chromecasts. He eventually stopped working on (or at least posting on XDA about) it because he was hired by Google. There isn’t really any decent open casting protocol with adoption. DLNA (UPnP) is pretty well implemented in proprietary devices (besides uncontrollable latency up to 10s on Samsung TVs), but there are neither decent free receiver implementations nor many control options (other than that the concept isn’t bad). Google Cast is smart (with its „we‘ll just give you a whole browser“ concept) and AirPlay works excellently well. Both are proprietary (guess I’m lucky to have both a Macbook and a Samsung TV).
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  Yeah, I was following that activity, but as it's key-based Google simply revoked the keys and devices would no longer stream to it. There used to be a solution to extract the key from your own Chromecast to simply use it for your own purposes. But then they evolved the protocol to Cast_v2 which IIRC had more hardened security, so it's just a matter of time until they stopped supporting v1 and simply lock out all devices. It's a pity, because it would be great to push content to custom receivers in your house (i.e. send a YouTube link to a Squeezebox server)
- mijoharas 2y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41171297
  - kevincox 2y ago
    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 display. 2. Send a URL to display. 3. Devices can send messages (with some way to tell them appart for security reasons, probably require and explicit opt-in to receive messages from non-initiator devi This is similar to the current protocol except step 2 is to send an app ID registered and approved by Google rather than an arbitrary URL. (Or some pre-made apps for things like playing a video from a URL or screen mirroring) RIP Mozilla Matchstick
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
> Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use. Open Screen Protocol exists and is very similar. It works and you can use it today (via the one and only reference implementation in the Chromium source tree)! It's even pretty good & makes sense! This was kind of part of the bargain for adding Presentation API to the web back in 2014/2015. Your site can itself trigger Chromecast! If that's true, then it seemed clear there should be a standardized way to talk to devices too, otherwise this wasn't really much of a standard. The same front-side/back-side happened with Web Push API for web sites which lead to the creation of a Web Push Protocol backend for actually sending push messages to the browser. It's not perfect but so far the web has somewhat stayed honest with APIs for the page having implementable backend protocols too. Presentation API sample (which oddly cant find my Chromecasts?): https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/presentation-api/ https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/presentation-api/ I really really wish there was some hardware support for this! I've been meaning to set it up locally & start using it some. Writing a native client seems not too absurdly hard.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > Open Screen Protocol exists and is very similar. Like any client-server protocol, it's useless if the devices and apps you use don't support it. Exactly zero of the apps I use to cast to my Chromecast supports Open Screen Protocol. And this isn't a case where I can just switch to a new client app. Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Jellyfin, etc. would have to all support it.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    It's still in draft (but seemingly has stabilized a lot in the past 2 years). And there's such a a chicken & egg between software & devices neither supporting OpenScreenProtocol. I get your skepticism but what do you want? The same could be said about any other option than Chromecast: it doesn't exist on devices or software. The really good news is that At least for many many apps, the effort to port to OpenScreemCast should be reasonably minimal. Chromecast for much of it's life has - under the covers - been web o ly, and rejiggering for the mild differences between Cast and OSP shouldn't be that wild. Where-as Matter Cast requires native apps on the target device, and the app has to be pre installed to work.

davidmurdoch 2y ago

The market didn't move on, the manufacturers found a better way to put ads in front of eyeballs.

jerlam 2y ago
The "Chromecast with Google TV" main upgrade for my use case (watching YouTube) was to introduce longer ads. For that reason I've lost faith in this product line and this rebranding (and price increase) guarantees I won't be getting one of these.

scarmig 2y ago

> Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use. Matter Cast in theory exists, though afaik Amazon's the only big power really pushing it.

pydry 2y ago

miracast is a decent standard. i'm not sure why we'd need chromecast's proprietary equivalent as well. the fact that google dropped it from stock android kind of says it all - they clearly think that chromecast isn't good enough to compete without being coddled.

arghwhat 2y ago
Miracast is for streaming a video feed from a device. This is horrible for battery life, AV sync and cannot deal with things like HDR content and remote input. Cast and Airplay makes the device itself fetch and play content, with local control and importantly much better display and video manage. (AirPlay and Cast both support screen sharing, but that is not the main use case.)
- pydry 2y ago
  The practical upshot is the same. Whether I get my TV to play a youtube video or play it on my phone and cast, it still plays, at least with wifi 6 (earlier versions were flaky). I also DGAF about battery life. If im watching TV, I have power nearby and im not moving anywhere. Id be charging my phone anyway.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    The practical upshot is not the same in any way or form. Miracast is complete garbage for video content. With one solution, you get good quality playback (including anti-judder from your TV), correct color handling (e.g., 10-bit, HDR, Dolby Vision, whatever), HDMI CEC volume control from the “source” device, and remote control support on the TV. With the other, you get recompressed content at random source resolution with improper frame pacing (TV cannot so anti-judder of a re-compressed 3:2 pulldown source), poor AV sync, a color space likely crushed to 8-bit with incorrect gamma, no integration and a device that is throwing its battery out the window - even if you don’t feel like you need your battery, Miracast still has no redeeming qualities for this usecase. Miracast is great for presentations and other scenarios that strictly need screen mirroring though.
rickdeckard 2y ago
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 - they clearly think that chromecast isn't good enough to compete without being coddled. Google had a basic implementation in AOSP to kickstart things, but when being deployed to the market it turned out to be too cumbersome and complicated: 1. Each vendor had to certify his device for Miracast implementation with the Wi-Fi Alliance. 2. The Miracast receiver (sink) was buggy in many TV-sets and often didn't even work well with devices from the same vendor (i.e. Samsung Galaxy with Samsung TV) 3. Mobile Chipset vendors (Qualcomm, Mediatek) started to provide their own Miracast implementations to make more efficient use of their HW-architecture 4. Power-consumption of Miracast was too high (the device has to encode it's display content into a H.264 stream) In the end Google saw the potential to deliver a good experience with a cheap dongle and took matters in their own hands. Miracast on AOSP was not maintained further because it was anyway not used by any major device-vendor (Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola)
- pydry 2y ago
  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 is beauty in having a dead simple way of mirroring whats on my phone that will play any kind of video.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    > 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.

lxgr 2y ago

> the market moved on from simple wireless display dongles. Has it? Then it must have left me behind somewhere. My Chromecast does 4K, Dolby Vision, runs Android TV, has a usable remote. What needs to change? There's no newer A/V standard available anyway! I literally couldn't think of anything else I'd want it to do. (Google could, of course, and it's somehow "AI", even though that probably just runs in the cloud anyway?)

rickdeckard 2y ago
> My Chromecast does 4K, Dolby Vision, runs Android TV, has a usable remote That's what Google calls "Google TV" now, a product which still exists. During the transition they called the dongles "Chromecast with Google TV". Now the "Chromecast" part of it is discontinued and its all "Google TV".
- lxgr 2y ago
  It still seems to be called that: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv So that's not going away? I really can't tell from TFA. The entire thing seems like a hot mess – the link I was hoping would explain why I'd want AI in my Chromecast successor is dead/404 as well in the "Google TV streamer" announcement (https://blog.google/products/google-nest/google-tv-streamer/ https://blog.google/products/google-nest/google-tv-streamer/).
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    > It still seems to be called that: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv From what I understand, this is the product they mean with "we're ending production of Chromecast, which will now only be available while supplies last." They kept using the "Chromecast" brand just for dongles, and are now discontinuing all dongles in favor of a single new product. My guess is that they reached a point where it's more economic to merge the GoogleTV reference design (ADT-3, ADT-4) with their Dongle-line and create a single box which serves both purposes...
2y ago

solarkraft 2y ago

Fun fact: There was a guy who managed to extract the keys out of one of the earlier Chromecasts. He eventually stopped working on (or at least posting on XDA about) it because he was hired by Google. There isn’t really any decent open casting protocol with adoption. DLNA (UPnP) is pretty well implemented in proprietary devices (besides uncontrollable latency up to 10s on Samsung TVs), but there are neither decent free receiver implementations nor many control options (other than that the concept isn’t bad). Google Cast is smart (with its „we‘ll just give you a whole browser“ concept) and AirPlay works excellently well. Both are proprietary (guess I’m lucky to have both a Macbook and a Samsung TV).

rickdeckard 2y ago
Yeah, I was following that activity, but as it's key-based Google simply revoked the keys and devices would no longer stream to it. There used to be a solution to extract the key from your own Chromecast to simply use it for your own purposes. But then they evolved the protocol to Cast_v2 which IIRC had more hardened security, so it's just a matter of time until they stopped supporting v1 and simply lock out all devices. It's a pity, because it would be great to push content to custom receivers in your house (i.e. send a YouTube link to a Squeezebox server)
mijoharas 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41171297
- kevincox 2y ago
  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 display. 2. Send a URL to display. 3. Devices can send messages (with some way to tell them appart for security reasons, probably require and explicit opt-in to receive messages from non-initiator devi This is similar to the current protocol except step 2 is to send an app ID registered and approved by Google rather than an arbitrary URL. (Or some pre-made apps for things like playing a video from a URL or screen mirroring) RIP Mozilla Matchstick

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

> Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use. Open Screen Protocol exists and is very similar. It works and you can use it today (via the one and only reference implementation in the Chromium source tree)! It's even pretty good & makes sense! This was kind of part of the bargain for adding Presentation API to the web back in 2014/2015. Your site can itself trigger Chromecast! If that's true, then it seemed clear there should be a standardized way to talk to devices too, otherwise this wasn't really much of a standard. The same front-side/back-side happened with Web Push API for web sites which lead to the creation of a Web Push Protocol backend for actually sending push messages to the browser. It's not perfect but so far the web has somewhat stayed honest with APIs for the page having implementable backend protocols too. Presentation API sample (which oddly cant find my Chromecasts?): https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/presentation-api/ https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/presentation-api/ I really really wish there was some hardware support for this! I've been meaning to set it up locally & start using it some. Writing a native client seems not too absurdly hard.

kelnos 2y ago
> Open Screen Protocol exists and is very similar. Like any client-server protocol, it's useless if the devices and apps you use don't support it. Exactly zero of the apps I use to cast to my Chromecast supports Open Screen Protocol. And this isn't a case where I can just switch to a new client app. Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Jellyfin, etc. would have to all support it.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  It's still in draft (but seemingly has stabilized a lot in the past 2 years). And there's such a a chicken & egg between software & devices neither supporting OpenScreenProtocol. I get your skepticism but what do you want? The same could be said about any other option than Chromecast: it doesn't exist on devices or software. The really good news is that At least for many many apps, the effort to port to OpenScreemCast should be reasonably minimal. Chromecast for much of it's life has - under the covers - been web o ly, and rejiggering for the mild differences between Cast and OSP shouldn't be that wild. Where-as Matter Cast requires native apps on the target device, and the app has to be pre installed to work.