New Chromecast 2015

I didn't know that either. That is definitely interesting. That definitely can overcome the lack of 5Ghz. But that plus the original chromecast is now more than the new one. I only have a Roku so they only thing I am interested in is the chrome tab casting.

Spotify support for Chromecast was announced today. http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9409673/google-chromecast-...

Yeah, Spotify is the reason I use my Apple TV much more than the Chromecast.. There's no AppleTV app for it either, but at least you can do the Airplay from any Apple device and it will play from my good speakers and show the album art on the screen.

Spotify announced support for Chromecast (and Chromecast Audio) a few days ago[0]

[0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/spotify-might-best-new-thing-ne...

But does the Ethernet adapter work with the new Chromecast? I'm also unhappy that Chromecast doesn't use USB-C yet.

So, am I wrong, or does the Steam Link do all of this and more? http://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/0/535152511... you can add any program, including spotify and google chrome to your steam library, and thus stream it to your TV.

"This product is unavailable in your country."

:(

Can it power the device from PoE (Power over Ethernet) link?

I can't find PoE to micro-usb cable anywhere else but this comes close.

For me what's missing is Amazon instant video. I understand why it doesn't have it, but it's a real bummer. Would also be nice if I could watch NBC sports, but I think I might be able to and just haven't figured it out yet.

Google releases new device. Top comment: "but the proprietary x doesn't work with the proprietary y." Proprietary software is the trap.

Try Spoticast.

I wish they'd release that adaptor for Oz.

As far as I can tell, that's the only difference. I just bought mine yesterday knowing there was a new one on the way, I don't think I'm missing much.

Even if this is all that's new, if this improves streaming of large files I'll be happy with the upgrade.

Yes the "what's new" section is the first thing I looked for! Does anyone know if this new version supports HEVC/H.265 video? I would upgrade my existing Chromecast if more codecs were supported but I didn't see any information in the articles I read. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is not as important to me because the 2.4 GHz band is not very crowded in my neighborhood.

Agreed.

Because the stick is easy to break, and this has a replaceable cable.

Two likely reasons. First, the previous form factor didn't fit in all TVs, so they had to include a tiny HDMI extender cable; this form factor has built-in tolerance for tight fits. Second, the new form factor allows more room for hardware bits and heat dissipation.

Probably the fact that you couldn't plug it into a lot of TVs without using an HDMI extender cable (due to how ports are laid out). That's why the HDMI connector is now on a flexible cable.

I just installed a couple old CCs at the office, and the old rigid form factor can sometimes be tricky to plug into some TVs, due to the mounting brackets sitting right on top of the video connectors. Bad design from the TV makers? Yes, but the flexible dongle would never have this issue.

I believe the flexible part also includes a longer antenna for the dual band receiver and as others have stated the poor fit with some tvs.

source: google roommate beta testing in our living room

Did anyone else notice that the audio only version is styled to resemble an LP?

Never underestimate the illusion of choice.

The bragged about how it's smaller and easier to hide. Who gives a crap what color it is. They shouldn't have focused on the looks at all but made sure it had the lowest possible profile.

They want you to take it with you when you are visiting friends (who don't have streaming devices). Its a nice idea and I have done it in the past.

Why not change your laptop's MAC address to that of the chromecast, authenticate on the laptop and then plug in chromecast?

Most hotel WiFi networks enforce device isolation too, so I don't think you can 'see' the chromecast even if you could authenticate it. The workaround is to create your own hotspot, bridging the hotel's WiFi to your own 'travel router,' using a laptop.

At that point, it's probably easier just to watch Netflix on the laptop... :-/

Some hotels I stayed at went as far as disabling HDMI ports on their TVs, which is extremely annoying.

The only thing I've seen people use it for is casting Netflix to the TV.

My family uses it daily. We mostly use it from our desktop computer but I like the app also.

Best Hardware for consuming videos for us.

My kids are 4, 9, 21, 23

Its meant for the family room or bedroom. Using it at your desk is a bit counter-intuitive considering how much better support any video player will have for a computer than a phone trying to do chromecast.

Browser casting has always been a "beta" feature from day one. The main draw was always supposed to be the specialized apps.

my wife uses it (chromecasting youtube videos)

Although we also have an Apple TV, XBox One, and a cable set top box, we use the Chromecast 95% of the time. There are apps for Dutch news (NOS) and public broadcasts (NPO). And if there is no app, we just use tab casting on a laptop.

The XBox One is primarily useful for Blu-Rays, but is pretty annoying otherwise (long startup time, regular updates that take a long time, no casting except for an experimental Miracast app, not energy efficient).

Since both my wife and I switched from iPhone to Android devices, the Apple TV became pretty useless, since it is firmly locked in Apple's ecosystem. Sometimes, we use it with an US account to purchase TV shows that are not available here yet.

Also, since we have a Chromecast, I have come to dislike the typical 'mediacenter with apps' interface of the XBox and Apple TV. A phone is far more convenient app-wise with touch, so the idea to have a dumb dongle was great.

If you rent or don't want to make holes in your wall for HDMI Chromecast is actually pretty neat way to bring Netflix, Plex, Youtube, etc. to your TV.

Of course you could buy new SmartTV that had necessary features, but so far I haven't found SmartTV that supported Plex and I don't want to buy a new TV since my old one works just fine.

Added benefit is that it can be controlled with just phone (or in my case I have dedicated my old tablet for Chromecast duty) which could theoretically save you the hassle with more remotes, but I only use my tablet for my bedroom TV, I don't even know where the original remote is, but Chromecast handles content and volume, so I just need my mobile device.

If you don't have a living room with a TV that's not near a computer then it's pretty useless, but I would guess most people don't fall in that category. I use mine every day. Watching YouTube and Netflix from my couch using my phone is super convenient. I also use it to play music while I'm cleaning the house.

I've easily gotten more value out of that little thing than any other tech gadget I've purchased in years (maybe even my whole life).

I use it to connect to my projector. I actually like the new flexible design - it saves space behind the projector.

Yes :(

http://i.imgur.com/SNMwrjd.png

Given the microUSB ports in the third and fourth images, I'd say it's likely.

Where else would it get power?

Yes, because power over HDMI is rare.

My concern is - can it still work with power provided by a regular USB socket on the TV? The specs claim it needs a 1 amp power supply, and most sockets can't do that much.

Maybe the specs overstate it.

Source?

Agreed. I just got a Sony TV with Android TV built in. I was hoping to hear some updates on this.

Nobody cares about Android TV because the worst thing that can happen when you turn on your TV is it displays "Optimizing app 15 of 189" for the next half an hour.

Very little goes through google's servers, actually. "Casting" something from your phone/tablet to the chromecast is just sending it a url (and a timestamp if you were already watching on your phone). Then it streams locally.

So, for example, you can stream from Plex and not touch Google servers at all.

As far as I know, Chromecast supports handoff very well. I've used my Chromecast for things like Netflix, but my primary use-case is Videostream for direct streaming of local files.

I haven't looked at this at all to see if there are any changes, so this is based on the previous version of Chromecast.

The only bit of information that has to go through Google is a registration check to make sure that the application that's playing the media is a registered and valid Chromecast app. After that check the receiver loads whatever URL is registered for the app that's playing and receives a payload from the casting device with whatever information is needed.

So no actual streaming is proxied through Google or anything like that. Even the request to load the player interface come directly from the receiver device (once it's verified with Google that it should load said URL). There is a "default" player app that I've never checked to see whether that's saved onto the receiver itself or if it's loaded from Google, but either way that's just a thin slice of HTML and JS, not a stream going through Google.

On Android I use an App called Localcast, it can play directly from your device or from a network attached storage, DLNA or a link to a resource on the web. It also does Cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive etc.

So it would seem like handoff to the Chromecast works really well. My TV supports Miracast and that does not work as well as the Chromecast does.

I use Plex to stream media from my computer to my TV, it works beautifully.

You stream from the content source straight to the device. Google is only involved with the content if you stream it from Google services (eg, YouTube, Play).

The Videostream plugin works beautifully. No plex-style on-demand encoding required. Just pick that 1080p mkv file or whatever and play, negligible CPU usage.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...

I stream local content from Ubuntu with stream2chromecast.py - https://github.com/Pat-Carter/stream2chromecast

802.11ac support?

Edit: See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298026

802.11ac (2.4GHz/5Ghz). Aka, fixing the biggest issue with the old one.

And also chromecast audio, which is new.

> I'm sorry, but what is new besides the form factor?

That's actually WHY I found this really interesting. A slight change to the form factor for easier connection to some TVs is all they changed. No features only this model can use. New features every day coming to both models. That means they got it right on gen 1, which is absolutely incredible.

I'd be willing to be not, unless Google invested a lot of effort in synchronizing the two streams.

When you say "that they talked about"...where were they talking? I can't find anything on the site about multi-room audio.

Chromecast is neither Miracast compatible nor does it receive power from HDMI.

I read somewhere that most HDMI ports only support up to 55 mA, which isn't enough for most devices. For comparison, a raspberry Pi will run 500-1000 mA, depending on peripherals.

It would be nice if more TV manufacturers took full advantage of the 5V pin.

New SoC, 5 GHz Wifi, BLE for easier setup from iOS, Chromecast Audio is all new, Chromecast Audio will support multi-zone.

Amazon Prime video doesn't support any TV-connected Apple or Google device. This appears to be a strategic decision Amazon has made.

I get around this by just casting my phone's screen. It works great out of the box. Just cast your phone's screen, start the Amazon Prime Video app and start your show. The phone will automatically full screen and orient correctly for the TV and all audio on the phone will silence in favor of using the TV's.

It's an amazon decision, not a google decision. I've complained to Amazon about this multiple times.

http://www.techhive.com/article/2982096/streaming-services/t... blech

Well, there goes my dollars. I'll stick with my Roku until they do.

What sucks is that the real losers in all this are the customers.

Yes, god yes I have. Chromecast used to work just fine last year, but this year it's been a disaster.

* Almost all youtube videos start playing before they're buffered, the video is paused but the audio continues playing until the video resumes and it catches up. Makes watching any 15 second video impossible. The buffering in general is really broken.

* Chromecast loves to play previous videos I watched when I start playing new ones. I frequently have to disconnect youtube from it and start a new session to get it to behave intuitively.

I pretty much have to transcode all of my media to h264/aac in order for it to play on the Chromecast from my computer -- I thought this would get better over time but it hasn't.

Large companies appear to like to use common terms as product names for some reason... e.g.: plus, alphabet, etc...

If your router can enforce local DNS server usage or allow creation of static routes, you can redirect Google DNS to your own DNS server. Most half-decent routers will allow you to make static routes.

Here's a good resource: http://help.unotelly.com/support/solutions/articles/192836-w...

I've made a few, they're extremely easy to do since it's just a basic webpage.

Wireless HDMI also costs about 10 times as much as a Chromecast, doesn't it?

Can't you streamcast to the apple tv, making the chromecast largely redundant? I'm genuinely curious; what do you get from the chromecast that you don't already have?

That would be a decently large extra expense for a feature used by only a fraction of users.

No, there's very limited network configuration available and it's hardcoded to Google's DNS. You'll need to use a static route on your router to redirect that to a different DNS server.

Apparently it's to avoid interference. The old device came with an optional extender cord for the same reason, but now you're forced to use it.

Asked and answered already here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298058

Well, hopefully you have an audio receiver. You don't really expect to run speakers just by themselves.

I think the critical mass of people who are used to running a stereo plug from their iPhone/Android to a stereo or somesuch has been reached, they don't need anything more than the image with the device and a 3.5mm plug.

Miracast turns out to be a terrible protocol in many ways. The way it uses Wifi networks is clunky, and requiring from-device streaming is fine for local content or screen mirroring, but terrible for streaming services (where you end up with Netflix streaming to your phone, then your phone transcoding and streaming to the TV via Miracast, which means two video streams on your Wifi and a lot of drain on your phone; by contrast, with Chromecast, Netflix streams from the internet to your TV with no intervening step).

Good thing you're not a conspiracy theorist and wouldn't dare suggest such a thing.

I've never had good luck with miracast.

It is supposed to have latency in the 10s of milliseconds, I have yet to see it under 100 or even 200ms. (and I am pretty sure I have seen it a lot higher!)

This is despite having a nice fast Intel chipset and what is supposed to be a well reviewed Miracast receiver.

It is a great idea, but it works so poorly.

Next up for standards failure, DLNA!

I am saddened that there are standards body tech to do what I want, and that none of them really work that well.

If I want to stream from multiple platforms to my sound system, I am best off investing in a proprietary solution from either Google or Apple. :(

You would be surprised. I've always found the interfaces for AppleTV/FireTV/Roku to be extremely clunky and not user friendly in the slightest. There's no reason not to use your phone that has interfaces that are much better designed and easier to navigate (a swipe of the finger to type some text, versus a hundred button presses to navigate an awful on-screen TV leopard). I think using remotes is pretty old-school and we're going to see them phased out pretty fast. AppleTV's interface is especially jarring, the Netflix app is borderline unusable.

And it sells and works very well with that niche. I know many non-techie people who just love their CC's for quickly transferring videos or images from their phones.

> Is this intended to compete with the AppleTV/FireTV/Roku?

No, that would be the Nexus Player.

The CC competes with other streaming sticks...like the Fire TV stick, Roku Streaming stick, etc.

no, that's what Android TV is for, with the NVidia Shield and Nexus Player. This product competes with the FireTV Stick and the Roku Streaming Stick.

Chromecast is the "light" competitor. Why give it it's own OS when "everyone" (yes I know not everyone) already has a smartphone that can just cast it's content to it?

This allows it to be cheaper and means the device itself is less prone to bugs & software glitches.

For the more advanced, you've got the Android TV Operating System - on the Nexus Player and other Android TV manufacturers, or built into some TVs.

> Is this intended to compete with the AppleTV/FireTV/Roku?

No, its intended as an incremental upgrade to the existing Chromecast.

The related product most similar to AppleTV/FireTV/Roku (in price and features -- though still less expensive) is Nexus Player.