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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

My 2yo smashed my Oh So Smart TV with the remote and I got a spare dumb TV and plugged in Chromecast into it since everything is streams nowadays.

Dear God how annoying it is to use. Buggy, laggy, drops randomly ... still can't play videos from my computer in an easy way.

I forgot how bad Chromecast were since I last used it 5 years ago.

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When the original came out ir was practically magic to be able to have the TV on while hanging out with roommates or friends, and all be able to contribute to the entertainment for the night right from your phone...then it didn't improve in any meaningful way, and regressed in others over the following 8+ years.

Really sad with the state of things.

When he broke my TV I was in the store looking for a new one. I had one condition -- there had to be a sane way to write with the remote. None of the TVs had any sane way but used arrows and enter or some cursor marker for the on screen keyboard.

Dunno why none used a T9 type of letter entering system. All remotes but one had number pads. It is really inconvenient to use "Smart" TVs.

So I went with the spare for a while.

Get a Bluetooth keyboard.

I used to maintain the Chromecast app of a decently sized streaming company for years, and oh boy. I damn near lost my sanity working on that thing. The app was broken repeatedly by silent firmware/OS updates pushed from Google, and trying to regression test updates across devices and versions was as close to hell as I've ever been.

On top of that, if you have a Pixel, the only thing it can cast to out of the box is Chromecast. Miracast (which e.g. Roku supports) - nope. Hell, they don't even do video-out over USB-C.

And I remember that it was different back in early Nexus days - they had Miracast, but deliberately ripped it out.

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