Hacker News Reader

It's a bit clunky, but the only real solution is just "a computer" with an old Logitech K400 keyboard + mouse combo. You won't be "casting," (although I suppose you still could) rather you'll just be using the keyboard directly. This is low tech but also sort of "bomb proof." A company can't sweep the rug out from under you, your setup will always work, and given that it's literally just a computer running whatever OS you want, you can perform nearly any task with this device. You might complain "but my embedded [company] product does X." Yes, but that product will be dead in two years, and they'll keep making the UI worse, and injecting more ads. Your computer will just keep working, and changing only as much as you let it change.

The pro move is getting a K830, a far superior keyboard/trackpad combo with backlighting. Unfortunately, also with a very weak microUSB charging port. Logitech perfected, then discontinued the best HTPC keyboard ever.

2nd this.

Bought 2 of them since I "lost" the first one (then later found it), and now that it's been discontinued, one of my best backup purchases ever.

Daily driver for my 85" gaming TV/media center. Tried other couch keyboards, but always ended up coming back to this one.

My K400 is a decade old and running strong. I don't think I have ever needed backlit keys for general Media Centre use.

We just have old macs connected via HDMI to big flat panel TVs, and remote keyboard/trackpads. That's it. It's 'clunky' but has not failed in 10 years.

If you want to plug your laptop on the TV and control it from your sofa, take a look at KDE Connect. It works amazing

I bought a huge and nice new Samsung TV last year and tried to pair it with a NUC running Win11, and the TV insisted on doing some weird "detecting your device, you should use our remote to control this device" bullshit with it every single time I switched inputs, such that it would miss the HDMI handshake and one side of the connection would give up and result in "no signal", and then I'd have to sleep and wake the NUC to get it to work.

I switched to iPhone, in part, because Chromecast's casting protocol was so unstable. It just... stopped working consistently. AirPlay seems to still work rather well, but it was substantially more expensive and doesn't really work with non-Apple devices (though the remote mostly alleviates this).

Idk, I think the real issue was it was probably "too complicated" for the average consumer. The type of person who is sitting at a TV probably wants something with a remote that behaves independent of their phone, not relies entirely on it for it to work. I love Chromecasts, but I can see why they're going away even if it makes me sad.

> I switched to iPhone, in part, because Chromecast's casting protocol was so unstable. It just... stopped working consistently.

I had a similar problem with some (Android phone) apps. Casting a movie, and after half an hour or so the app would lose its connection to the Chromecast. Which meant you couldn't control (e.g. seek backward/forward) the movie anymore without restarting it (the movie). This didn't happen with some other apps though, e.g. the Google TV app. Apparently it is easy to not properly implement the Chromecast connection. Perhaps the connection gets terminated when the phone goes to idle mode, unless you do something to prevent that.

Yeah, that was a common issue with me. I had significantly worse issues though, my chromecast would hard lock and/or have very strange visual glitches that required a reboot to fix, typically about 10-20 minutes into playing something. That's if I even got to that point because half the time it would just refuse to actually play anything without a reboot 95% of the time I went to use it.

I actually just bought a current gen Chromecast because I was looking for a "plug it in so I can watch YouTube on my TV" device similar to the Gen1 and was also dismayed at being forced to register/log in with a Google account and go through all of the hoops. I wish I had done more research and had I known that current Chromecasts are basically just a thin proxy of the exact same "Google TV OS" that ships on a lot of current smart TVs I would have paid the premium to buy a Nvidia Shield or something

I recently bought two TVs, one for my sister and one for my father. My sister's has Roku built in and my father's has GoogleTV built in. Meanwhile my sister dug out an old game console and wanted to see if we could get it to work. Upon unboxing and attempting to use the new TVs, I found absolutely no way to access an HDMI port without going through the process of creating and logging into an account on each. My next TV will be a dumb TV.

Current-year Vizios have no problem using ARC or whatever it is, and the smart/network stuff is completely disabled. It just works with whatever HDMI is sending it.

The smart stupidity is why I didn't cry at all when the kids broke the Samsung piece of shit. Vizio has my vote, at least for now.

I recently picked up a dumb tv from an estate sale - 46" LED for $60. Cheaper, and for my use it's better.

> I found absolutely no way to access an HDMI port without going through the process of creating and logging into an account on each.

This is crazy and infuriating. I would have returned both TVs to the store if this happened to me. Was this advertised on the box? This feels like it shouldn't be legal because you're being forced into a legal agreement after purchasing the product.

I’m pleasantly surprised by Apple Airplay. I can cast anything from my iPhone or iPad to my TV, they just need to be on the same WiFi.

The original Chromecast was really good at just letting you cast anything to a TV.

Sign-in required?

With Airplay? I do not think I have ever been prompted to. The TV is a Roku so technically I am signed in there and I have an AppleID but the iPad is my wife’s and the Roku account isn’t the same email as either of those accounts.

Can't have nice things indeed.

An alt: Apple AirPlay works super well even with Android tvs nowadays.

Isn't AirPlay only good for screen casting as opposed to casting videos directly? My conclusion was that it's not feasible to use AirPlay to cast a video at the full frame rate and sound synced.

AirPlay can do both. There's a "screen mirroring" button in Control Center that streams your phone screen to the TV, but if you tap the AirPlay button on a video player or in the audio device selector, the TV will stream the video directly from the server at native resolution and FPS, without going through your phone (you can turn your phone off and playback will continue).

Depends on if the video source itself supports Airplay or not. Most don't.

AirPlay or more accurately "screen mirroring" does cast sound and more often than not recognizes the video content and casts it full screen (from most iOS media apps such as youtube at least). It doesn't always work on my samsung TV without an Apple TV device though, in about 10% of cases it'll just fail to connect to the TV altogether

You can cast video e.g. from the QuickTime app or a <video> tag in the browser too which won’t just mirror your screen. In fact the cast video won’t even show on your device’s screen but only on the receiver in that case.

I use an app called Airflow on my Mac to stream local video files to Apple TV. It's $20, but lifetime license and it's been working fine through the years.

I've had 2 Chromecasts of various vintage and an Nvidia Shield, and I've consistently run into stupid bugs and obvious failure modes the entire time. It's like it was a beta product rushed into production, then forgotten about when the project lost its executive champion.

But this is standard fare for Google these days. It's just not an organization that's structured to create AND sustain customer products. I no longer buy or invest in any customer-focused Google tech, and I try to avoid it on the Biz side where I can.

My experience was the opposite: my gen1 Chromecast's unreliable streaming is what made me get a Raspberry pi 3 :) IIRC the problem likely was the lack of support for 5Ghz WiFi combined with crowded channels in my area.

Would you mind expanding? How do you use it? Even a DIY link would be great!

You mean how do I use it for streaming? That changed over the years and I haven't been using it for streaming the last months due to circumstances. But if you are looking for suggestions, then I would point you to DietPi as OS and Kodi as media center. You can configure it to dierctly boot into Kodi, and if you use NewPipe as YouTube client on your smartphone, you also get a convenient option to play videos on Kodi. Plus you can stream any file you have on your PC or smartphone. To stream from Linux I used idok, but there could be others.

The second. Thank you so much.

Still use my gen 1, the best 20$ spend in my life. I just have a annoying bug with youtube video that google won't fix.

Why would they give you a 25$ device to stream video to your TV when they can sell you a shitty subscription to a shitty service for that amount every month, plus whatever they earn from plastering the whole thing with ads?

My first Chromecast was the current one, and I honestly don't get what the issue with it (except VLC streaming) and the wall wart which is kinda expected given the SoC power. I've logged in Google acc and every app acc exactly once a year ago and since then it just works autonomously. And I have all modern streaming, my local streaming from ISP and youtube in one place on any outdated TV which are present in all rentals here. That was the point of it, right? To add smart tv functionality to the old tv.

You did a great job summing up every Google product’s evolution over time.

Maybe it is time to start a OpenCast project!

Fingers crossed Google doesn't deliberately kill support for these old devices in Android. For a very long time, I've used my gen 1 to watch local OTA sports broadcasts on my hotel room TV when I'm overseas. I accidentally bent the HDMI jack pretty badly one time, but it still works.

I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap. It's a shame there aren't any good open source setups using stock computers like Raspberry Pi that can act as a good Chromecast replacement (or if there are, I missed on it; I tried Kodi but while it is pretty cool it isn't really great for streaming services like YouTube in my opinion.) but on the other hand, it's not the end of the world.

Many modern TVs, if you can find one that isn't complete dogshit (good fucking luck), can do Miricast without connecting to the Internet or requiring an account. That's nice since it fills one role of Chromecast: the ability to easily cast your desktop.

But I'd like a full open source ecosystem implementing casting. Right now using Chromecast protocols from Firefox is a crapshoot and I just haven't bothered, but I don't think there's any reason why we can't just make our own. YouTube may be somewhat hostile, but at a certain point it's hard to stop a cast tool that just execs an official Google Chrome binary, you know? So there's always something that could be done.

That said, I keep a list of instructions for un-shittifying the Google Chromecast TV devices for myself, since I do have a few of them. Note that you already need to log in for this to really work, but I already do that, since I want to be logged into YouTube, for the time being (for Premium and age-restricted videos and subscriptions and etc.)

I'll just copy and paste them here:

    ## Replacing the Terrible Launcher
    Google took a dump all over the TV launcher with ads. Here is a workaround:
    1. Enable *Developer Mode* by tapping the TV OS Build Number in Settings -> About 7 times.
    2. Enable USB debugging.
    3. Prepare a device with `adb`. On NixOS, `nix shell nixpkgs#android-tools`.
    4. Find the IP in About -> Status and use it to do `adb connect [IP]`.
    5. Install an alternative launcher like ATV Launcher Pro.
    6. Disable the default launcher entirely. `adb shell "pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx && pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith"`
    ### Button Mapper
    Google also made their version of Android extra hostile to the launcher being replaced, so when you disable the launcher the Home and YouTube buttons will stop working. This can be fixed using a third party app called _Button Mapper_ available on Play Store.
    1. Install _Button Mapper_ from Play Store.
    2. Enable the Button Mapper Accessibility Service in Settings.
    3. Add the Buttons
    4. Map YouTube to open the YouTube app
    5. Map Netflix to open the Jellyfin app
    The app will warn about not working if the device sleeps, but this doesn't apply as these devices don't seem to "sleep" the way that Android phones and tablets do.

If your auth becomes stale you need to re-enable those app IDs and log back in. This will manifest as things simply not working, e.g. videos not playing. However, it only happened to me a couple of times. I think it requires session tokens to completely expire, which takes a while of inactivity.

> I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap.

I used to do that, with a Linux HTPC and Plex. I eventually switched to the physical AppleTV device, with all the content on a surplus Mac mini connected to the home network. It's just less work to maintain. On the old setup, it always worked perfectly whenever I was around and had plenty of time to tinker with things. It only ever had problems when I was at the office, very busy, and the kids wanted to watch some show I had digitized from our DVD collection. Granted, the problems were always small and easily fixed, but they were disruptive because of the circumstance.

I've never had that happen to me with the Apple setup. Yeah, you've got to at least partially buy into their ecosystem. But they don't force you to go all in if you don't want to.

I'm currently using Jellyfin to manage my media. With very few exceptions, it's been as turnkey as it gets. Anything with a web browser is good enough to use it, making nearly any kind of setup sufficient. Almost any OS can just browse the web very well. I run it with Docker on Synology DSM. Early on in Jellyfin's life, some Jellyfin server updates required manual intervention, but for a long time now, I just update periodically (every few months) and haven't run into a problem.

With that in mind, if I wanted a Linux HTPC setup for minimal tinkering, for the purposes of accessing YouTube and Jellyfin, I'd probably go with an immutable system; I like the look of Bazzite for this. Then, I'd probably disable automatic updates, and manually update things periodically when I have time. If it breaks, you can always roll it back, but manual updates will take the minimal potential disruptions to probably just zero. You could run this on a cheap mini/NUC PC. For TVs that are not mounted to the wall, you could probably even mount it to the back using a VESA mount adapter.

That said, I don't currently have plans to replace all of my Chromecast setups, so I haven't actually done this. That's because they've been working very well for years and there's really no reason to mess with something that works. They were cheap, they run Android apps, and I've cut out all of the unwanted advertising.