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Comment by pthatcherg | Hacker News Reader

It's probably because of CPU power. Encoding high resolution video take a lot of CPU power, and the Pixel has more CPU power than other Chromebooks.

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Close. It's hardware encode acceleration. The Ivy Bridge CPU in the Pixel has it, the earlier Chromebooks don't (I don't know if that's true universally; I didn't check).

That is the point of the question. If it requires CPU usage, how does it save battery.

It only requires CPU usage when it's streaming the contents of your screen. For Youtube/Netflix, all it does is tell the key the url of the stream and everything is done either on the key or the server.

I don't believe that's correct -- from what I can tell, when it's streaming webpages, it is actually only synchronizing two copies of Chrome -- one on the stick, one on your PC. It is not encoding/transmitting a video, as with AirPlay or Miracast.

From what do you discern that? Given that everything they showed about the the product was variations of it receiving and decoding a video stream, it would be quite a switch for it to also have a full platform running a web browser in synchronicity. It seems much more likely that it is a direct video send, making it enormously simpler to design.

> The receiver device runs a scaled-down Chrome browser with a receiver application that receives data over Internet Protocol and transmits it to the television via HDMI.

https://developers.google.com/cast/

Very cool, though incredibly surprising (a browser is an intensive, complex thing, so will people have to constantly be patching their Chromestick?), especially given that once you add the cost of synchronizing all interactions, it seems so much easier to simply video grab the tab.

If anyone has this device, what is CPU usage on the source like when tab-casting?

Just to reply to myself, it seems that they do send encoded video- http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1j27ro/an_indepth_l...

And now people have published the extension of that, which is that you can cast whole screens and arbitrary content just as video streams - http://www.droid-life.com/2013/07/26/tip-chromecast-can-cast...

I was only guessing about the chrome tab mirroring feature. Are the other features limited to the Pixel?

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