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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

With screen mirroring, Apple TV offers the ability to play any game in the App Store on a TV wirelessly without having to buy a controller. That game library will likely always be larger than this one. Granted, you must have an iPhone or iPad, but I am surprised that Apple does not tout this feature more. I use it daily and it is pretty awesome.

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The lag is terrible with mirroring. Apple TV won't be viable for gaming until the game is played on the box itself and there is a low-latency controller.

Similarly, I've never understood the purpose of ChromeCast. The lag makes it completely unusable for video (I'm getting ~1 frame / 3 seconds), making it a glorified radio with cellphone/laptop remotes.

Odd, I've streamed Netflix to Chromecast and my laptop video to Chromecast just fine. It may be your wifi connection.

I believe there is something more nuanced going on with Chromecast "casting" performance.

Netflix is fast obviously because you are just telling the chromecast to stream netflix itself, not "casting" it to chromecast. Same goes with youtube.

However "casting" performance for me is even worse than the described .3fps on my Chromebook Pixel that isn't running ChromeOS. And my LAN is fast enough to use mplayer over ssh/x-forwarding... Trying chrome tab casting in Debian on a Chromebook Pixel burns the Pixel up, with it being very obvious that the Pixel is the bottleneck.

Trying to video encode the "cast" tab without using hardware support maybe? I'm not sure, I haven't really investigated it further.

I find the critique confusing, too, because I streamed a 1080p movie to my Chromecast by dragging it into Chrome and then casting from Chrome itself.

No problems. It played fine.

Is Chrome actually decoding the file then reencoding it / pushing raw video frames, or is it just streaming the file to the Chromecast? I suspect the later.

Maybe I'll try that myself later.

Tried it myself. Chrome plays the video fine itself. Trying to cast that tab to Chromecast has the CPU usage on the casting computer spike way up. This is not a network bandwidth issue.

Incidentally I've just discovered that my Roku can have local videos streamed to it from my S3. It works flawlessly.

That is odd. On mine on a poor connection it works like youtube -- it pauses for buffering. But it plays smoothly when it's not paused for buffering...

You need to upgrade your router. I was using a cheapo D-Link router when I first got my ChromeCast and the connection was awful. Range to laptops and devices was terrible and the connection always dropped. I bought an ASUS router for $150 and life is incredibly easier. I can stream HD content from 40-50ft away across 3 bedrooms without any issues.

I'm confused: are you talking about wifi range (presumably fixable by using a WAP that's better than the one built into your router) or the bandwidth of the router itself? Only asking because ISTM a decent WAP is much cheaper than $150...

It's not necessarily bandwidth or range. Some of it can just be the quality of the router implementation. I remember having lots of trouble with a Chromecast (discovery issues, losing connections and other issues) and I couldn't figure out what was going on, especially since I had a brand-spanking new high-power access point.

But I wasn't using my new access point as a router. For unrelated reasons, I replaced the 10+ year-old router with something newer and the Chromecast started working flawlessly even though I hadn't changed anything on the wireless side.

OK so it's not the WAP, but I still think we could differentiate between an ethernet switch upgrade (for local problems i.e. with content streamed from one device to another) and a router upgrade (for upstream problems: NAT issues maybe?). Routers have switch functionality built-in, but since you were using a really old one you might have tried sticking a cheap switch between the router and your local network before upgrading. Anyway, I think the blanket "You need to upgrade your router." advice is unwarranted.

I have never, ever had video lag with my chromecast. It works flawlessly every time I use it. Netflix and HBO Go from a Moto X.

I just bought a chromecast now it's finally out in the UK. Streaming local video from my dlna server over wifi has been a total pleasure and works perfectly. Iplayer, youtube, any other html5 video I throw at it just works. What are you trying to do with it that gets that kind of lag? The only thing I've found which reduces framerate at all is the experimental fullscreen casting.

This is something I can't get my head round. I have a NAS which I sometimes stream stuff from my xbox 360 from. With chromecast do I need any other device for that to work. Or does it go NAS > Phone/Laptop > Chromecast. Or NAS > Chromecast.

I think people confuse the ChromeCast tab/screen mirroring (which is slow and laggy) and ChromeCast DIAL/casting from apps like Netflix which actually just sends a URL to the Chromecast to stream

But even with the latter there is lag for pausing/playing.

Yeah, ChromeCast is a great product and a major marketing failure. Hardly anybody (even techies!!) understands that it is about competing with Apple TV (and now Amazon Fire TV) in the streaming market, not sending arbitrary stuff from the browser to your TV. Honestly, they should have launched without any of the confusing and crappy tab-casting functionality at all and probably called it something different than ChromeCast. The thing has (ridiculously cheaply) solved my entire internet-television-entertainment problem but I've literally never once used it for a browser tab.

as a techie that doesn't know how to use ChromeCast the way it should be used (as you've mentioned) would you mind enlightening me? How, exactly do you use it if not with the tab-casting?

Use any of the following apps, and use the button supplied in those apps to instruct your ChromeCast to play the given media directly.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast/app...

I don't understand why Google are so bad at advertising and marketing. Probably the only reason Chrome itself took off was that they put a big ad for it on the Google homepage. Maybe they should now switch that ad and advertise something else?

Okay, that's great. But I don't use Netflix at all. I'd like to watch something from VLC, but apparently the plug in that enabled that was killed. Google's so simple its stupid makes it impossible for me to find out how the thing actually works and why I can't try to configure it to work any better.

It's awesome for YouTube and you can stream any local media using Plex.

+1 for Plex - works perfectly from the browser/iPhone/iPad/Android phones and tablets. Great Chromecast integration.

AllCast (one of the more notable apps that supports streaming from local apps like VLC) got its Chromecast support back once the official SDK (finally) came out:

http://phandroid.com/2014/02/04/allcast-chromecast-update/

Per other commenter, you are doing something wrong. My friend has had one since it was released. Works really well.

Have you tried the 'Videostream' app for the Chrome browser? Works flawlessly for me for playing local videos (although only mp4 right now). They also have an Android app so you can use your phone/tablet as a remote control.

I haven't really had a problem with it.

To the people saying they haven't had a problem with it: Have you ever tried to play an action game via mirroring on Apple TV? The lag is short enough that it might be acceptable for turn based games, but playing, e.g. Real Racing (which I have) is a terrible experience.

This is an AirPlay issue, right? For example, when I go to pause a song that is being AirPlayed to my Airport Express, there is a noticable delay before the song stops playing.

It works fine for me, and if I remember correctly the people having a problem with lag had their ATV connected via RJ-45 and switching to wifi fixed it.

That sounds completely backwards to me. You should get significantly lower latency over a LAN connection than WiFi.

Sounded strange to me too, here is the discussion

https://discussions.apple.com/message/24987047#24987047

They might be using the wireless network for a handshake and then bypassing the router entirely with a private network shared by the 2 devices.

Really? Mine is on wifi and lags. My guess is it's like 150 - 250 ms but it's enough to make any game impossible to play (except maybe Threes)

Yes, this. It is really stretching it to say that you can effectively "game" on your TV when airshare'ing from your iPad /iPhone to your Apple TV. It sucks.

Not only the lag, but if you're looking at your TV screen, you can't effectively use the iPhone/iPad screen as a controller, unless it's super simple.

If AppleTV let me watch Amazon Prime video it would be perfect. I use Amazon Prime and Hulu+ for TV, and right now the only device I have that lets me watch both is my PS3, and its UI sucks (plus it's constantly requiring me to download updates).

Amazon added this about six months ago, but it requires another iOS device:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/amazons-instant-video-app-a...

Interesting that Amazon now has a pretty good motivation to remove this feature.

Why? Amazon wants to make money on the blades (content), not the razor.

Except they are now selling a razor that "works best" with their own blades.

Don't get confused: Amazon will always sell you both razors and blades. They're not in the business of winning one specific category: they want to win everything.

That's why you can use the Kindle app on your iOS, or Android, or web browser. Or Amazon Prime on PS3/4, Xbox One/360, Roku, iOS.

They don't have to kill the iPad; they just have to win every book reader.

Except Amazon Prime still doesn't work on Android, other than the Fire. Kindle is truly cross platform, but Prime streaming video is not.

Why? That's like saying that Amazon has a motivation to remove the Kindle app from iPhones and iPads so that you'll be forced to buy their Kindle. Amazon actually doesn't care if you buy their hardware or not, they only care about selling you content.

Constantly?

http://us.playstation.com/support/systemupdates/ps3/history/

Compared to any other device I use, PS3 updates are unusually intrusive. Almost nothing seems to be done automatically, so I'll end up with 5 minutes of downloading update apps and system updates before I can do what I intended to do when I sat down. Oh, and the updates are often "required", meaning you're prevented from even running your out of date app. I'm hopeful that they fixed most of these issues for the PS4 (hard to believe there was no App Store or Play Store when the PS3 came out).

> PS3 updates are unusually intrusive

I totally agree with that statement, I just was taken aback by the word "constantly."

Agreed - the worst are the ones that just tell you to update but don't provide a button to take you to the update option.

They're using it as an incentive to purchase PS+ - so I don't think this will be fixed with PS4. I find it distasteful being forced to pay to prevent being blocked by updates when all I want to do is watch a video.

http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/setti...

I've had a Roku for more than a year and it offers both Amazon Prime video and Hulu+. (And Netflix and many other apps.)

Have you noticed how Amazon Prime now has the rubbishest films on it for the "included with Prime" section but the films you'd expect to be included are now "buy!" or "rent!"

I have started to discover that a killer feature of the Apple TV is the ability to use the iTunes Music Store. It very often has movies (even obscure ones) that don't exist on Netflix or Amazon free or paid. For any given movie, the chances of me finding it on Apple seem to be best of all services.

Fire TV screen mirrors from Kindle Fire HDX tablets (smaller, lighter, cheaper than iPad). Not sure about other Android tablets (at least until XDA geeks get ahold of one).

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