Introducing Google Cast for audio | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Google Cast for audio

chrome.blogspot.com

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> Google Cast Ready speakers come with Cast technology built-in, so you don’t have to buy any additional equipment.

Except for, you know, the entirely new speaker(s).

I love this idea, but I want a simple, small dongle, like the chromecast, that outputs audio only rather than HDMI. I already have a speaker/amp in my living room that has a mini-stereo in. I simply want a way to connect a chromecast to it.

I use this HDMI audio extractor to turn a Chromecast into what you describe: http://www.amazon.com/J-Tech-Digital-Premium-Extractor-Conve...

That is pretty slick. I've had a Squeezebox for years, but it's not too helpful for Youtube benders. For now, I've just got audio out from the TV to the stereo which works fine for casting. The audio's not hi-def but usually the quality of the source audio is the bottleneck in my experience, not the RCA audio connection.

Here's a slightly cheaper way to do the same thing: http://liliputing.com/2014/02/10-adapter-turns-chromecast-in...

I can confirm that that little device no longer works. The old models worked without the VGA portion needing to be plugged in, however the new models shipping from China don't work unless the VGA unit is plugged into something, which basically defeats the purpose.

I am now using this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DMZOUVK/ref=oh_aui_detai... which is working great.

When I first got my Chromecast, I was beyond frustrated that the music always cut out (even though watching videos was fine). One day, I was determined to get to the bottom of it, and realized that my roommate's Yamaha RX-V571 will reset the HDMI connection every two seconds if it can't handshake the video. He has an HDMI->VGA adaptor and a VGA projector plugged into the same receiver. So, whenever I want to listen to music in our living room, I have to turn his projector on for two seconds. It's beyond stupid, but at least it works.

That's odd, my slightly older Yamaha (RX-V367) works fine with the chromecast as an HDMI device with no tv hooked up. Wonder why the newer model doesn't like it.

can't reply deeper... this is for the Yamaha comment next to this: disable auto resolution. it usually fixes this.

> can't reply deeper

What's that all about, then?

When people start replying to each other too quickly, HN makes you take a bit of cooling off time.

I solved that issue via a dummy VGA plug, like this: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?200444-DV...! In fact, I simply plugged the three resistors straight into the pins of VGA port on the HDMI converter. Works like a charm. :)

I am doing the same thing without the HDMI audio extractor. The Chromecast is plugged directly into an HDMI port on the receiver. It works fine. Maybe whether the extractor is necessary depends on the receiver.

Same here. TV on, I get video, TV off and it's audio only.

Do you have to connect the HDMI out to anything for that to work?

No, no need to connect HDMI out to anything. I just connect the optical out to my receiver.

Thank you, that is very helpful.

this thing works great, I do the same thing. I wonder if these integrated speaker devices will support playing content that is not audo-only... like youtube videos. it's great to be able to get music from youtube videos. I hope they don't limit the stuff you can cast to audio-only with these new google-cast for audio devices.

Maybe Chromecast v2 could have that, alongside HDMI 2.0? That, plus 802.11ac and 2x2 antennas would make it absolutely perfect. (And probably more expensive than $35, but possibly worth it)

Sounds exactly like what the Nexus Q was supposed to be (with updated specs).

That already exists. It's known as the Nexus Player, which is "Google Cast Ready", has HDMI 2.0, and 802.11ac 2x2.

http://www.google.com/nexus/player/

Good point, although I'd prefer to pay less to not have Android TV (I don't think the TV platforms make any sense compared to "Casting" content from mobile devices).

I do this with a raspberry pi. I set up an AirPlay service on it, and added a tiny USB wifi dongle and put it in a nice white casing. Works great and cheaper than airport express that will do what you need also.

http://www.raywenderlich.com/44918/raspberry-pi-airplay-tuto...

Airplay doesn't do much good for my Android phone, unfortunately :/

There's numerous solutions for that. But I think if you want to stream the native audio output of your device you need to root it. Some options here: http://gizmodo.com/how-to-stream-anything-from-android-to-ai...

But the HDMI splitter is probably your best bet :)

The problem is that the quality of the audio out of the raspberry pi is terrible. I wonder if these HDMI audio extractors I see in the comments are any better. I have a raspberry pi connected to a projector that doesn't have audio out and I can't decide between a sound card for the pi (think wolfson), or a HDMI audio extractor in order to improve the quality.

Supposedly the audio out on the B+ and A+ is dramatically better. I haven't bought one of the new ones to make my own judgement yet though.

You can use a USB audio dongle though.

HiFiBerry is a very good option

Last time I tried this, the sound output was awful from the Pi itself and glitchy when using a USB DAC. Any problems with the audio in your experience?

I'm no audiophile. I'm happy streaming 320kbs spotify with my premium account to a $50 pair of logitech computer speakers. No complaints of audio quality from me. Nobody has ever said anything either.

Are you using a + model?

It looks like the problem that gave me crackles when using the audio output jack may have been fixed with a firmware update. Thanks, you gave me reason to check and I might be able to put my Pi back into service!

https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/128#issuecomment...

I use a bluetooth adapter connected to my receiver's inputs. My use case is pretty simple though: send audio from my phone (Spotify or audio book) to the receiver.

The Moto Stream works fine for me with Android and iPhone:

http://www.motorola.com/us/accessories-headphones-speakers/M...

Whether it will work seamlessly may depend on the receiver, but I have a Chromecast plugged into an HDMI port on my Yamaha unit. (Note, there is nothing plugged into the HDMI out port on the receiver.) This setup works flawlessly for streaming audio throughout my house. Some people say they had to use an HDMI audio extractor to achieve this, but that was not necessary in my case.

Yeah, similar setup here - I've plugged mine into the first HDMI port on my Onkyo receiver (http://amzn.com/B0077V88V8), and everything works fine. Audio through the reciever, no TV on - plus I get the automatic input switching thing that Chromecast does (seems to just go to the first HDMI port on the receiver, not the actual one it was plugged into). Pretty nice.

I think you just described ROCKI! - http://www.myrocki.com/

They had a successful Kickstarter in 2013 (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rocki/rocki-wifi-music-...) and went through Techstars Boston in Fall 2014.

I wonder if they'll just make this as simple as a Chromecast being a "Google Cast Ready" speaker - aka, a stream output for audio.

You could try to build it yourself https://jeena.net/rp-airplay-radio

Any Bluetooth audio adapter will do, and it will do for iOS devices, too. Unless you want a longer tether than Bluetooth allows there is no advantage to "casting."

Perhaps if one could cast to multiple Chomecasts...

That would be disturbing if you could hear more than one at a time, there will be variance in delay...

I suppose that depends on how it's done. Sonos manages to network multiple speakers and coordinate playback.

$4 BT audio dongles like this one

http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-5mm-USB-Bluetooth-Wireless-Stereo-...

will work fine, only problem is double compression of audio - it sounds like crap

I don't want to cast from the cloud. Just make the device able to receive any media from my LAN!!

it's nice that the dongle can stream from the web, but it's way more useful to make the device aware of upnp/dlna devices over my local network.

Because of this I've moved to raspberry which

  - exposes itself over the network as a upnp device
  - plays remote media in the main TV
  - acts as a nas, it can stream to kids' room
  - downloads media via torrents (that I can remotely control)

Plus it's a fully Linux environment that I can fine tune as desired

> I don't want to cast from the cloud.

It certainly helps battery life for your mobile device to step aside as soon as playback has started. When casting video it doesn't matter even if I turn the device off.

Its possible to have things on your LAN other than mobile devices.

To be clear, you can cast from desktops, laptops, or anything that can run Chrome.

And you can stream from a local device. See plex.

You know, UPnP has media renderers, servers and control software as three separate matters. This is already a solved problem.

And, well, I had controlled mpd running on my desktop machine (that has the speakers connected) and streaming from my NAS from my N900, like, 5 years ago. Replace desktop with something like rPI and the tech is here.

Can a UPnP renderer pull audio from a cloud service requiring login and authentication? Genuine question.

Some cloud services get around this by accepting a single-use auth token in the URL for the media file/stream.

Yep. I can really imagine explaining THAT to my dad!

Why would you need to explain it?

That's nice. This lets normal people do it.

UPnP and DLNA are a disaster of incompatibility and terrible usability. I've tried to use various UPnP/DLNA audio streaming hardware for almost 10 years and they have all had terrible issues. Most required the device controlling streaming to always be on, which is terrible for battery life and plain broken on tablets, etc. that go to sleep. Some only worked with Windows 7 media player's 'play to' command. I had to go through crazy setups like running multiple different UPnP services (bubble UPnP) just to make virtual UPnP devices that fixed bugs in my real UPnP devices, and even then things would mysteriously stop working.

Stay very, very far away from UPnP/DLNA. It's borderline false advertising IMHO to claim it streams music.

if you're using android, i suggest you try bubbleupnp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.... It doesn't seem to have the problems you describe, and it's also very happy to send stuff to a chromecast instead of a DLNA renderer. I could see how it's possible that your renderer is the cause of the problems, and that can be harder to replace since it's probably embedded in your TV (I've only used chromecast and samsung TVs).

I've actually had little to no trouble with DLNA overall, using among other things the ReadyDLNA server for a sparc readynas and rygel on ubuntu. i suppose it only takes one bad implementation among the components in your setup to ruin the whole experience, but i've been pleasantly surprised over the years how well it seems to work.

bubble doesn't have the best UI, but it's not bad, and there are other apps that are prettier (allcast comes to mind). in the past i would have totally agreed that most upnp controllers i had used had TERRIBLE usability, but most of those were embedded in A/V equipment (TVs, receivers), and what A/V equipment have you ever used with a good UI?

>Plus it's a fully Linux environment that I can fine tune as desired

You are not the Chromecast's target audience.

I'm so glad someone else is aware of this fact. Every time I see someone blatantly not the target market I think back to that dude that shot down Dropbox because he could do everything they were planning on his Linux box.

Dude should have been asking for a ground floor share holding job rather than shooting it down if he was able to so easily do it

If you're using Android, you can just mount your shared directories with samba and can cast through a player to chromecast. I also have a htpc and its a much better solution overall.

It's not casting from 'the cloud', but from a server. And that server can be any device on your local network. Thats how it can receive any media on your LAN.

Plex is pretty awesome for casting content on your own network if you haven't looked at that.

I have my own Plex server with a couple Chromecasts hooked up throughout my apartment (two televisions and one connected to an HDMI port on my stereo for audio-only). It works fantastically well, allowing me to switch where things play-back as I move from room to room. And, like you said, it's linux, so I can do what needs to be done in regards to automating / organizing my media collection.

Chromecast accepts URLs to LAN resources. All you need to do is expose your files over HTTP (I do this with my NAS and it works fine).

What app do you use to do this?

I just use Chrome to browse my directory listing and use AllCast as the handler when I tap on one of the links. There are others as well.

Well, there's Plex, but that's slightly different... I've been thinking of taking some of the work from mediacenterjs, and the chromecast stuff for node.js and coming up with a media center that outputs to a chromecast device, and controls via a phone/tablet.

Eh, the lack of gigabit ethernet makes it a pretty poor NAS.

Don't get me wrong, I like the RPi, but you can spend $25 more and get a much better NAS board.

Have you heard of Subsonic? The web client supports casting, and so does the amazing paid firm of the Android client, Dsub.

Note the lack of spotify support. It's turning into a bit of a showdown between players like google cast and spotify connect.

There will definitely be a small market in building devices which can serve as bridges between the standards.

It's disappointing that we are in the situation where we have several competing protocols for streaming audio - Google Cast, AirPlay, Spotify Connect, UPnP/DLNA.

As a society we are capable of making software and hardware that interoperate among manufacturers - email and HTTP are good examples. We could be a far more technologically advanced world if capitalism didn't encourage companies to create competing closed-source protocols that only benefit the companies themselves, to the detriment of everyone else.

This is how I feel every time there is an announcement like this.

To be fair, the existing UPnP/DLNA standard really wasn't good enough. For example, AirPlay just added wifi direct connections between devices which is a requirement for good streaming video.

On balance I believe it's a net positive to have some competing standards for a while as we figure out what works best. I do hope we can arrive at some interoperable standards, or we can at least mitigate the spread via low cost adapter devices.

Yes but if everyone agreed on a standard I could see us all complaining that "we could be far more technologically advanced world if we didn't force everyone to use the same standard and there was more room for innovation and competition".

Spotify still works through AirPlay though.

I'm not sore what Spotify gets out of this - why bother pushing your own protocol, why not just make your music work as many places as possible?

They're probably looking to nurture some vendor lock-in

Very nice. I'm right now sitting in front of a schematics of a nice modern modular stereo hi-fi amplifier that I'm building. I made sure to leave plenty of internal interconnects for BTO radio modules, so that I could accomodate for Bluetooth, DAB, UPnP rendering, TI CC8520 or whatever wireless standard would be coming my way later down the line.

Seems that I can now plan to add a Google Cast radio module that can be integrated into the device. I don't even have to change my design it seems, I don't even have to put all my money on this horse, and I can still do without this gadget at first and get the basic device to market as quickly as possible.

Neat.

This sounds really neat--any information on your product you can share?

Will do! I'm finishing up the design right now, and I plan to go DIY first anyways in order to get some quick feedback, circumvent expensive EMI certification, and to sell some units before having to go into case manufacturing. As soon as the prototype shows it's working at the quality level I hope it will, we'll start marketing it, and I'll make sure to drop you a note right then!

This is really cool! I've looked far and wide for got a good stereo amplifier that is customizable, but such things don't seem to exist! Please let us know more!

Probably want the RF transmitting components outside the shielded amplifier chassis...

There usually are antenna output pins even on some of the cheapest Bluetooth modules, and I plan to go for an all metal case anyways. You've certainly got a point though ;-)

Is there any indication they're going to sell Cast radio compatible chips to end users? I seriously doubt you could get one without signing NDAs, etc.

Don't care about NDAs as much. At least not as much as about cut tape availability at the usual distributors. I'm fine as long as I can buy 100 chips at mouser instead of buying an obscure reel in shenzen (as might be the case for hdmi transceivers btw). They mentioned a couple chip manufacturers in the announcement, so I'm hoping they will follow through with that, or at the least, make modules available.

The same has been going on for digital radio recently. Only silabs have decent chips at 10€ per piece in single quantities, the rest is all large modules and obsolete chips that are all "not recommended for new designs".

Same for Bluetooth. CSR is quite hard to reach, chips are NDAed, and chip programmers and documentation is hard to get by unless you go the aliexpress route. Then suddenly the modules are easier to place on my PCB than the chip, amazingly cheap, and even the programmers are available as knockoffs for 50 dollars instead of 800.

It sometimes feels unprofessional to seemingly tack random Chinese Lego blocks onto each other, but apparently that's how the industry runs. I've even stopped mocking huge Javascript libraries recently, in sheer appreciation of this realisation ;-)

"Google Cast is designed to give you more freedom while listening to music."

I sense some irony in this statement.

It almost makes AirPlay open by comparison. At least that lets you stream your local music collection rather than restricting you to approved cloud music services.

Google Play Music supports this. Upload your audio files; stream from anywhere. No subscription needed.

emphasis here being on local music collection.

I don't want to have to upload a huge library of music just to stream it to my local network, where I already have the music on my hard drive.

There are other apps that allow you to stream your local music if that's what you want to do (AllCast, BubbleUPnP, etc).

But I've always wondered about this argument - Why wouldn't you put your local music library on Google music? It's free and means you've got access to your library everywhere. I could understand before they had matching that uploading 100+GB of music is probably not desirable, but it now even big libraries are fully uploaded in a day or so.

If you expose your local media over HTTP (doesn't even need to be world-accessible), a Chromecast on the same network can play it.

I've had good experiences with Plex for local media. And anything you can put in a Chrome tab you can cast to the device.

> At least that lets you stream your local music collection

What makes you assume that Google Cast wouldn't? You can stream your local video collection to a Chromecast.

In fact, how is it restricted at all? If it works like a Chromecast does, the SDK is open and anyone can write receiver apps to run on it. How much more open do you need it to be?

Not natively though, you have to use Plex or play the video in Chrome.

Wow, it seems like this will take a while to come out and I didn't see any word on pricing.

A good alternative to this is a Beep. Beep sells devices that plug into any speakers audio jack to let you stream music from your phone. What's better is that it also syncs up multiple units so you can have your music in sync across your house.

We've used them in our office a few times and love them. https://www.thisisbeep.com

I don't think it's been officially announced yet, but at least one of the reports on the new Google Cast stuff, and a dev who claims to work on one of the partner apps commenting on reddit, suggest that the audio cast stuff will synced audio across multiple devices.

This would be a killer feature if true.

I love my Chromecasts. I have two of them in our house, and we don't have a television subscription, we just use a mixture of Plex, Netflix, and streams for sports. We're saving a bunch of money every year now, and it works great.

But damn, the lack of a desktop sdk/api for chromecast is just infuriating. I get it, Google believes in Mobile and Web only, but you'd think if they're shooting for market domination, they wouldn't ignore an entire market segment in terms of developer options.

Pretty off-topic, but what sports streams do you use? I'd love to ditch cable, but can't seem to find good replacements for sports.

Been using the links posted here for NFL: http://www.reddit.com/r/nflstreams

There are sidebar links for other sports too.

This is why I'm hoping for the Matchstick project to work out. Some apps that work with ChromeCast already just work with Matchstick. They recently posted about trying to get supported for DRM requiring apps like NetFlix. There should be more news this week from CES.

Of course, for my to consider this a success, I want to see the software running on more than just their HDMI dongle. People have already compiled it to run on some Chinese dongles with the same CPU, but I'd like to see it also run on some more open platforms like Freescale iMX.6, Allwinner A20, and most especially X86.

Will we finally get gapless playback in the Chromecast's native music player? I've tried to use my Chromecast for music, but the gaps between tracks are just complete deal breakers for many albums. I had just assumed audio was not a priority for google.

Chromecast is just a web browser - so I imagine that's due to the client (which each service has their own, I think). Not sure what exactly they're doing for audio casting, but I imagine it's dependent on the service to implement properly

It's a deal breaker for me, yes. It took years to persuade Spotify to fix this problem.

The sdk offers gapless playback but the OS still can't actually do it. Poweramp is one of the few apps that can do gapless, but it uses ffmpg instead of native.

I created an iOS App that allows you to stream audio directly from one device to another. It works great if you have an old iPod touch available. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-stream-free/id91402690...

I don't like the way Google Cast always needs to connect to a service before playing any media. This could be a little bit annoying with audio. Its okay for me to wait a couple seconds to connect for watching a movie. But let's say you wanna switch from Google Music to Spotify, it's always gonna take some time.

And have you tried to use it without internet access? It completely refuse to work.

My ISP had some problem that let 200 families without service for a week. Although I have my local network fully working, the dongle refused to boot

You are aware that the chromecast is really nothing more then a web browser in a stick? It has no storage for any thing other then the firmware to run the device.

A local network is more than capable of serving up the chromecast app. It's a restriction they've added to the device that it won't load it from a local network.

I think "restriction" is a poor choice: it's more like an architectural decision - that is exactly how they designed it.

I could equally say your computer is more than capable of running a self-hosted version of GMail, but "it's a restriction [Google] added" for them to run it on their servers.

I run a Plex media server on my laptop, which is already serving up content to my local network over http. It would be very simple for them to host their Chromecast app on the same local server and for the cast button to send that URL.

The Chromecast checks the URLs against a whitelist. Presumably as a security measure, which is a perfectly valid reason, but it's still a "restriction".

To allow people to run a self-hosted GMail, huge changes would need to be made to the code. To allow me to serve my own Chromecast apps, it would need to remove a whitelist check.

Totally unrelated but I have to know this! Somebody posted an article many months back that talked about DIY audio system that gives run for money to Bose, Beats and likes. It was open source design by an anon electrical engineer. Anyone knows what was it?

I use an Airport Express as an AirPlay receiver, which is connected to a line input on my Sonos setup. Nice thing is that Sonos can switch to that input automatically when it senses a signal.

I've also used Shairport[0] on a Raspberry Pi as an AirPlay receiver - it worked great, I just wanted to keep tinkering with the Pi so I switched to the Airport Express, which I already owned.

[0]: https://github.com/hendrikw82/shairport

Edit: I see someone else already said that, whoops. FWIW, I didn't have any major audio quality issues in the brief time the Pi was used for AirPlay.

Thing is if you have a Sonos already, then you have had music casting from Google for a while. It's not the same protocol, but the Google Play Music app has been able to "cast" to Sonos for at least some months, maybe a year or more.

> Google Cast Ready speakers pull content directly from the cloud, so you'll get the best audio quality and can freely multi-task on your phone, tablet, or laptop, all without straining the battery

Is it that much of a battery strain to connect to a radio in the house, and usually in the same room? The device that'll be doing it is designed to connect to cell towers up dozens of miles away [1], after all...

1. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower-cellphone-...

It's about letting your mobile device sleep rather than to constantly be (semi)-awake to push audio.

Bluetooth speakers: Unbelievable but they also stream sound which is only locally on mobile phone. Why do all Googlers think that everybody in the whole world has good wifi everywhere?

BT Speakers typically use A2DP, which sounds horrid. Recompressing already compressed audio is not a path towards goodness.

That said, reading up on A2DP, it seems that A2DP supports higher quality audio streams, but I have yet to see anyone advertise such in their products.

So Google has decided to compete with Airplay. Although I guess this is better, because I'm assuming it will work with any router, and not just special ones sold by Apple.

Is that what you meant to say? AirPlay isn't restricted to special Apple routers either.

That is true, but I also believe there are some lower level "nice to haves" they enable on their routers to make sure Bonjour/mDNS works properly for airplay. If not intentionally, I do know that some routers (Actiontec / FiOS comes to mind) that have particular difficulty with providing reliable Airplay connections.

I'll bite, can someone help me understand the downvotes? Actiontec routers (among others I'm sure) may not work well with Bonjour out of the box: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Airports generally don't need attention for airplay, and that probably leads a lot of people to the impression that you need an Apple router.

It's actually more like Sonos. Airplay streams from the device to the receiver. With this (and Sonos) a command is sent to the device which does the streaming on its own.

I'm not sure that's totally accurate – I think AirPlay has multiple modes of operation, including the ability to stream directly from a third device.

I don't remember the details of this off the top of my head.

Even better I bet speaker manufacturers will ship both and basically your speaker will "just work" regardless of what platform you are using.

This is the best news yet coming from the auto manufacturers and Android Auto/Apple Carplay. I personally would never choose one of the two, but the option will make both ecosystems more successful.

  >"Google Cast streams your music directly from the cloud instead of from your phone, so you won’t lose any sound quality."

Huh??? This is almost _never_ the case in my opinion, especially when using popular cloud services for music playback. Pretty sure I just had to nerf a high quality .WAV file to a .WMV 20 minutes ago before I could even upload it to google music.

.wav is not a music format. It's meant for pure sound clips and doesn't even have the capability of adding metadata like artist and song name. If you care about sound quality then just use FLAC.

The streaming quality from Google Music is top notch, it just seems that you had a problem getting the music into the service due to an antiquated format.

The problem is with this part of the statement: "Google Cast Ready speakers pull content directly from the cloud, so you’ll get the best audio quality" Pulling content from the cloud doesn't not mean you'll get "the best" audio quality.

Streaming over the internet will yield better quality than a Bluetooth stream which compresses the music. The bits that hit the speaker are as high quality as the source material.

Right, that would then be "better than bluetooth", not "the best technology". In particular, the network induces latency and buffering problems.

FLAC get's compressed to 320 by google music anyways

You converted an LPCM Audio file to a Windows Media Video file to upload to Google Music?

Surprised no one mentioned Mopidy[0] in the thread. From their github:

Mopidy is an extensible music server that plays music from local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Play Music, and more. You edit the playlist from any phone, tablet, or computer using a range of MPD and web clients.

[0]:https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy

Ive been doing google cast audio. It's called, Chromecast+hdmi analog audio extractor=free youtube music to home audio system. :)

I own a Chromecast and like all about it except it's ability to play oyur own content. I understand why they forbid it, but for the same reasons I'm using it much mroe rarely than I would otherwise. Additionally this could have easily been an addition to the original Chromecast via a simple extractor.

Plex works well with Chromecast to play your own media.

There are actually many apps that allow you to play local content now. It was pretty bad for a while before they released the SDK though.

The two I use are Videostream for Google Chrome, and BubbleUPnP for Android.

Have you seen which permissions those kind of apps require?

I don't want to allow these apps to read my history, share my contacts, or expose the current running apps just to cast some media ..

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videostrea...

Which permissions do you take issue with? I don't see anything like what you claim.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.findsdk.ap...

I won't even run the Facebook or LinkedIn apps without locking them down first. Frankly, it's somewhat negligent that this isn't built into the Play Store installation UI.

create a disposable @gmail account

There are lots of apps that cast your local content, AllCast for one.

Check out the Chrome extension Videostream for Google Chromecast, link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...

https://github.com/xat/castnow let's you play local files from the command line

Here is a list of all music apps supported: https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chrome/devices/chromecast/...

I wish Spotify would integrate..

No Spotify? Wow. I don't even recognize half the music services it supports. As someone else said on this thread, I am happy with 320kbps music streaming on Spotify + it's remote control features + the recent hardware support for Spotify Connect.

Might be nicer than wrestling with my Vizio soundbar to connect via Bluetooth. Takes multiple attempts to make it connect to any of my devices (laptop, phone, or tablet), then sound drops and gets flaky frequently when I stream music.

Is it just me or has anyone else been waiting for multi-room audio, I don't understand why I can't 'cast' to two locations at once?

Seems like they'd take the Sonos market pretty easily if/when implemented

As a recent Sonos convert, I really think that they are going to be hard to catch in terms of nailing so many aspects of the user experience. Not least of which is how good the hardware (esp the Play:1 speakers) sound and look. I Have to admit how surprised I was to learn that the same company that made those janky wall controller systems a decade ago is now the second largest speaker company in the world.

My only issue is the price, the only thing it gives over any other implementation is the multi room aspect, as soon as a company like Google bakes it in to their already established platform I don't see them selling many units

I was going to by one out of excitement, but then I realised it is only available this spring. I might not buy it anymore, since the hype I had at this exact moment will be gone...

Any support for multi-room audio? (or multiple remote speakers?) Sonos seem to be the only ones with a handle on this, and even then it's not particularly low latency...

If you use SonosNet rather than your standard wifi network, it has much better latency.

iTunes does that with AirPorts

And their minisite: http://www.google.com/castaudio/

Why is there not a dongle for this. This should have been the first step and part of the announcement.

Is the protocol documented somewhere? Would be great to see a software implementation of that.

It'd be nice if I could turn my old Squeezebox Boom into a client for this thing.

So, when will Chrome Cast finally support Bluetooth audio? That's what I want.

well, i guess that means miracast is done for.

Miracast is such a POS, I am saddened by exactly how horrible it is.

I have a Miracast setup with over a second latency for video. When it works at all.

Darn, I just bought a bunch of Sonos gear...

A full 10 years after AirTunes. Yay.

http://www.google.com/castaudio/ gives a 404...

I just checked and it's working fine for me.

yes, now it works for me too.

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