Google Chromecast Review - An Awesome $35 HDMI Dongle
by Brian Klug on July 29, 2013 9:45 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Media Player
- Android
- Mobile
- HDMI
- Chrome
- Tablets
- Chromecast
Through Chrome
It’s impossible to expect every service to port their frontend to the Cast SDK, and for some services licensing issues might make that very difficult (Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vudu), or imposible, to say nothing about those who face technical restrictions (Flash). For that, there’s the other side of Chromecast, which works similar in practice to other screen mirroring standards (WiDi, Miracast, AirPlay Mirroring), and streams the content of a tab, and its audio, directly to the receiver. The plugin adds a Cast icon to Chrome, and there’s a tiny down arrow at the far right for selecting between current tab, audio mode, and if you’re lucky full screen (I don’t know why some see the full screen option and others don’t, neither my Retina MacBook Pro nor Windows 7 desktops see this option, but I’ve seen others show it).
There are three different options in settings for video quality, and since the video is encoded in software on the host, choosing between them will affect CPU use dramatically. I’ve backed out bitrates for the three settings: 5.0 Mbps for extreme (720p high bitrate), 3.0 Mbps for High (720p), 1.7 Mbps for Standard (480p), all seem to be VP8, especially given the fact that this is essentially WebRTC in practice.
There’s latency of about a second on the connection, and of course the occasional artifact during motion and a dropped frame or two (depending on connection quality), but it works surprisingly well.
HDMI Capture of Chrome Casted Tab
For a lot of services that don’t have Cast support this is the only way to get video across, it’s essentially AirPlay Mirroring but of a tab (or full screen if the setting is visible under that drop down). I’d love to see this functionality added to Chrome for Android or iOS if that’s possible as well, though those platforms really need VP8 hardware encode to make it tenable.
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kirsch - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
The licensing implications of Tab casting are interesting to me. Hulu (or more likely Hulu's content providers) cannot be happy and may force Google to somehow disable Chromecast on their website. Or I can dream, and maybe they will realize the futility of making an artificial distinction between clients and will stop the BS.savagemike - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
Hulu et al have a bit of a problem though. Since the tab casting is mirroring it never sees the Chromecast directly and should have no way to see anything but the Chrome browser. The Chrome browser is among the most popular in the world.So Hulu and the rest have one play. They can stop their sites from being visible on one of the most popular browsers in the world. Even if they decided to make that play thinking they'd drive people off Chrome to other browsers Google (or whomever) could quite easily make a similar extension for Firefox which also plays well with WebRTC. So hulu would probably end up having to block Chrome and Firefox. That would be insanity for any web company.
In any event I would imagine a firefox extension to work with Chromecast will show up sooner or later.
DesktopMan - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
The license restrictions on those services sound insane. Chrome tab casting is pretty much wireless HDMI, does Hulu not work over HDMI in clone mode? What about Miracast?edwpang - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
The USB power meter is pretty useful. What the brand name of it?Thanks
Ritup - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
You can find it here, a good friend designed that.https://www.tindie.com/stores/FriedCircuits/
Donkey2008 - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
To the author - Was "Molybdenum" the name of the device stock or did you come up with that name for it? I have a reason for asking.Brian Klug - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
Came up with it, the first one I named Chromey, the second one Molybdenum since, well, periodic table and stuff, I dunno.-Brian
Donkey2008 - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
Cool. I work for a company that does moly exploration and I rarely find anyone who knows what molybdenum is or even how to pronounce it (mole-ib-denim).For those who don't understand, molybdenum is better known as "Chrome Moly" (thus the Google reference). Fun, off-topic fact of the day. Derp.
Oh, and Skynet...LOL.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
CroMo steel is used pretty regularly in the bike industry. :)bountygiver - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
According to what google has been doing, a first party chromecast app for windows 8/RT is not likely to come, but I hope someone can make one as it can be really useful if it is integrated in windows Share/PlayTo(on win8.1).