My Chromecast Setup

I wanted to briefly talk about my Chromecast setup, not because I am doing anything novel with it but because there are a few things I didn’t know about the Chromecast before I bought one so may be of interest to folks thinking about it!

Streaming Online Files with Chromecast

For files that are online so far I have just been using a combination of YouTube inside of the Chrome web browser or the YouTube app on my iPhone and the Netflix iPhone app.

The iPhone apps are pretty useful, one streaming has begun you can close out of the app on your phone and it will continue to work.

Netflix currently doesn’t support queuing up multiple things, so if I am watching a series it means at the end of the episode I have to hit play again on my phone. I hope this gets fixed at some stage.

There doesn’t appear to be anyway to stream from any other web browser than Chrome, it would be nice if other extensions came out.

Streaming Offline Files with Chromecast

For streaming offline files I have been super happy with Video Stream, this is another Chrome plugin that lets you select a file from your file system and it will stream it to your Chromecast. Any media file I have tried has streamed super quick and the quality has been great.

You can also stream local files by dragging them into your Chrome web browser and casting the tab but I have heard mixed reports about this.

Other things I have learned about Chromecast

Streaming both online and offline files pretty much covers everything you would want to do with your Chromecast, but I thought I would share two other things I have learned.

Chromebooks don’t have native support for Chromecast

This was something that kind of confused and annoyed me, I have a Chromebook and I figured it would be the ultimate thing to use to control Chromecast, but it turns out that I only have the same amount of control as I would have using the Chrome plugin. I know ChromeOS is a loader for Chrome, but I would have thought they would have an app that would let me easily cast my entire desktop.

Chromecasts can power themselves off of the TV

So long as you have a spare USB slot in your TV you can power the Chromecast using this, which is nice as it means one less power socket being taken up.