Thanks to Chromecast from Google you no longer have to watch your favorite TV shows on a 7in tablet screen, using your headphones and getting a tinny sound and miniscule picture so small you need a microscope to view it!
This fantastic little dongle, just a centimeter or so in size, plugs into your TV set, allowing you to stream video, music and YouTube gems as well as having mainstream support for popular Netflix and Google Play. You can also get web content by using the Chrome browser.
Dead easy to set up, we had Chromecast working in just a few minutes. It works with Android, iOS, Chrome for Mac and Chrome for Windows.
Priced around $35 or about £25 from Amazon in the UK, the Chromecast Google HDMI dongle just plugs into any HDTV and then you connect to your home wifi network. Don’t bother with ethernet (wired device) because it won’t work.
Inside the box you’ll find the dongle, an HDMI extender, the USB power cable and a power adapter. The power adapter really needs to be plugged into a mains socket using a US-GB converter, don’t bother with a multi-adapter as there won’t be enough power to use it.
Chromecast is essentially a remote control
Once you’ve set it up, and you’ll find a few videos enabling you to do that, you’ll see the Chromecast logo and the home screen featuring some of the first apps available for Chromecast. At the moment there aren’t a great number but they will increase over time so keep your eye on the Google Play Store.
In the immediate future Chromecast may not completely replace the bigger or more expensive streaming devices but it’s likely to get better as there has been significant investment in it.
Because the dongle is so small, you could try using it when you’re away from home, maybe on holiday or staying in a hotel while on business.
The way to look at Chromecast is essentially as a remote control. Once you’ve got the Netflix app running on the phone you can stream Netflix directly to the Chromecast / TV off the wifi router but if you are broadcasting from a Chrome browser tab then the stream will go through your smartphone.
If you want to up the volume then you can use Chromecast to do it and using the Google Cast Chrome extension you can stream whatever is in the Chrome browser to the TV.
We did a few experiments so first up was a 1080p video which had great quality, we followed this with a blast of rock music from Google Play and that was superb too. We didn’t notice any lag on the pictures and no distortion on the music.
Content from a website or cloud is grabbed by Chromecast
There is also a work around from PLEX media server if you want to play digital music and videos from your network drive or computers. Chromecast fetches the content from a website or cloud service and not from the device you’re using.
As a result, you could play a video using your smartphone as a remote control and still browse the web or play a game while the video plays fine. To find out how to install Google Chromecast check out this easy to use guide.
As the phone is not actually doing the streaming from Chromecast it saves your battery power too, which has always got to be a bonus you can buy one right now through our store.
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