Chromecast

[bgowland]

Thanks UJB, I got the PM.

I did look into Chromecast when it was first released towards the end of July. Unfortunately Chromecast devices aren't yet available in the UK (not officially anyway). There is an independent Amazon reseller selling them on Amazon UK but at three times the price which is a bit too steep for me.

WRT posts here so far, with limited reading of how it works, it seems to me that anything that can send the relevant network requests/commands could be used as the "sender app" - not just a Chrome browser or Android/iOS apps. Naturally Google are going to directly support Chrome over other browsers but lets face it, anything can be hacked to make it look like one browser or another (in theory) so even a plugin for npvr should be able to do it.

It does seem more suited to mobile devices as "senders" though and I'll definitely look into integrating it with nDroid when I can get my hands on a Chromecast device.

One downer (for the moment at least) is that Google seem to have crippled the Chromecast to prevent streaming from "just anywhere" (such as the local network). See Google just killed the best thing about the chromecast for now

Cheers,
Brian

[UncleJohnsBand]

<sigh> it seemed promising but alas it seams Google may be going the way of Apple and you can only play if we say it is ok....and if you do it the way we tell you to do it....

[bgowland]

<sigh> it seemed promising but alas it seams Google may be going the way of Apple and you can only play if we say it is ok....and if you do it the way we tell you to do it....

I'm hoping it's a temporary thing. The update at the end of the link I posted with the comment from the Google spokesperson did say "...including those for local content.". The meaning of "local content" isn't entirely clear but if it does mean streaming from local servers then there's hope yet.

I'm not sure if Google would ring-fence things in the same way as Apple do - there's far more potential in making things as open as possible. Perhaps they simply discovered security or privacy issues with having unlimited streaming capabilities. Who knows.

I checked eBay and I can get a Chromecast device from plenty of US sellers prepared to ship to the UK but prices are still way over the top. I'll just wait and keep an eye on how things progress.

[UncleJohnsBand]

Looks like I am seeing $35 here in US

[bgowland]

Looks like I am seeing $35 here in US

Yep. That's the official price direct from Google but it's a lot more expensive to try and get one in the UK (the Amazon UK reseller is asking the equivalent of ~$105).

It has just occurred to me an old school friend lives in NJ - I'll email him and see if he'll buy me one and send it over. Not sure why I didn't think of that before. Doh!

EDIT: Just had a response from my friend in NJ who's happy to buy one and send it over. All we have to do now is hope Google relax the restriction on "local content" sometime soon. I'll report back when it arrives and I've had a chance to play with it.

Cheers,
Brian

[UncleJohnsBand]

Yep. That's the official price direct from Google but it's a lot more expensive to try and get one in the UK (the Amazon UK reseller is asking the equivalent of ~$105).

It has just occurred to me an old school friend lives in NJ - I'll email him and see if he'll buy me one and send it over. Not sure why I didn't think of that before. Doh!

EDIT: Just had a response from my friend in NJ who's happy to buy one and send it over. All we have to do now is hope Google relax the restriction on "local content" sometime soon. I'll report back when it arrives and I've had a chance to play with it.

Cheers,
Brian

Great!

[bgowland]

Things are in motion. The only official sellers are Amazon (US) who are currently out of stock, Best Buy who currently only do in-store purchases (but my friend doesn't have a local store) or Google Play promising shipping by 13th September.

He has gone ahead with an order from Google but it looks like it'll be a couple of weeks before I get it and get an idea of what's possible.

Cheers,
Brian

[bgowland]

Let the fun begin...

The Chromecast arrived today - total price around £35 including the US shipping and sales-tax my friend had to pay and also the USPS shipping charge from NJ to the UK (luckily no import charge at my end).

There's no official release date in the UK (last time I checked) and predictions of UK pricing (by various web pundits) suggest it'll be around £30 (plus postage of course) when it is available, so I think what I've paid is about right for early access.

The Software Development Kit is still in a 'Preview' stage and as a result I've had to submit the device serial number to Google in order to have it white-listed for development purposes. Estimated response from them is "within 48 hours".

Initial setup and connection to the wi-fi network is fairly straight-forward and just involves going to a Google setup website and installing an app / utility to connect to the Chromecast. Needless to say when I tried from my Nexus 7 to download the app, it told me it wasn't available in my country. I did manage to download the Windows utility though (needs W7 or later) and set things up from my wife's laptop.

As I said in a previous post, Google have disabled the ability to stream "local content" so at the moment it'll only allow content from 'approved' providers but they claim they want it to work with local content again in future. Until that happens it'll be of limited use for npvr but I'll play around with it to see what it can do. If they go back on that promise and don't allow local streaming again, I can always off-load it to someone on eBay.

Cheers,
Brian

[sub]

Does it have a general web browser built in? It'd be interesting to see if you could make it work with the NextPVR touch pages.

[bgowland]

Does it have a general web browser built in? It'd be interesting to see if you could make it work with the NextPVR touch pages.

To be honest I haven't gone past the initial setup stage and registering to have it white-listed for dev purposes. I've got some work stuff to do so it'll be an hour or so until I can play with it properly and get my head around how it works.

Interesting idea about the touch pages - I'll look into it. From the docs I've worked out the Receiver apps are developed using HTML/JS/CSS so effectively rendered using a web technologies. The Sender apps can be Android / iOS / Chrome apps although I suspect with enough digging and the relevant protocols anything could be a sender. The Sender tells the Receiver where to connect to and what to pull. As I said, I still don't know the nuts & bolts of it all but that's what I've worked out so far.

Cheers,
Brian