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chromecast
#61
Inside Chromecast: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422366,00.asp
IfixIt: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecas...wn/16069/1
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#62
I disagree, I think Miracast was a crippled tech from the start. 1) Because it had a hardware component, the adoption rate was low. Sure, my laptop and cell phone are compatible, but I have no receiver for it as neither my tv or av receiver supports it. 2) It requires a direct wireless connectionHuh So you have to drop your wifi connection to the router to connect to the receiver?? And it doesn't work over lanHuh I just never bought into it, and neither did anybody I know.

Airplay on the other hand was the perfect tech as it was software only, worked over lan and it was simple. But the only problem with it was that it was an Apple product and therefore only worked with Apple products. Low penetration.

I think this was absolutely the right move for Google. Not only they implemented an Airplay-like technology, but they even made it simpler and cheaper. Spending $35 is a hell of a lot easier than spending $100 (in our household, anything over $90 requires spouse knowledge/approval).That's how you maximize your market penetration. Plus Google's device doesn't even require a remote and uses the beaming device as a remote.Not to mention it works on all mobile and desktop devices. And that's how you maximize your market size.

Nexus Q was wrong on all fronts, but somehow Google redeems themselves by making sure this product is right on all fronts. Props to Page and co.
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#63
Miracast certainly had many flaws, but a dependence on "receiver" hardware wasn't really one of them, although the WiDi chipset didn't help. Fundamentally it was the complete lack of any available low-cost receivers at launch that was the problem - they became available eventually, by which time most people had forgotten about Miracast.

Airplay still needed "receiver" hardware for it to be of much use - hence the AppleTV which meant Airplay support was readily available for $99. And fortunately for Apple, a lot of third-party AV suppliers have also bought into the Airplay technology, making it now fairly ubiquitous.

Without hardware to jump start the market, protocols like Chromecast, Airplay and Miracast are on a hiding to nothing. IMHO the dongle is an example of Google seeding early Chromecast hardware support until third party hardware support kicks into gear. Hopefully this will include XBMC in the not too distant future. Smile
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#64
Source code is available
http://www.cnx-software.com/2013/07/27/c...lopment%29
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#65
FYI, looks like someone's already implementing a ChromeCast receiver in python?

Haven't tried it myself, but figure it might be of interest to anyone with more coding knowledge then I.

https://github.com/dz0ny/leapcast

Edit: Got it working for youtube.

Netflix seems to throw a 404 error.

Still, pretty damn promising.
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#66
Confirmed that Chromecast actually is running android and not a modified ChromeOS, the same guys who found this out are going to release a root too.

source: https://twitter.com/gtvhacker
wiki: http://gtvhacker.com/index.php/Google_Chromecast
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#67
(2013-07-27, 16:02)rupert Wrote: FYI, looks like someone's already implementing a ChromeCast receiver in python?

Haven't tried it myself, but figure it might be of interest to anyone with more coding knowledge then I.

https://github.com/dz0ny/leapcast

Edit: Got it working for youtube.

Netflix seems to throw a 404 error.

Still, pretty damn promising.

Well that was fast.
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#68
And the /proc/cpuinfo confirms it is a single-core ARMv7 (Cortex-Ax), and not an earlier generation architecture - strange that they called it the DE3005.
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#69
Hmm....

Looks more & more like Netflix isn't gonna play well outside of the actual Chromecast device.

Not surprising, but still disappointing.

Looks to my (possibly wrong) eyes like it's using a binary player inside the chromecast firmware, unlike the other chromecast apps.....Confused

Per:
https://clients3.google.com/cast/chromec...ice/config
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#70
Here is why I would like to see Chromecast receiver support in XBMC. I have an Acer Aspire Revo that I pretty much use exclusively as a HTPC device. It works great for me because it has an optical output (unlike a Raspberry Pi) which feeds my receiver. For whatever reason, even though my TV has a digital audio output (which strangely uses coax, not optical, but my receiver accepts it), I can only send sound from the TV's built in tuner to the receiver. In other words, if I feed a HDMI signal to the TV and it has audio, the TV will play the audio through its (relatively crappy) speakers, but won't pass it through to my audio receiver. XBMC works very well in this situation because as I say the Revo has an optical audio output that can go direct to the receiver, bypassing the TV altogether.

The Chromecast dongle has two strikes against it in my situation: First, no optical output, so I could only play the sound on the TV. Second, it will only connect to a local network using wi-fi. Not everyone has (or wants) a wi-fi network in their home - I won't go into the reasons why, because they don't matter, but a device that is Wi-Fi only won't work for me. Even my tablet connects to the network using a network-to-USB adapter when I'm at home. And besides that, I have noticed (especially when trying to talk to people that use VoIP over a wi-fi connection) that wi-fi isn't exactly the most reliable thing in the world. I am just wondering what's going to happen when someone buys three or four of these Chromecast dongles and tries to use them all at once.

But at the same time, I really like the concept that if I find a video on my desktop computer or my tablet, I can just fling it to my TV. So, I'd very much like to see an XBMC add-on that could emulate the functionality of the Chromecast dongle, but then output the the video using XBMC.

One other thing I will mention is that, at least when using an Acer Aspire Revo running Ubuntu 12.04, XBMC plays beautifully, and so does MythTV's frontend software, but those are the only things that do. Try to use VLC and you might get steady video, but don't count on it. Try to play anything from a web browser and it's more like watching a slide show where the slides change about once per second. I'm sure it's because most software isn't aware of, or doesn't fully utilize the nVidia graphics. I tried the Linux version of Hulu Desktop sometime back and the response was pretty awful. So if any of this stuff could be "flung" to XBMC, and then XBMC would play it using its audio and video engines, that would be great!
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#71
Just found this:

Chromecast Open Source Code: Linux Kernel, Toolchain, Bootloader, and More

Read more: http://www.cnx-software.com/2013/07/27/c...-and-more/
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#72
(2013-07-27, 16:02)rupert Wrote: FYI, looks like someone's already implementing a ChromeCast receiver in python?

Haven't tried it myself, but figure it might be of interest to anyone with more coding knowledge then I.

https://github.com/dz0ny/leapcast

Edit: Got it working for youtube.

Netflix seems to throw a 404 error.

Still, pretty damn promising.

OK I got that python app from github, on my Linux Mint 14 laptop. I also had to install python-tornado, and you need the google version of chrome, not the chromium-browser that ubuntu/mint ships. I followed these instructions:

http://www.itworld.com/software/351601/i...ux-mint-14

I then ran
Code:
python2 app.py 192.168.1.24 --name "Envy" --chrome /usr/bin/google-chrome

My Samsung S3 Youtube app immediately recognised it as a chrome target (if that is the right word) and I was able to do all the chromecast stuff like pausing, queuing etc.

I don't have access to netflix in my country so can't test that.

Of course this is something I have been able to do on XBMC via iMediaShare or BubbleUPnP or recent XBMC on the android, for ages using upnp. But there is no reason you can't install chrome and the python code on your XBMC box and cast something to it today.

The two minor problems are that chrome doesn't start fullscreen, and doesn't close when you're finished. Fine on a laptop, but would need to be sorted for "10 foot interface" mode.
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#73
I've been trying to get this working on windows 7, I presume the issue is that the relative directories are structured for a linux install.

Anyone successfully used windows 7 and have some command line parameters to share?
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#74
(2013-07-28, 13:20)seamus5 Wrote: I've been trying to get this working on windows 7, I presume the issue is that the relative directories are structured for a linux install.

Anyone successfully used windows 7 and have some command line parameters to share?

Provided you installed all app.py dependencies, copy app.py where chrome.exe is installed, go to that directory, then:

python app.py <local ip> --chrome chrome.exe --name "LolCast receiver"
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#75
(2013-07-28, 15:44)bubbleguuum Wrote:
(2013-07-28, 13:20)seamus5 Wrote: I've been trying to get this working on windows 7, I presume the issue is that the relative directories are structured for a linux install.

Anyone successfully used windows 7 and have some command line parameters to share?

Provided you installed all app.py dependencies, copy app.py where chrome.exe is installed, go to that directory, then:

python app.py <local ip> --chrome chrome.exe --name "LolCast receiver"

Perfect, that did the trick.

Anybody have any luck getting the play music app to work? Everything seems to work ok in youtube, but the cast icon doesn't seem to show in music for some reason.
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