Google Chromecast Review

 hey guys it's will from Tested and it'snorm from tested norm chromecast is out it's been out for a few weeks now oh yeswe both tested it out and we've had mixed results and feelings about thislittle dongle so let me give I think the only thing we agree on is that it's adongle it cost $35 well depends it costs $35 it depends cuz you know so buy fromAmazon cost $35 there and sometimes no tax for some people okay I from GooglePlay $35 plus taxes if you butter early yeah $35 plus two months free necklacemaking this maybe 12 to 15 bill I got it early I got it but I didn't get twomonths of free Netflix and we ordered about five minutes apart reconquer I gottwo months free netflix this to me was fifteen dollars job is to French manokay it's a dongle so what does it do itstreams video from computers and tablets to your TV it plugs into an HDMI portand a USB port or a bore brick yes the case may be um so this is kind of Google's alternative to Apple TV it's basically just airplay

 it's not Apple TVeven it's just it's just the airplay functionality of the Apple TV and Googlewants you to use this to buy stuff or watch youtube videos and buy stuff ongoogle play music movies just like you would buy on Apple TV stuff overridesyou they're going after Microsoft's quest to get the second screen which inthe old days was the TV and not a tablet or phone or something they want thisyeah they want one of your phone what do you want to be freshest HDMI very veryprecious HDMI yards so let's describe let's just walk through the whole setupprocess and we'll talk about that so I have a novel set up I have a littlemonitor right yes so imagine if you will that this is a big 16 72 inch TV 73 inchokay I'm that's a hard it's a it's like that's a seven inch TV norm its 73-inchTV I'm going to plug chromecast on an HDMI port on the side or you could pluginto your receiver come on it does come with a really tiny HDMI extension cablethat's because it's it's a little fat for an HDMIthat's because right around the HDMI port yeah this is a little too big forsome receivers yes I'm HDMI ports well andand my TV I couldn't have plugged it would have blocked the ports on eitherside so if you look at the extension cable it's actually a smaller littlegasket around the HDMI port I'm gonna plumb I use the extension camp let'sjust use the extension cable


 it's in the box why not why not otherwise it's gonnago in a drawer and never use 20 years you can be like oh I'm gonna HDMI cablesI should throw this out so I plug it in yeah right I play should power up nopeyou got a plug in the USB port Jill now even though this is HDMI 1.4 it actuallywill not drive power from HDMI 1.4 you cannot supported by the specs it needsmore power needs more not on point forward yes so at the end here there isa microUSB port okay comes with a micro USB cable and a wall wart so I'm gonnaplug this in you can although it does require power you can actually takepower from the USB port of your TV yeah which is great because I've never usedthe USB port of my hammer and now I'm never going to never never no need toI'd plug this in yeah kind of bundled the cables and how about tucked away nookay so now you fire up the on screen display on the device and you put inkeyboard and mouse using the keyboard and mouse your Wi-Fi password usernameright you have to log in to a website ha so the way it's all set up now I'm notgonna reset it up yeah but there's Wi-Fi in here 802 11 and 2.4 gigahertz only oknot 5 gigahertz connection you log on to a website it will on your laptop youconnect to its Wi-Fi access point first you're going look for Wi-Fi accesspoints ya know connect from computer to chromecast ok and and there you have awebpage and you'll type in your local access point do you have at this pointdid your chromecast have a name that included like mine was chromecast 51:22it has some identifiers ok and you can rename it ok coming to em to anythingyou want well what did you name yours chromecast 3 1 6 6 is that what itstarted out as yes it's very magic didn't didn't need to change it at allok once you've paired that then chromecast kassir Wi-Fi network


needspasswords is logged in so we're all set up right now you can see on ourchromecast it's connected to our are don't tell people our Wi-Fi you knowwhere we live and we have maximum bars you have connectivity which is great theaccess points just over there I can see it it's 8 feet away yeah15 feet away no problems so here's what you can do with the chromecast I'm gonnademo this first with the tablet that's a Nexus 7 it looks like it makes moresense it's very shiny what you can do and conveniently I have YouTube lovethem here is that you can send YouTube videos from your tablet to thechromecast so that's that's the kind of thing I would like to do absolutely yeahand you don't have to do it from a YouTube website although you can so I'mgonna YouTube the YouTube app right now okay and I'm just gonna load up forexample this video and while would normally watch the video within the USplayer and teeming loading the add up right now great there's an icon on thetop here it's the chromecast icon and I can tap that and I'll see you tube TVhas the name of our chromecast on the bottom you chromecast 1366 3160 3166 I'mgoing to tap that and it'll say connect it and I'll load up the


YouTube graphicwhich means it's sending a signal and right now the YouTube player on thetablet which I can actually put into landscape position will be the thumbnailof that video so it's not going to play it on two places at once and the videois now playing on our chromecast so the way this works instead of the tabletbeing the tablets just sent telling the chromecast hey go get this video and nowthe tablets job is done you can search out and do something else no active databeing sent from from the tablet here okayto the chromecast aside from the first thing that said here's the aside fromthe URL and the timestamp and the volume what I can do though is I can scrub sonow sending signals to send it you had to reoffer but yeah that's pretty goodso we got all your controls there and you have you know all the metadatamm-hmm from that YouTube video I'm gonna let this play for a second did you findyourself walking out trying to touch the screen where the touch interface usuallyis on the TV no okay I don't know that TV okay but I can go back and I canbrowse other videos now and I can do other things on the tablet can you leavethe YouTube app entire absolutely so I can go back into Chrome you know and inthe top left hand corner if I scroll down notifications mm-hmm I'll actuallytell me that I'm still playing that video and you have controls for it aswell I can cause whatever from notifications I can playand you know what I can even turn the device off I'll still keep on playingit's going to sit on my coffee table if I want to change it pop it up and in thelock screen mm-hmm I have some control as well just a possibility it looks likepause and play bring it back and I can you know do whatever I want web browseand and or go back and you now here's the cool thing about the Chrome so holdon I we're looking at a little tiny we'reshooting a little tiny screen so people can't really see what the videoquantities like here what's what's the video quality like when you're streamingYouTube it will take down the highest resolution they like the interval willsend so if you're if if YouTube sending it's not going to do 4k not do 1080 okaydo 1080p if you have YouTube but if you have YouTube this will totally take in1080p and of course I'll evaluate the signal strength of your chromecast whereI was using it where the signal might not have been best it was taking the720p or sometimes even the 480p your your living room is a Wi-Fi Death Zone Ithink that the chromecast but it didn't do so well and it's tough to simulatehere because we have a good signal is adjusting for buffer versus bitrate okaybecause you can't manually say I know I have not great signal always play at480p well and that's one of the things that if you're looking at this as acompetitor to the Apple TV


it's one of those things that Apple has done reallywell from even like in the old QuickTime for PC and Mac days where they wouldthey were really good at calculating how much buffer they needed to have beforewould let you start playing so in the first place as opposed to saying play atthe lowest resolution plate 360p I just want to consistent experience it wouldtry to go for for I D try to go for 720 and then give me buffering can you andyou can't manually specify which nitrate was by that's not with YouTube streamingis that a limit is that a limitation of the what happens if you do from a PCbecause I can't display their PC you can okay so I'm gonna show you the coolestthing though about the chromecast and I'll go to another video here is anotherYouTube video so this is a YouTube video and I can press play and I'll actuallywhat I'll do is it's added it to a queue Wowso I'm gonna go back actually do it a couple more times just like your YouTubewatch watch later queue watch later queue I'm pressing play andif you go actually I have to actually manually I'm going to not show othervideos does this does this work in the if you're on YouTube calm as well as theapp this actually does work on YouTube con as well you have this thing calledthe TV queue and if you're if you're browsing YouTube you can actually in theplayer and say additive TV queue and you'll fill up this whole list of videosthat was played in sequence you can be a YouTube DJ you can absolutely be yourYouTube DJ I would also do is play ads ogram that's convenientyes imagining that I'll show you what you asked is if I go to youtube.com inthe embedded player on youtube.com it'll actually also let you send a chromecastfrom there so sim pick a random video some some news when the video is doneplaying if you're at the end of your queue I'll just show you a lastingplayed and or maybe not here so do content providers have to opt in to thisor does it just automatically have to opt in so you have to provide supportand there are very few places that provide support right now so right nowit's YouTube and Netflix and Google Play Store and that's pretty much it right soa little Netflix and Netflix experience real quick it's basically the same asthat YouTube experience Oh gives me the icon I was watching Star Trek No nextgeneration which episode and it can't find my Netflix Netflix isn't workingright now but there is a chromecast button right at the top and you clickthat you could send whatever is being played on Netflix maybe maybe even Thordon't try loading that on the chromecast there it goes againnothing's being sent directly from this tablet to the chromecast it just tellingtelling the chromecast where the address is giving authentication so you're notdoing it up down any of that business you're not downloading something to thistablet and then uploading across

 the same Wi-Fi network to the TV which seemslike it would look like a good thing like this this seems like a good idea tome yes the place is where you actually there are cases where you actuallycensus of video signals from from your device to the TV and that consumes morepower obviously on your phone yeah I hear on my phone I actually have aGoogle Play transformers have you bought any movies from Google Play this is freeokay former's was free when you bought lastyear's Nexus I remember you could say you paid two hundred thirty dollars forthat $200 in Google Play Movies there is that chromecast button again okay and Ican send from chromecast and now at this point it is actually going to try send asignal from from the my device here but I can get this to workand there goes it'll load the the Google Play Movies icon theoretically there itgoes that's the Google Play Movies you know it takes about 10 seconds onaverage for everything to sync up and it has all the metadata again and playbacksee it's still it's still ticking its L mean this isn't a thing I experienced inmy living room and there goes where I have good Wi-Fi and I wasn't when Iwasn't jamming 10 videos at a time over to it like it seems like it works betterif there's a queue and again the video money here's pretty good for up thevideo quality is excellent even on the small screen you can tell it's a littlebit of buffering 20 like yeah I mean if you're scrubbing you're going to get thebuffering so it works on YouTube works on Google Play movies and music yeahwe're not going to show too much is this movie and it also works in Netflix butdoesn't work in other popular apps like for example Hulu Plus right HBO GO evenWeb Apps like Vimeo Pandora all these companies has did well our videosworkers


we have YouTube but so like on iOS for example yeah support will comethe future it's hard for me to test all this stuff because I'm using I'm usingiOS 7 beta and YouTube app just flat-out doesn't work on that there's a buttonthat says you can chromecast in Netflix but it doesn't seem to do anything so itcould be iOS 7 problems it could be just stuff not working quite right yettheoretically that support will comment what this isn't like airplay in thesense that on airplay you can send everything from your iPad it's a TVthere's a mirror straight up mirroring did well there's some limits to thatthere you're assuming stuff that the content provider doesn't allow even ifyou use mirroring it just blocks out the video but there's none of that forchromecast right now okay that theoretically will be supported by appsfor example there's this app in development right now called Aircast nowI can launch this air cast and I'll run the background and what let me do isactually send stuff from photo gallery from Dropbox or EagleGoogle and Google drive's is this from the people who do the third-partyairplay app on iOS I think different area developer okay so for example if Imean and this is theoretically how Google chromecast will work in thefuture when these apps are really supported is this like Google Google TVapps are they the same thing so actually I can send now I'm in gallery I'm not inYouTube or Netflix and I can still search for chromecast I'll find mychromecast and I'll play a video I shot just a few minutes ago from the galleryon the TV so this gives you a way to stream content that you've shot andphotos you've shot and theoretically something that you've like ripped from aDVD and put on your device over to the chromecast yes this is good all thisseems good so far but the end those apps like this Aircast app not reallysupported yet well but support will come well it's just like that's a promiselike Google TV no sounds like it sounds like an awfully big promise just to melike I'm a demo also quickly dropbox which i think is probably one of thebest ways where I use chromecast okay so this is a video we shot last year I cansend two Aircast in Dropbox and then this looks pretty awesome and then I canpress play and theoretically


it's going to look for the chromecast and sent overthere it's this app is still development not not supposed to be out yet it's onlyand it only works it's only gonna work with the codecs to the device supports Iassume and everything work it's probably the wrong end video again um one of thethings I noticed about it is that it takes a fairly look it doesn't maintainthat relationship between the device and the chromecast it seems like there'salways a fair amount of time to set stuff up yeah whenever you send videoover absolutely um if we talk about tab casting yet Noso this is the thing that is another get around for we're getting around the endaround and around for the limitations of chromecast right now okay well there andfinally there goes the video being pushed ever so slow linkI can't hope that's high speed or no it's it's fully sighted chain andhitching oh that's a good time to hitch that putting really flew um okay so notso great as a casting on Desktop meaning on a desktop operatingsystem using the full version of Chrome you can send anything from a tab ontoChrome's Mac PC theoretically Linux I assume as long as running the Chromeoperating system with the right extent but not for example the version ofchrome that runs on your desktop version of Chrome yeah so in my browser rightnow on my Mac okay in the top left hand corner of Prohm you see if you can seethis there is an icon right here that's a chromecast icon yeah that's anextension you installed yep and if I hit that I'll say cast this tab is still inbeta cast as the chromecast and there are options show you the options in justsecond and cast tab with audio also so all the audio come from this tab and nowit's on the chromecast there it was an options menu the extension options letsyou change auto resizing the browser lets you change your project brushprojection quality so you can go from 40 P or you extreme do you did you go withextreme I went extreme extreme and what you notice then also is now that I'm inany other tab for example I could be browsing a different website like NewYork Times but the tab that's in the background I had Saints streamed isstill showing up there


 it's just frozen because I'm not do anything so I canactually do something like play a video in the back and I'll play the video youcan see there's a little bit of a delay yeah and I can kill ducks browse anotherwebsite and the video will still be playing in the back it's kind of chunkythough now so here's it this is how people are getting around Vimeo notsupporting chromecast for example this was not a good experience for me ifyou're on something like Vimeo yeah I can actually starts casting this tab andthen you could play a movie yep and you can go pedigree and go fullscreen andtada in theory in theory once it goes full screen there goes if you mightamissed bearing screen you're playing fullscreen Vimeo so this worked with HBOGo Vimeo couple other things that I tried the quality is noticeably inferiorto direct Netflix direct YouTube the othersupport it natively it is kind of bummer and that's largely because this is stillin beta uh that's true the Apple TV my Apple TV uses a wired connection not aWi-Fi and still that direct streaming is kind of hinky and not real good yeaheven when I was testing this on a wired PC sending a wired signal to the Wi-Fisignal this it wasn't that great does this work with your older macbook airdid you try it does it require the Sandy post Sandy Bridge h.264 it totally worksit works in software works with okay two years ago back to two year old networkokay so it doesn't require some sort of specific it's not because AirPlayMirroring only works on machines at our host Sandy Bridge with the dedicated isexport encoder yeah on the chip on the MacBook Air 11 inch though and we'llshow this full screen there's some gnarly gnarly rendering problems withusing tab streaming for example I understand now we'll show you in yourswitchover but and we'll demo I mean this is now what you'll see is itfullscreen MacBook Air it looks terrible Tex is unreadable yeah it looks liketheir lines dirty looks interlace vertically but if we switch it over Iactually didn't like a hold on 13-inch MacBook Air here's the 13-inch MacBookAir none of that interlacing


problem I'm not sure exactly why you think it's aresolution problem that laptop maybe I don't think it's resolution focus at thesame resolution on the yoga mmm that was just Windows PC well that's weirdyeah I didn't have any of those because you came into the office and startedtalking about that problems like what the hell are you talking about I have ithad any of this only works identified on the 11 inch MacBook Air but the problemI had is the lag not the not the actual like so quality not usable as a secondscreen I mean in fairness the Apple TV and airplay is not usable as a secondscreen either like this is this is a device to get video to your TV not adevice to hook up a TV as a second month not even usable as a way to demonstratePowerPoint presentations because those don't run in browser oh you can runPowerPoint in browser you can we go to office live or download that and theviewers they can't run other applications if you want to do somethinglike you know what's the Apple version yeah you know that stuff is probablyyeah it's probably not going to work for that you probably know plug in a cableum the the so the one thing I did have to say is that it does support likeNetflix does support Native Chrome casting even on the Mac now I don't knowif that's new I didn't see it before but it's going to come up with something I'mplaying from Netflix right now that's just in the browser and that's just inthe browser so I like like I think for 35 bucks this is a pretty compellinglittle box no you can't say for 35 bucks because you're also taking up it's notthe $35 cost it's the taking up an HDMI slot cost well but something is going totake up that


HDMI so ya spend money on a Roku remote bucks and I think Roku isRoku you can pipe stuff directly from your phone or tablet to I'd say I thinkthis is a much better product than a Roku box if your your goal is to watchNetflix in YouTube because there's no you remember there's no you - no you -mum Roku yeah I think that if you're gonna buy something to fill your limitednumber of HDMI slot see if you have a game console one or a blue air play oranother and you want something for streaming the Apple TV is still gonna bethe best option right now and regardless if you just want to mess around with achromecast outlet I'll let you borrow mine for 10 bucks for a week what haveyou dollars though this is 35 this is a lot lunches that were more expensivethan this I mean it's not a smart thing to do I have but I'm not using thechromecast after using it for a couple bits of there points going to draw Iunplugged - it is $35 yeah shorts fancy lunch $35 still down the hall NetflixYouTube if they like you do both of those things with airplay those are onlythings you want and you have good Wi-Fi signal yeah where you plugging in yourchromecast then this might be for you here's the thing I will tell you therewill be an Amazon app for this you know there will be no as long as they'd liketo put everything out so wait wait for the Amazon app wait for Vimeo app waitfor the Pandora app and wait for possibly the ethernet the wired versionwell and in fairness Google has a pretty good history at this point of launchingsomething seeing what people use it for and how it works and then making it muchbetter the second go-round taken point the net the

Nexus 7 yes ifyou spend $35 which admittedly is not a lot of money on this and late a yearlater half a year later when all the supports comes out with their party appsand services come support this yeah and they might release a ethernet versionand then that's $35 wasted because you're in a bottom the next version butyou're still 30 bucks cheaper than the than the Apple TV at this point theApple TV is a better way to go but I think if you want something cheap getthis if you're the kind of person that doesn't care about video quality there'sa lot of people out there as evidenced by the first five years of YouTube likethere are clearly people who don't care that their video quality sucks in whichcase tab cast away kids it's you're going to get HBO go on the TV for $35otherwise there are plenty of other options out there the Roku 3 Apple TV Ithink the better option is the Apple TV for 100 bucks especially if you have iOSdevices you can do airplane absolutely so that's it it's the chromecast it's 35bucks Norman think it worth it I think $35well it is a dongle that's 35 minutes did much we agree completely agree we'llsee you guys next time bye