I got really excited when I caught wind of the new device Google
rolled out earlier today, ChromeCast.
I’ve been trying out a NetGear Push2TV PTV-3000 and an Actiontec ScreenBeam pro
just the last few days, with a very frustrating and mixed bag of results (more
on that in a detailed future post). I hoped that Chromecast might represent a
big new player (Google) coming into the wireless HD market (so far, we’ve had very
few players and only a handful of devices) that might herald in a new era of
easy, platform agnostic connections between devices and screens. Such does not
seem to be the case… yet. For now at least, Chromecast only allows you to
stream what you can see in your Chrome browser to your TV, and even then possibly
only a subset of the content that might be there (although it works on a ton of
devices/platforms, so good on you, Google). As it stands now, Chromecast can’t
show anything you can pull up on your laptop/mobile device, just what you can
display in the chrome browser—that no Microsoft applications, no gaming, no running
an app on your smartphone over the Chromecast, etc. But I hope that may be
coming soon, especially since this approach requires no special chipset(s) to work (unlike Miracast/WiFi Direct/WiDi/Airplay),
just a Wi-Fi enabled device.
I did manage to snag a chat session with a google rep who
answered some of my questions, but they had to beg off when I ranged into too
technical an area, shunting our chat over to a technical specialist for an
email follow up. Once I get more details, I’ll cull from the chat and email and
have a more detailed post (including things like frame rate, delay, audio
formats supported). Oh, they were able to tell me it support “up to 1080p.” We’ll
hopefully find out exactly what that ominous “up to” means later.
