I'm amazed no one has suggested Chromecast. It just works. Click a button on your phone or laptop and the video or song you were listening to or want to listen to suddenly appears on the TV. Even grandparents seem to get it. Maybe Apple TV is a similar experience but Chromecast is as good as it gets
Until you try to put it on an isolated VLAN for IOT. Then all hell breaks loose on trying to configure a firewall to correctly allow it to be discovered and cast to.
I used to love it, but have had very annoying connection issues of late. Also shuts off and restarts during some use. I had to switch it over to 2.4Ghz recently which I think did it in, which I had to do for connection of home devices with "dumb smart" plugs.
I know a lot of people seem to love Chromecast, but for some reason using a phone to control TV never made sense to me. I prefer the physical remote. And for sending screen to the TV, the quality was never good.
Our Chromecast and the one included with TV haven’t been used for years.
The Chromecast was never amazing, and having to use a phone or Chrome to control your TV is really weird. Having a Chromecast was better than nothing though.
However if you’ve used an AppleTV you realise that the Chromecast is actually a pretty terrible solution, compared to just having a device with apps.
I have an apple TV at home, but for the price chromecast works well. It's really great for 2 cases:
1. Connected to a tv in a workplace, anyone on the local network can easily use Chrome to share a screen instead of passing around an HDMI cable.
2. Lately hotel rooms sometimes have a chromecast or apple TV, and it's a welcome feature of the room to open netflix on my phone and cast to the TV. In fact I think I should ditch the HDMI cable I keep in my suitcase and replace it with a chromecast. They are pretty small, too.
In both of those cases, I would prefer to only use casting/mirroring and not actually login to the device and/or install apps.
The Chromecast meant "oh I want to watch a movie tonight" becomes:
1. open chromecast on TV
2. open stream app on phone
3. push chromecast button
4. pick movie
* it creates social actions: A bunch of friends sitting around can share youtube videos with each other.
* it vastly simplifies streaming audio (e.g. spotify)
I bought a chromecast so I could put videos on my tv while I eat dinner. That's legitimately 90% of what I use it for. The other 10% is streaming video from Plex/YT/etc or to dunk my screen for jackbox.
I agree - I have a 1st gen Chromecast and it still works really well after quite a few years. It doesn't always play nice with my wife's iphone but considering how little it cost, I'm not complaining.
It's not a simple system. Technically all you need is upnp to perform all those functions. A raspberry pi with a build of VLC that only always plays full screen and a slideshow of some kind in between use. However, with the google product specifically it is deliberately designed to handicap itself and require all kinds of extra software (google at services, the YouTube app, etc) on the mobile device. It may look simple from the perspective of someone who already has all the added necessities, but try playing a video on the Chromecast with your own choice of software and you'll see it for the nightmare it is.
I don’t think that’s a fair way to judge a product. It’s made and marketed for sending videos from android phones to your TV, and it does that well. It doesn’t handle tasks it wasn’t built for well? That’s fine.
Useability outside of a very narrow window is abysmal on a product. That's not fair to say? I think it is. Imagine a kitchen knife that only worked with a certain cutting board.
This is very similar to the advice of Jacob-Kaplan Moss, architect of the Django documentation [1]. I used this very advice in the authoring of the Open vSwitch documentation [2] though I, like other commenters here, did have difficulty distinguishing between tutorials and how-tos.
