My experience with Google Chromecast
When i arrived at work this morning, I finally got my chromecast ^b^
So here is my experience with it and review so far. I may update this blog based on further thoughts. First of all, open box picture:
Pretty simplistic packaing, isn’t it?
Took me about 1.5 minutes to unpack and everything and connect to my TV. The USB power cable is ridiculously long. And I don’t know why Google always needs a power cable anyway. It makes sense to get power if TV cannot provide power, but HDMI 1.4 standard dictates the HDMI socket provide 5V DC. Oh well, here is what it looks like.
So far, about 2.5 minutes. Now the fun part, I need to set it up. Turn on TV, switch source to HDMI. And… nothing..??!?!? Here is what I see:
Yeah nothing, I started to panic and went through the instruction sheet again. I even called my GF, who happens to work closely with the google tv people. Here I started my 1 hour long troubleshooting process. At first I noticed the device is burning hot and I suspected something is short circuited, so I disconnected everything and tried again, still nothing. The troubleshoot guide from google said I should see a blinking light on the device, that didn’t happen :( I then tried to disconnect my TV power and restart, disconnect HDMI and only left USB on, vice versa; holding reset button, etc. Finally at some point, the light started to blink! I then connected everything back, and saw the “Set me up” screen as I should have 1 hour ago. Even at this point, I still don’t know what happened and why it didn’t turn on at the first try. I pretty much exhausted everything I could do to the device before returning it. Everything else is a breeze. 5 minutes after big troubleshoot. I can finally connect it to my home wifi.
Off we go! First, test the happy case: YouTube. It works pretty good. I was able to select a video on my iPhone and cast, no problem; then switched to mocbook chrome and casted without a problem. Second thing I tried is Amazon Instant Video. Because AIV app on iphone doesn’t support case, so I could only start a video from Chrome and cast it there. And the result is… ugh pretty terrible. The cast is literally a Chrome cast. The TV was simply mimicing my browser screen, without sound, with lag.. It’s even worse than any remote desktop app. I think I will keep my HDMI cable for a while..
So, to summarize, it’s a great product when it works. It can be very tricky when I had to spend time to troubleshoot. The support is fairly limited as of today. I see this product as a path explorer to its next generation. It will definitely wake up a lot of app owners to start integrating streaming capability and slowly see more coverage, but today it doesn’t have many support. Roku will probably do better out-of-the-box, but Chromecast definitely is a game changer (Remember Google G1?).
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