As title, Been given one of these.
I use android, can I use it to mirror my screen when playing Minecraft PE on my phone for instance, or is it only for the chrome browser? Would be good if it made the phone into a controller and I could play modern combat on the TV!
Chromecast is primarily used as a media player. With apps on your phone like - SBS, ABC, Netflix, Youtube, etc you can choose to send those videos to your TV screen using your phone as a remote control. You can also mirror your screen on the TV if you wanted to share a non-Chromecast supported application. I haven't tried using it for games yet so I'm not sure if it could do what you mentioned. It's a handy tool for making a TV or projector a bit smarter.
if you have a Android phone and you use Google Home (i.e. the Chromecast app), you can also cast your entire screen of your phone.
so, you can look at Google Maps, read Email, etc.
if you have a tablet, then children can use the tablet as a white-board or play games like Tic-Tac-Toe or Hangman, etc.
Plug it in to your TV, then power, and then use it.
Chromecast mirroring works great if you are close to stock Android. The Wife & I cast the screen whilst playing The Chase android game, good fun.
Not every video stream site is supported so for those that you cannot cast, you can mirror the phone or PC (chrome browser) screen to the TV.
I use it to be able to watch YouTube videos or movies from Google Play Store on the big screen, and with Dolby Digital+ Surround (Chromecast plugged into receiver). It is the only way you can get 5.1 surround for movies from Google Play. I also use it to cast music from my phone to my hifi system using Pulsar media player (which can cast music to a Chromecast). I don't even have to turn my tv on for that (so I don't need to buy a "Chromecast Audio"). Apart from that it is handy to cast the occasional photo or movie file from my phone to the tv.
It can work for mirroring, but not on all devices and not perfectly.
Games that are Turn by Turn are fine, but anything that requires constant interaction and it gets frustrating.
So no Shooters, Racing, or Fighting games. Or even Drawing Apps (rarely work without latency).
If you have a Bluetooth keyboard, and you try typing something into a Word document… you'll probably get a little frustrated too at the latency.
However, Web Browsing works fine.
Kodi App on Android + Chromecast = Free and near unlimited content to watch
Chromecast supported games = Fun house parties
Android Screencast = Works reasonably well on vanilla/ near vanilla Android (Personally never found much use for it)
Dammit, everyone seems to be able to get this to work from their phone except me!
I can play mp4s from my SD card and cast but Netflix no longer casts the video since recent updates. I only get audio and subtitles.
dogboy on 27/06/2017 - 11:14 Comment score below threshold.