This is fantastic as Chromecast support was one thing keeping me from dropping Chrome entiredly. I have a real love/hate relationship with Chromecast. I love its minimalism and simplicity - you just pick something you want to 'cast' and off you go. Whether there's a handoff to stream directly to the TV or it's directly casting from the device is seamless (unless there are bandwidth issues with the latter). Videostream[1] works really well for video files.
However, recently it's got a lot worse. For some reason universal notifications of casting devices stopped coming up on my Pixel. That meant navigating back into the casting app, which may have lost its connection, or using the Google Home app to switch something off.
Also the fact that some content providers put annoying blocks on their apps (not just Amazon - some broadcasters in the UK prevent you from streaming live content), and all that means is you need to cast your tab/screen instead of using app-handoff (see bandwidth issues, above).
It's so close to the perfect streaming device that the ways in which it fails hurt that much more.
I've been using it a lot and it works very well, but it's a cli app. You can get a Chrome/Firefox app that gives you a button on your browser bar and sends the URL to whatever page you want to catt, that's a good way to cast anything youtube-dl supports to a Chromecast.
It amazes me that Google hasn't made a similar pieces of software for viewing x video format... The fact you have to use weird 3rd party stuff just to watch a movie you downloaded is strange to me.
It would instantly make Chromecast 10x more useful. But Google is focused with keeping it for streaming sites and browser pages only for some reason.
If they want to keep people using the stuff that has ads on it, then you have to make sure it works for every other scenario too. Otherwise people will replace it entirely.
What kills me about Chromecast now is that you _have_ to log in to a Google Account to manage any Chromecast devices. Previously you could manage them without signing in if you wanted to.
This is not quite as convenient, but if you have DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, you can put !translate at the beginning of the URL and it will redirect you.
If you don't want to use a third party, open the large version of the Firefox bookmarks manager (ctrl+shift+b) and make a new bookmark with URL https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto... and keyword "translate". Then you can just put the word "translate" before a URL and it will take you to Google Translate directly.
Chrome shows me a preview of what's going to be printed and lets me fit to page or scale. Firefox gives a print dialog that doesn't even have a preview button.
In Firefox, if you select "Print..." from the hamburger-menu (not Ctrl+P), you get an interface similar to the one in Chrome. Not sure why it's not the default. (Or File -> Print Preview)
The thing that drives me crazy about print in Firefox is that it is very difficult to turn off headers and footers. I don't want to leak information about my intranet or local filesystem structure (URL field) but the option for turning these off is to jump into dialog, a tab, and change six dropdowns. It doesn't even remember your selection. Are these ever even useful, or just a waste of ink and a security hole?
I honestly think that UI was pulled from microsoft word/office. It's been about a decade since I've used microsoft products so I'm willing to be wrong, but my understanding was that the print button was a shortcut to print document now, and the file print would take you to a print dialog
That's exactly right. Ctrl+P or clicking the button in the toolbar has always been a "quick print" dialog, while going File->Print brings up all the options. I remember some applications skipping the dialog altogether on the second click and using the settings from your last print session.
Using the latest Firefox on High Sierra, the print dialog for me doesn't include a preview where I can see what changes when I change options. But then, I get the same print dialog from Firefox's hamburger menu, so maybe there's something different about my machine.
I'm not near my Ubuntu (bionic beaver) laptop at the moment. Hopefully the hamburger menu print option on Firefox is better there. That's often the one I'm printing from since it's for home.
> For some reason universal notifications of casting devices stopped coming up on my Pixel
You should be able to re-enable them; if you want to enable them just on your phone, you can go into Settings, then the "Google" category, then "cast media controls" and then toggle the setting there. If you want to enable them for the chromecast as a whole to all phones, you can go into the Home app, click on the device, click the "settings" gear on the top right, and then toggle the "Let others control your cast media" setting.
(My roommate has a Chromecast, and I had to disable the notifications on my phone because I occasionally accidentally paused or unpaused what he was watching)
I assume it has to re-encode the content. Can you get any decent quality this way, as my gut feeling is that you need beefy CPU/GPU to maintain the framerate?
VLC on iOS will transcode any content that the Chromecast can't handle. It does suck down some CPU, but my iPhone 6 keeps up with it just fine. I can pick just about any file from my SMB share and stream it to the Chromcast from my phone. Still a bit buggy though.
Localcast does not transcode. If you've got MP4 video then it works well, otherwise the chromecast can't display it. Videostream managed by the parent comment on the PC does transcode and so is much more accepting.
Yes, you are being more precise where I was being vague. What I suppose I meant was that in practice, if it has a ".mp4" extension then it'll usually work, and if it doesn't then it usually won't.
>Also the fact that some content providers put annoying blocks on their apps
It's not so much a block as the fact that adding cast support needs explicit buy-in from the content provider and whatever else that entails since it's not some open protocol. And that's generally OK. We more or less moved from flash to standard videos. We'll, hopefully, also move from all these rubbish dongles to something sensible.
This is wonderful, its such a shame that the cast protocol is proprietary, the devices have the best UX I've seen from a multimedia dongle. No more faffing around with crap 10' UI's and cheap remote controls.
It's to trick people into thinking they can only buy a Sony Blu-ray player to go along with their Sony TV to go along their Sony soundbar. I'm glad everyone's stuff gets along for the most part but the fake vendor lock-in is lame.
That was no surprise for me, after using XBMC/Kodi for a few years with CEC support through HDMI. It was so natural to just pause/resume from the remote control that now I'm surprised people didn't know about this.
Yeah I use CEC to control our Apple TV. Never understood why everyone was complaining about the new Apple TV touch remote - we just use the TV remote. And our TV is like 8 years old now.
On a related note, there is also PipeCast, an attempt for a general library to cast to devices such as the Chromecast (but afaik not limited to it), from the people behind NewPipe
Miracast is not an alternative to Chromecast (officially called Google Cast nowadays). Miracast is a standard for wireless screen mirroring. If you play a Netflix show on your Miracast device, it plays on your phone, which then subsequently mirrors its own screen it to your Miracast display. This mirroring includes your entire phone UI and stuff like incoming notifications. At best, Miracast is an open standard alternative to Apple Airplay.
Chromecast is a standard for remote controlling video and audio devices. When you play a Netflix stream on a Chromecast display, you send it a video URL that the Chromecast dongle/box/built-in device plays independently. You can then pause/stop/rewind/fast-forward it from multiple devices in your network, none of which are playing the video themselves. Chromecast is immensely more useful and practical as a result. As a small detail, Chromecast additionally supports display mirroring but that's not why so many people use it.
There are no open alternatives for Chromecast. Some Kodi remote apps create a similar experience to stream video to Kodi. But the key of Chromecast's success is not its technical sophistication, but the fact that it has been adopted by a huge number of media services in their Android/iOS client apps. The reason for this is that it's (1) built using an easily available SDK from Google and (2) Chromecast devices enforce DRM, it's not possible (anymore) to cast to uncertified third party devices.
Ah yes, I thought DLNA was just for streaming but it also supports a "Digital Media Controller" spec for remote control devices that don't stream. So I suppose that ís an open Chromecast alternative.
> it's not possible (anymore) to cast to uncertified third party devices
That's my #1 gripe with it. The protocol is pretty freely available, but at the end there's a pretty strict authentication process requiring device keys stored in a secure enclave (is there a way of getting them out of there?).
One way to go would be shipping a modified version of the library not enforcing authentication, paving the way for unapproved devices (implementing the protocol is seemingly easy) - but it will likely not be adopted very widely.
Getting real Google Cast reception on your own device (I don't want to buy another hardware thing for something that is entirely software and that won't allow my custom software to run) will essentially involve breaking DRM.
I have a 1st gen chromecast which has root. It's been sitting in a wardrobe, but I suppose a clone could be made with some reverse engineering effort. I don't think the 1st gen ones had secure enclaves. They are pretty old at this point.
They should work, provided you let it update the software. However, the scene around rooting chromecasts died and I don't think you will retain root if you let it update. So you'll have to put it more effort to regain root, but in theory it should be possible.
Nevertheless, you'd have to ask Google why they effectively killed Miracast - it was supported in Android 4.2 and 5, then mysteriously removed in Android 6.
My old phone supported screen mirroring to my TV, I consider it a regression that my current one doesn't and I'd have to buy a dongle.
Under Android it's usually only one more press to "share" the media to something and that something can be a little helper app that talks to a Chromecast alternative (e.g. Kodi). So it is a worse user experience, but it's not totally dead.
They say that but I have never gotten it to actually find my chromecast. My goto for casting is now https://github.com/keredson/gnomecast which just works.
This is awesome. Chromecast is the main reason i still have chrome installed. I have to open up chrome, just for casting.
At work, all of our conference rooms have Chromecasts in them, because it's the only cross platform (including linux), cable free solution. And is often even easier to use then hdmi because you don't have to mess with display settings.
I would often open chrome, share the entire desktop, then go back to Firefox. This will be nice for my workflow.
Amazon is the reason why you can't cast their video on Chromecast. They have done everything in their power to thwart Google including taking down Chromecast for sale on the Amazon website.
I always thought this was the other way around: Amazon dropped Google Home products in favor of their Alexa, so Google killed YouTube on FireTV to damage Amazon.
To be honest that was the reason for me to get a Playstation 4, so I could watch YouTube on my TV again. (And obviously for playing some games...)
I remember Chromecast was the only reason I still had to switch back from FF to Chrome when they released "new firefox". If this goes it would be a gamechanger.
Awesome. Stuff like this gives me hope of a Firefox renaissance where people don't regard it as something outdated that you better replace with Chrome but a real and viable alternative.
FYI, you can use Chromium instead of Chrome if you only have it installed for the Chromecast support. Chromium is open source and should be less Google-infested.
You can cast your entire desktop with Chromium and still use Firefox for browsing. I think it works well for anything besides heavy video streaming, because that probably requires native Firefox support that the linked project provides.
I hate that Firefox went all-in with WebExtensions and removed XUL/XPCOM. Having to download another sidecar app alongside your extension is crappy UX.
That is not misleading at all. Many add-ons require such companion apps. Any add-on that wants to access the filesystem in a more broad way or needs to use raw sockets will need this type of native app to be present. There is a protocol for talking between the native app and the WebExtension called "Native Messaging":
Native Messaging allow an Add-on to launch a native application that follows its rules. Basically, the add-on needs to ask for nativeMessaging permission, as this one does in:
It would only be misleading if they didn't provide the bridge. They do, however, with links to multiple platforms right below the link to the extension.
This is cool, although Firefox for Android can already cast video to nearby Chromecasts. If I've got something in a tab that I want to cast, I usually send the tab to my phone first, then cast it.
I suppose this would be useful if you've only got an iPhone.
> Firefox for Android can already cast video to nearby Chromecast
This is less about Firefox itself casting video, and more about Android providing APIs to Chromecast. It's still Google doing the casting at the Android OS level; Firefox just leverages that.
I know this is a nitpick, but it's important to understand the distinction with a closed protocol like this is that Google is the gatekeeper.
The above linked Firefox addon is: highly unstable, made through painstaking reverse engineering, and has limited support (e.g. no Youtube). It's brilliant, comendable work, but I wonder how sustainable.
Firefox for Android can support it by calling Android's Chromecast support. They can release the code for calling those libraries.
Firefox for desktop can't implement the same since the OS behind it doesn't have such support.
This project requires you to install a bridge on the OS side and an add-on for calling it. It removes the need for Chrome for the users who already use Firefox as a primary browser.
However, recently it's got a lot worse. For some reason universal notifications of casting devices stopped coming up on my Pixel. That meant navigating back into the casting app, which may have lost its connection, or using the Google Home app to switch something off.
Also the fact that some content providers put annoying blocks on their apps (not just Amazon - some broadcasters in the UK prevent you from streaming live content), and all that means is you need to cast your tab/screen instead of using app-handoff (see bandwidth issues, above).
It's so close to the perfect streaming device that the ways in which it fails hurt that much more.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...