You get the dongle you pay for in Google’s Chromecast

Since the launch and relative flop of Google TV, Google is vastly scaling back its approach to getting video to a TV. Its new effort is as stripped-down as the Chromecast itself, an unassuming HDMI dongle that comes with a small but robust set of capabilities: playing video from YouTube and Netflix or mirroring anything you can pull up in a Chrome browser tab. While it’s far from functionally perfect, enough of the experience is simple and straightforward enough that it bears seeing where Google and its hopefully growing list of partners take this project.

The Chromecast dongle is small, 2.8 inches in length and a half-inch thick, and it sticks straight out of an HDMI port. The device does require power, which can be provided from the HDMI port itself if your TV or monitor is new enough to have the HDMI 1.4+ MHL spec.

Otherwise, you need the included micro-USB-to-USB cable to hook up to your TV’s USB port or to an AC adapter plugged into the wall. An HDMI extender is also included in the box, if your port setup can’t accommodate the dongle itself. The device has a button on it, and pressing it doesn’t turn the device on or off, but allows the Chromecast to boot into USB boot mode.

Setup involves giving the Chromecast your Wi-Fi password so it can pull in content on its own steam.

Setup is very straightforward; plugging the Chromecast in and setting it as the displayed input gives you a screen that directs you to google.com/chromecast/setup, a page that invites you to download a Chromecast application. Opening the application displays a list of nearby Chromecasts, and when you select one, the screen the Chromecast is connected to will change to display a combination of letters and numbers.

The app asks you to verify that the numbers and letters are the same and then asks you to enter your Wi-Fi password to get the Chromecast online. Hence, your own Wi-Fi password is about as much security as you get; once the Chromecast is set up, any other device connected to the network (and with the Chromecast app/extensions) can push content to it.

There is no iOS app yet (even though Google told us it would work on iOS devices), but iPhone and iPad users can still play because you can set up the Chromecast via Safari. The only added step is that you have to switch your phone or tablet’s Wi-Fi network from your own to the one the Chromecast is broadcasting so you can hand it your Wi-Fi password.

And so you enter the glorious world of barebones, quasi-streaming video push. Supported Android devices and anything that can run the Chrome browser are free to throw video or content to the TV.

The Chromecast does have some light settings available to tweak. Though the device’s spec sheet states that it supports up to 1080p and my monitor is 1920×1080, the only options I’m offered are 480p, 720p, and 720p “high bitrate.” These settings affect tab mirroring only, though; video throughput for apps can reach full HD resolution. You can minimize any letterboxing bars by fiddling with the full-screen settings, and there’s also a setting to automatically make Chrome full-screen on the source computer when it’s casting content to a Chromecast.

When you select a video to cast, the app makes sure you know where you’re sending it. If you have a Chromecast in every room, best give them unique names.

Cast that content

To start simply, we’ll begin using a tablet or smartphone to supply content to our Chromecast. These Android devices can feed the Chromecast only with YouTube, Netflix, or Google Play video content.

Once pressed, the device throws both the video and audio to the Chromecast, which will then start playing it. From then on, you can pause the video as well as scrub through it to different points. If you have a TV that powers the USB port regardless of whether the TV is on, you can cast a video to the Chromecast at any time, and the dongle will power your TV on, switch the input, and start playing whatever it’s been given.

Being a refugee of the jankiest kinds of streaming setups, I was expecting the sound to continue to come out of the device throwing the video rather than getting fed to the display’s speakers where the Chromecast was plugged in. However, the device not only pushes audio from compatible apps, but it reflects the volume setting on the device.

I could see the Chromecast being immensely useful to a roomful of people with smartphones. I’ve seen enough gatherings of friends turn into a turn-based game of “here’s a funny YouTube video I saw the other day.” I’ve even seen hosts use YouTube as a source for a background playlist. Given those situations, a seamless solution for multiple people to get video on a big screen without having to crowd around one computer seems nice. All you have to do is get everyone to spell the Wi-Fi password right (Never. Gonna. Happen).

On the topic of playlists, Ars editor Megan Geuss said that a Google employee at the Chromecast’s launch event described to her a sort of playlist-curation feature that would allow videos to be pushed to a Chromecast and played in order or rearranged. Right now, it’s possible to queue up YouTube videos, but only from a single device; trying to cast anything from another device, even if it’s from YouTube, will break the queue. Hence, my dream of YouTube queue collaboration will remain just that, but I hope it’s something that will be added in the future.

The text at the bottom left of the screen is selectable to add YouTube videos to a queue.

The playback from apps isn’t exactly snappy; it can take 10 or 15 seconds from the time you press the cast button to when the video actually plays on your computer. But once it’s playing, you can go about your business doing other stuff on the tablet, which is kind of great; your usual couch device is now providing your entertainment both across the room and in your hands.

Even when the Chromecast was playing something from a tablet on which I was simultaneously playing a YouTube video, I didn’t encounter any problems—the tasks of the Chromecast and the tablet are entirely separate, so in theory, they’ll never affect each other. If you head back out to, for instance, the browsing interface on the Netflix app, a blue bar will appear along the top of the screen to show the video “now playing” in the casting app. If you tap the bar, you’ll return to the stand-in screen with the pause button and scrub bar.

Power to the PC

When it comes to using your computer with the Chromecast, the Chrome Web browser acts as a skeleton key, unlocking capabilities in the Chromecast that are unavailable to tablets and smartphones. Streaming sites (illicit or otherwise), or movie files on your computer is easy—anything that can be dragged into a Chrome browser tab is fair game.

As AllThingsD pointed out, the Chromecast also circumvents some service restrictions of streaming businesses. Hulu, for instance, reserves TV access as a feature for Hulu Plus membership. With the Chromecast, users can bypass that monthly fee and just stream regular Hulu to their display. Of course, they could always do this with the right combination of cables and a modest amount of technical know-how, but the Chromecast makes it a little more seamless.

There are also plenty of legal activities to enjoy: casting tabs streaming video from the NBC site, or Spotify music, or non-YouTube video sites. You can even set up an Aereo tab and watch broadcast TV on your TV in a delightfully Rube Goldbergian fashion.

On a few occasions, casting a tab to the Chromecast produced some weird artifacts. For example, using it to play a YouTube video without using the cast button sometimes results in the video cutting rapidly back and forth between scenes as they change (hence, always use the cast button). Animated ads will also produce the effect, and I would even get it when paging through Flickr photos (shown in the video above).

YouTube streaming for a computer goes much more smoothly if you don’t try to cast the tab, but use the cast button instead.

On some occasions, this would slow the entire computer to a crawl, while virtually no other programs were running, and the cast button would pop an error stating that other processes on the computer were slowing down the Chromecast. Look ye inward, Chromecast, and you might find answers to some of your problems.

The Chromecast (and especially the Chrome tab casting) is supposed to be in beta, so it may have a long road ahead of it before it stops occasionally flaking. Google has a thorough explanation of the technical challenges of streaming both a Chrome tab as well as pulling in app-provided video. Another downside of Chrome tab casting is that you don’t get the volume controls, so you’ll still need your display’s remote.

The Chromecast is roughly mirroring Chrome tabs, with a 2-ish second delay, though you can’t see anything outside the tab or your cursor. My annoying tendency is to treat Chromecasting like streaming, so if I have multiple things I want to cast and I finish one of them, I close the tab rather than pulling up the next thing I want to play, breaking the connection and requiring me to re-cast the next tab.