We need meat in the Chromecast sandwich

GOOGLE must deliver in the land where content is king.

TRYING out different media configurations to bring the internet to the big screen has been an obsession of mine for eight years — ever since I began using Windows Media Centre on a computer connected to my old TV set.

My 2006 TV didn’t have an HDMI connector, rather an old SCART connector that let me stream internet content to the TV, including telecasts, music and video podcasts from around the world, from a purpose-built PC.

I paid well over $1000 for the privilege, shelling out for a computer, TV tuner card, graphics card, Microsoft’s expensive software and cables.

(You can watch video about this old 2006 setup here, here and here.)

Fast forward to 2014, and you can achieve most of this for $49, courtesy of Google’s new Chromecast dongle, which is ­finally launching in Australia, having debuted in the US in the middle of last year.

All you need is Chromecast, and a budget $200-$300 TV with a spare HDMI slot.

The wireless Chromecast dongle looks like a very fat USB stick. You plug one end into the HDMI slot, and the included power cord into the other end. You switch your TV input to the HDMI channel, and you’re in business.

There is a setup procedure. You download the Chromecast app, then discover the Chromecast dongle with it, and link the dongle to your home network’s WiFi. That’s about it.

So what do you see when you switch your input to the dongle? Just some pleasant photos supplied by Google, nothing more — no apps, icons, or menus.

That’s because the Chromecast dongle is useless on its own. You make it work using a smartphone or computer attached to the same home network.

Chromecast works a bit like Apple’s Airplay, or Miracast on Android phones.

You fire up an app such as YouTube, choose a video or movie, and press a button in the app to stream it to your TV or home theatre system.

Once you have Chromecast installed on a home network, you’ll find a Chromecast button available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps that have been upgraded by developers to work with Chromecast.

Chromecast is billed to work with iPhones, iPads and Windows phones as well as Android devices, PCs and Macs.

But there is one enormous difference as to how Chromecast works from standard mirroring.

Chromecast instead performs a handshaking routine. It grabs the source of the video, and then streams it directly to your TV, bypassing your phone altogether.

If you want, you can switch your phone or tablet off, or search for other media you want to see, and create a playlist.

Or you can use your device as a remote. You can pause, skip to another section of the video, or change the playback volume using your phone’s volume rocker.

I first set the TV’s volume using its normal remote to mid range, and then exclusively used the phone to make volume adjustments.

By directly streaming from the source and not via a phone or tablet, Chromecast can achieve smooth full 1080p high-definition quality in playback and it’s very acceptable.

There were pauses in playback. It did take several seconds for streaming to transfer from my device to the big screen after pressing the Chromecast button. Initially you see the app logo — such as YouTube or Pandora, while you wait.

And it took a few seconds to resume streaming after skipping to another part of a movie — but this didn’t worry me.

One point: I noticed Chromecast connects only to the 2.4 ­Gigahertz WiFi band and not the faster 5 Gigahertz band on newer dual channel routers. That’s something Google should address in future.

The main issue with Chromecast is content: namely, how many apps are there that can stream decent content to Australian Chromecast dongles?

There’s certainly a commitment by the big streaming media players such as Foxtel, Quickflix, Telstra BigPond and ABC iview to upgrade their apps for use with Chromecast.

Foxtel says its Presto movie app will be Chromecast-ready sometime in July for both iOS and Android devices.

Quickflix says it’s in the final stages of testing a Chromecast-enabled app for both iOS and Android devices, while Telstra has been negotiating with Google to get BigPond movies, ARL and NFL sporting telecasts, music and other material, on to Chromecast.

The ABC says its iview app will be Chromecast-compatible in about two months.

Once that’s happened, Chrome­cast will be a compelling proposition, but as of today, none of this is available.

I was able to try out some apps that do work now: YouTube, Pandora and Rdio music services, Vevo music videos, Red Bull ­Action TV and Viki movies all worked fine with Chromecast. But these are hardly at the core of mainstream Australian entertainment.

If you are a Netflix user, and there are many in Australia now, you have some hope of accessing US Netflix on Chromecast if you use a virtual private network (VPN), and if your router has a “static routes” setting that lets you redirect the in-built Chromecast domain name server (DNS) settings. You also change your router DNS settings to the VPN.

That’s a techy discussion, but I got it to work. For more details, search online.

You can also stream your own media — videos, TV programs, movies, music and photos, stored on your home network — to Chromecast using the Plex app. I’m a big fan of Plex as it presents your home content in an attractive way, with metadata added.

You run a Plex app on your phone or tablet, and Chromecast home content to the big screen from there. Plex also includes streamed video podcasts from the likes of Revision3, Ted TV and CNN.

You can also mirror contents from a Chrome browser running on a PC or Mac to the TV by installing the Google cast extension – just make sure mirroring is disabled when you are browsing the internet privately.

In fact some websites advertise themselves as being “Chromecast ready”. You can stream their video contents to the big screen from your computer.

You can’t go wrong with Chromecast.

Rating: 8.5/10
Price: $49