Harken back to Episode 2, where Chromecast was mentioned. You should recall that at the time, Chromecast was unable to send local content to your TV because the SDK was hobbled to not allow this. There were some hacks like using Chrome with an extension, but it didn’t work well. The fellow who created AllCast, Koushik Dutta was unhappy about his app being disabled. Well, that situation has been turned around and for the moment, AllCast works again.
I brought one home from a trip the the USA last year. I mentioned in the G+ Bad Voltage community at the time that the usual trick for streaming outside the USA, proxies and such wasn’t working for Chromecast because it was using hard-coded DNS servers.
I’m a little shy about posting links now and want you to know I have nothing to do with Chromecast, Google, AllCast or anything else mentioned here
Have any of you found a good use for Chromecast (or does anyone even have one)?
Eeeenteresting. Do you get the sense that AllCast now works because it is Properly Allowed Technology, or is it taking advantage of a loophole and might get re-hobbled at some point?
I am hoping that Kouch “learned his lesson” and has jumped on the public SDK without going further. However, we’ve been discussing this on Twitter (we being developers and myself) and agree that you never know when the urg will be pulled out if you’re depending on someone else’s platform. One dev said “that goes double for Google. I lost months on Wave!”.
Chromecast will only be really useful when it’s relatively easy to use with almost anything. That means ubiquitous “Cast” buttons on appropriate apps and an SDK that’s stable.
Agreed a bit on the rug-pulling potential of using someone else’s platform, but frankly everything you do is on someone else’s platform unless you’re a chip designer for Intel, and you miss out on a lot of stuff if you refuse. So I wouldn’t take it too far. It does mean that it’s fairly easy for a platform provider to burn its dependents by screwing them one too many times – if you’re massive, like Google and Apple and MS, then you can afford to do this a lot because you’re massive and people can’t afford to ignore you, but it’s a salutary thing for smaller players…
No question, we drive or ride on roads, someone can decide to slap a toll on them, change the speed limit, etc. In return for Google’s conditions and a possible problem down the road, though, you get a huge leg up when you have a good idea and want to implement it quickly. One recent example of this is a Hangout app that ties Hangouts to a conference server. All they had to do to add great video support to their audio server was to make one call in the app
Back to topic, pulling out of rugs, look at what Twitter did. Google’s most recent big step was the removal of the XMPP compatibility from Gtalk. I do not believe they’re worse than any large corp, though, and as I say, they provide a great platform in many of the available services.
I found, and have seen others complain, that video stutters on a Chrome tab. I don’t recall whether I was getting any audio. I think the Chrome tab thing was really for stills anyway, to show photos to your granny and such.
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