Chromecast effect on Echo

[haydongreenbutton]

Strangely with the Chromecast's release I don't see anything about it here.

I sincerely hope there are some Ceton engineers and product managers spending some time figuring out how they can integrate Google's new video 'flinging' protocols into the Echo. Of course, please do this AFTER you publicly release the Android software update to Echo. It looks like it'll be by far the quickest way of getting other people's content to the device.

That'd be just awesome to have the Companion App start up WMC content on the Echo and just as easily a Netflix App start up video right from there too. And, oh yeah, the Echo supports the traditional remote control which is better for TV viewing (FF/Skip/etc).

At this point hopefully it's clear to Ceton that the one differentiator they have in the Echo is that it's a WMC extender. That has to be their priority. Bringing Netflix and all is fine on top of Android but WMC is why people have bought the Echo. Don't ignore that key reason for existence or $35 dollar products will eat your lunch.

[Sammy2]

I don't think that the chromecast has any effect on the echo. Android 4.3 may though. And I think that ceton realized long ago that the only differentiating thing about the echo is the ability to tune Live TV with an EPG and PVR associated with a PC. The other stuff is what will make it better than any other extender out there.

[wanabefree]

I don't have the technical knowledge to know if it is even possible but what if echo or some form of extender software could be incorporated into the ChromeCast dongle.
Personally I am pretty fed up with Ceton's lack of communication and endless delays. I would look forward to some other competition in this market.

[Sammy2]

Ceton has already stated that the echo f/w will not be sold independently of the echo device. Also, it is not possible to flash another device with it because the f/w is distributed via the internet based on a device's MAC ID. I suppose it is possible to reverse-engineer the f/w but that would take considerable time and effort. You can see if you can find a copy of SoftSled extender software someplace and try that in the mean time.

[mdavej]

My Chromecast should arrive in a few days, but I don't see why it wouldn't be able to sling Remote Potato, hence play back my recordings. As for live TV, if I can figure out a way to display it in a web page, it should work as well. Perhaps a new extension similar to IE Tab, only it would have WMC in it. Do you guys think such a thing might be possible?

[haydongreenbutton]

My Chromecast should arrive in a few days, but I don't see why it wouldn't be able to sling Remote Potato, hence play back my recordings. As for live TV, if I can figure out a way to display it in a web page, it should work as well. Perhaps a new extension similar to IE Tab, only it would have WMC in it. Do you guys think such a thing might be possible?

A few things about how the Chromecast works:

• When playing video, the smart device (Chrome browser, Android device, etc) initiates the video, the compressed video is then streamed directly to the Chromecast.
  When displaying web pages, Chrome directly writes rendered images to the Chromecast for display. So trying to display video in a browser window is quite less than ideal because it's an uncompressed signal being delivered over wifi.

The thing about the Chromecast that's cool isn't really the device itself but the protocols that Google developed and have released freely for anyone to use. It makes those two cases above easy. Which is why Ceton can implement it in their device and end up with some good support without having to do too much work.

[mdavej]

I think the main hurdle is going to be that Ceton wants to sell Echos, not support another company's cheaper hardware. So any integration will have to be done by end users, not Ceton.

[foxwood]

If I was in the market for an Echo, it would be because it acts as a WMC extender - the $179 price tag of the Echo is only about 20% hardware, 80% function*.

As such, the Chromecast isn't competing with the Echo.

As things stand, WMc Extenders (Xboxes, Echos, Linksys DMA2x00s, etc) are designed to work really well with a remote control. Chromecasting, like Win8 Metro apps, is not inherently remote-friendly. So for many people, switching to a hypotehetical Chromecast mode on an Echo would mean putting the remote down and picking up a phone/tablet instead. Being able to say to my better half "can you pause that show you're watching, so I can show you this funny video about a bear that I just found on YouTube?" isn't necessarily something that would make the Echo particularly more attractive.

I think adding a "Chromecast receiver" function to the Echo would only be useful in so far as there's a real possibility that Chromecasting might take off, and lots of existing services might add Chromecast buttons to their apps, and they might work better than native android apps (because it's not clear how well you can control an android app with a TV style remote). But it's not at all clear that that's going to be an option - the Chromecast Reciever service isn't an Android app.

So I don't think Chromecast is likely to make people who are in the market for a WMC Extender less likely to buy an Extender, and I don't think it's a Chromecast function, if it every arrives, would make the Echo sufficently more useful than an XBox (though HD Netflix without a Live subscription would definitely be a consideration, if everything else worked properly).


(Ignoring entirely the perception that the "80% function " is only 80% functional, so it's really 20% hardware, 64% function, 16% missing in action!)

[djmc321]

Looks like someone has ported the Chromecast functionality to an Android app.

http://www.xda-developers.com/android/t ... cheapcast/

Hopefully Echo Android will allow side-loading APKs?

[Prindle19]

Installed Cheapcast on an old Acer 200 which I use for my bar audio today and it works great.

Finally, I can remotely control Google Play Music since there is still no API for folks like Slingbox developers to work with.

I also received the 3 backordered Chromecasts I ordered today.

I love them.

I put them on three of the 5 tvs where I have echos currently installed.

I love the flick to functionality and it is clear that more if not every streaming service will support chromecast eventually.

What would be killer would be if the Echo supported Chromecast as an overlay / pass through and wouldn't require input switching.

Watching TV, want to throw up a video or Chrome tab (fantasy football live stats, Sunday Ticket stream, etc) just flick it over whatever TV you want and when the content is done, resume live TV or whatever the echo was doing before. Not having to switch inputs is a huge advantage the echo could offer

[barnabas1969]

You can use your smartphone to play YouTube videos to your TV (does not work on extenders) without Chromecast or cheapcast. For more information, see here:
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=9&t=3443

[foxwood]

You can use your smartphone to play YouTube videos to your TV (does not work on extenders) without Chromecast or cheapcast. For more information, see here:
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=9&t=3443

There's rather more to ChromeCast than YouTube. If anything, the example you point to of pairing Chrome on the HTPC with the Android YouTube client was a prototype for ChromeCast, but the potential for ChromeCast lies in the possibility that other clients, besides the YouTube and Netflix clients that it ships with, will use the ChromeCast APIs.

And there's an awful lot of TVs out there without a PC attached to them that can never take advantage of Chrome browser pairing, so the ChromeCast has a lot more potential for 3rd party developers, if they have the kind of client that could benefit from the large screen.

[barnabas1969]

You can use your smartphone to play YouTube videos to your TV (does not work on extenders) without Chromecast or cheapcast. For more information, see here:
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=9&t=3443

There's rather more to ChromeCast than YouTube. If anything, the example you point to of pairing Chrome on the HTPC with the Android YouTube client was a prototype for ChromeCast, but the potential for ChromeCast lies in the possibility that other clients, besides the YouTube and Netflix clients that it ships with, will use the ChromeCast APIs.

And there's an awful lot of TVs out there without a PC attached to them that can never take advantage of Chrome browser pairing, so the ChromeCast has a lot more potential for 3rd party developers, if they have the kind of client that could benefit from the large screen.

Yes, I agree with you. I was simply pointing out that people can use YouTube from their smartphone without buying the Chromecast nor switching HDMI inputs on their TV.

I might buy a Chromecast just to play with it (and because it's inexpensive). Who knows, maybe someone will develop something for it that will give me a compelling reason to use it. For now, I can use the aforementioned method to play YouTube on my living room TV. When I first set it up, I thought it was just a novelty. I never thought I would actually enjoy watching YouTube videos on the big screen, but it's really fun to do. Searching for video's on my phone/tablet and sending them to the big screen is very easy and fun to do. It beats the heck out of using a TV remote to type your search phrase.

[foxwood]

As you point out yourself, the $35 price point isn't much of a barrier. What I'm interested to see is how ChromeCast handles HDMI-CEC. I seen lots of hoopla about how the ChromeCast can turn on your TV using HDMI-CEC, but I don't care about that - turning the TV on is not that big a deal. I expect that the Chromecast will be able to tell the TV to switch to the Chromecast HDMI port automatically, but the real trick will be to get it to switch the TV back to the HDMI port that was in use before I called the ChromeCast up.

If it can do that, then the HDMI port switching is no longer an issue. And I can have a ChromeCast in the living room TV and the bedroom TV, and use the same user interface for both, which isn't true with the Chrome pairing approach, which will only work in the livingroom.

It also just struck me that the YouTube 3D channel could also take advantage of this, by using HDMI-CEC to tell a 3D TV to switch to 3D mode automatically as well. That could be really useful, because the 3D channel is hard to use if you have to switch back and forth between 2D and 3D mode to select videos.

[barnabas1969]

I was wondering about HDMI-CEC myself. It's nice to know that it will turn on your TV. The HDMI-CEC command to switch inputs (to the device that is requesting it) is closely related to the power-on command. However, there is no HDMI-CEC support for "switch to previous input", unless the Chromecast can query the HDMI bus to find the currently-selected input BEFORE it sends the "change input" command (very unlikely).

There is also no HDMI-CEC command to tell the TV to switch to 3D mode. If you're playing a side-by-side or top/bottom 3D video, you'll need to tell the TV that it's 3D by using your remote-control (or with an IR blaster that is controlled using a program like EventGhost). The only way the TV knows that it's 3D content is if it's frame-packed like a 3D Bluray movie.

I'm actually deep into the HDMI-CEC stuff right now. I'm studying to create my own EventGhost plugin to control the Pulse-Eight HDMI-CEC device.

I've been using the RCAware device for more than a year, but it has some stability problems which require the device to be power cycled (meaning that the USB cable needs to be unplugged, or the power cable needs to be pulled from the back of the PC). RCAware has been completely non-responsive for quite a number of months, and they have actually stopped selling the device/driver/software.

Due to the way HDMI-CEC is implemented on the RCAware device (causing ALL CEC messages to be displayed in the EventGhost log), I can tell you with certainty that there are no HDMI-CEC commands to change the 3D mode of the TV.

And, to make matters worse, CEC is supported very differently from one TV manufacturer to another, and even from one model to another (made by the same manufacturer).

While your idea sounds great... it just doesn't exist today.

From what I've been told by the Pulse-Eight developers, they are working with the HDMI forum to come up with the next set of specs for HDMI-CEC. But, even if they add some kind of 3D commands... they probably won't exist in your TV (even in the next firmware update for your TV)... and probably not in new TV's for several years either.

To be honest, the Pulse-Eight software is light-years behind the RCAware software. But, at least the Pulse-Eight device's firmware seems to be more stable than the RCAware device's firmware. And... the Pulse-Eight devs are actually RESPONDING to me... whereas the RCAware (and RainshadowTech) people are not.