Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sylos | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, you could cast with the Google Cast extension over Chromium.

And it's generally believed that Google moved the Chromecast-functionality into Chrome and away from an extension to not necessarily lock out Chromium, but rather to lock out other Chromium-based browsers which could use their extensions, so for example Opera.

Firefox and, I believe, Edge are also getting support for Chrome extensions in the foreseeable future, so this might have increased the incentive to lock out browsers that can use their extensions, too.

View on HN

What is that speculation based on? Why wouldn't Google want more browsers to be able to Cast?

My opinion: I feel like this is a pro-user move with an unfortunate side effect of breaking/unsupporting an extension. If I just want to cast to my TV why should I have to hunt for an extension. I'd rather it "just work" via a context menu in the browser.

It favors a particular implementation (Chromecast) in a market where there are several competing standards and no established leader. Shouldn't Miracast, for example, "just work" as well?

I don't know of any competing standards. The Matchstick tried but failed (I think they had DRM problems). Miracast is completely different, it deals with video to remove displays where as chromecast (primarily) is about loading a URL on a remote display with some communication primitives.

I really wish there was a competing product/standard, but I don't know of one.

Miracast is a streaming endpoint. As in, you typically throw H264+AAC at it.

Chromecast, however, is amount remote controlling a secondary Chrome HTML canvas on the Chromecast, where the intended use is manipulating a <video> object.

You can cast a tab to your Chromecast, thus treating it like Miracast, but that is largely not what the Chromecast is meant for.

Example, I can have Youtube (the website or the phone app) cast a queue of videos to the Chromecast, interact with that queue from multiple devices, and even disconnect all devices, and the Chromecast keeps playing because it streams the video directly from Youtube, not my phone or browser.

Miracast cannot do any of these things.

In addition, the only functioning Miracast device I've ever discovered is Microsoft's Wireless Display Adapter. All the built in Miracast end point impls in TVs and such are utter garbage and usually don't work.

>What is that speculation based on? Why wouldn't Google want more browsers to be able to Cast?

You have to remember how Google's business works. Ads on search is a massive part (majority?) of their revenue. The main reason for Chrome existing is to direct people to Google search via the address bar.

Chrome now uploads all browsing history associated with a Google login too, so it's a lot of extra valuable information for ads.

Given that there is a support article on how to make Chrome use the cast extension by disabling the media router functionality, this seems unlikely.

https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6349849?hl=en

Reply on news.ycombinator.com