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Comment by cprecioso | Hacker News Reader

The latest Chromecast is an Android TV box with its own remote (in the stick form factor). Coming from Google, it's probably the highest quality Android TV box you'll find, and quite affordable. It does come with some Google "bells and whistles", but nothing I found intrusive, and they can be disabled.

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Nope, the nVidia Shield is miles ahead.

Chromecast with Google TV doesn't have TrueHD support, ethernet, 6/8ch PCM HDMI output, automatic frame-rate switch, game streaming (yes this is an obvious troll, but still it is true). nVidia Shield have those, and more.

The google TV chromecast does support wired ethernet, but you need to buy the separate adapter for it.

The nVidia Shield is also like 3-4x as expensive.

I love my 2015 Shield. I do with that Nvidia would release a new Shield with a better SoC though. Even the 2019 model has essentially the same chip. The chip is still fine for all streaming, I'd just like more horsepower for emulation.

Then hope the UK government approves the ARM acquisition.

You can turn on "apps only" mode which gets rid of most of the pre-loaded stuff, though one massive advertisement remains on the main homepage. Huge improvement over the Fire Stick which doesn't let you turn off the Amazon junk that takes over 90% of the menu real estate. Roku is still clean and simple and you can hide stuff you don't want. But massive downside is its a closed ecosystem and you can't load APKs and are at the whims of Roku removing apps after you buy it.

I 100% didn't know there were ads on the UI -- guess my adblocking DNS setup is working perfectly

The UI is 95%+ ads, I wonder how it looks like with adblocking.

Be aware that you'll be forced to share your GPS location with Google during the set-up, there's no way around it. You'll also need to do the setup with the Google Home app which requires you to set up a "Home", which is way overkill if all you want is a Chromecast.

Also, the Nvidia Shield is truly a lot better in terms of hardware and application support. Quite a lot of Chromecast "apps" are inferior to the Android TV versions that also run on the Shield.

> Be aware that you'll be forced to share your GPS location with Google during the set-up

I think you're misinterpreting the meaning of the location permission: it's probably requesting that to connect to the Chromecast via WiFi Direct or Bluetooth. Android buckets that into location because you can figure out a user's location by looking at nearby WiFi networks/Bluetooth beacons.

Last time I looked Netflix wasn't available on it, is that still the case?

That was never the case. The remote even has a dedicated Netflix button.

It was the case at one point [0]. It stopped me buying one. It seems it's back in a limited form [1]

[0] https://9to5google.com/2020/11/25/google-tv-netflix-dropped/

[1] https://9to5google.com/2021/03/11/netflix-directory-comes-ba...

Those articles are about the content aggregation feature of the "Google TV" app.

The Netflix app has been working the entire time on the "Chromecast with Google TV" device, which is what cprecioso recommended.

That's referring to the aggregated listing view that the device provides across many providers. There are still individual apps. The Netflix app (which is what the dedicated button on the remote launches by default) still works. I'm a Netflix subscriber and have been using the new Chromecast since it was released.

Netflix is definitely available, and the main app I use on there

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