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Comment by lodovic | Hacker News Reader

Only the Chromecast is interesting, but that is really becoming less and less every day due to their aggressive advertising.

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Being kind of a cheapskate, I've tried chromecast and the Amazon one and then bought an AppleTV device. I haven't had issues like I did with other dongle-like devices with having to restart them when there was a hiccup or crash of some kind - which is especially annoying when watching live sports.

I now have two AppleTV devices

(I use the word 'device' because they also have a streaming product called AppleTV+, which btw has some really good shows, and I think you can get the streaming service w/o the device)

I am still pissed off since buying a Chromecast just to realize there was no way to watch videos on a harddrive on the home network.

You might want to check Videostream for Chromecast ? There's both a mobile app that links to your PC and also a desktop app. Last time I checked, VLC also allowed casting of videos on your PC(although iirc was more iffy with subtitles, etc) though not sure if there's mobile support, and I believe there are also other paid apps that can be used to cast videos. If you're referring to seeing videos directly from a hard drive without a PC, a TV with usb support should take care of that (long time ago, I had even a Bluray player that had usb and was used in similar fashion to cast videos from a usb flash drive)

At the time, like 4 years ago, I could make nothing work except poor screencasts. That functionality should be native.

It is easier to just plug a laptop into the TV than using a Chromecast.

Maybe I should give it another try.

BubbleUPnP for DLNA/Chromecast

On my PC I can open chrome and stream to the Chromecast on my network. I drag videos from the desktop onto chrome and it plays fine.

Only reason I have chrome installed lol.

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