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Comment by Recoil42 | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe that's correct -- from what I can tell, when it's streaming webpages, it is actually only synchronizing two copies of Chrome -- one on the stick, one on your PC. It is not encoding/transmitting a video, as with AirPlay or Miracast.

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From what do you discern that? Given that everything they showed about the the product was variations of it receiving and decoding a video stream, it would be quite a switch for it to also have a full platform running a web browser in synchronicity. It seems much more likely that it is a direct video send, making it enormously simpler to design.

> The receiver device runs a scaled-down Chrome browser with a receiver application that receives data over Internet Protocol and transmits it to the television via HDMI.

https://developers.google.com/cast/

Very cool, though incredibly surprising (a browser is an intensive, complex thing, so will people have to constantly be patching their Chromestick?), especially given that once you add the cost of synchronizing all interactions, it seems so much easier to simply video grab the tab.

If anyone has this device, what is CPU usage on the source like when tab-casting?

Just to reply to myself, it seems that they do send encoded video- http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1j27ro/an_indepth_l...

And now people have published the extension of that, which is that you can cast whole screens and arbitrary content just as video streams - http://www.droid-life.com/2013/07/26/tip-chromecast-can-cast...

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