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Comment by eclipxe | Hacker News Reader

I think people confuse the ChromeCast tab/screen mirroring (which is slow and laggy) and ChromeCast DIAL/casting from apps like Netflix which actually just sends a URL to the Chromecast to stream

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Yeah, ChromeCast is a great product and a major marketing failure. Hardly anybody (even techies!!) understands that it is about competing with Apple TV (and now Amazon Fire TV) in the streaming market, not sending arbitrary stuff from the browser to your TV. Honestly, they should have launched without any of the confusing and crappy tab-casting functionality at all and probably called it something different than ChromeCast. The thing has (ridiculously cheaply) solved my entire internet-television-entertainment problem but I've literally never once used it for a browser tab.

as a techie that doesn't know how to use ChromeCast the way it should be used (as you've mentioned) would you mind enlightening me? How, exactly do you use it if not with the tab-casting?

Use any of the following apps, and use the button supplied in those apps to instruct your ChromeCast to play the given media directly.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast/app...

I don't understand why Google are so bad at advertising and marketing. Probably the only reason Chrome itself took off was that they put a big ad for it on the Google homepage. Maybe they should now switch that ad and advertise something else?

But even with the latter there is lag for pausing/playing.

Okay, that's great. But I don't use Netflix at all. I'd like to watch something from VLC, but apparently the plug in that enabled that was killed. Google's so simple its stupid makes it impossible for me to find out how the thing actually works and why I can't try to configure it to work any better.

It's awesome for YouTube and you can stream any local media using Plex.

+1 for Plex - works perfectly from the browser/iPhone/iPad/Android phones and tablets. Great Chromecast integration.

AllCast (one of the more notable apps that supports streaming from local apps like VLC) got its Chromecast support back once the official SDK (finally) came out:

http://phandroid.com/2014/02/04/allcast-chromecast-update/

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