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New Chromecast


Sammy

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1 minute ago, troyhough said:

What are your thoughts on the actual playback of the device, specifically with being able to Direct Play all/most Emby content/files?

I haven't experienced any problems but haven't done exhaustive testing.  When using a device I don't really pay any attention to if something is direct playing or not.  If it plays properly with the proper quality I don't really care.

At first blush, I would say it is on par with a Mi in what it handles internally.

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arche
5 hours ago, ebr said:

Who the heck decided to put the power button on the bottom of the remote?

Has anyone ever seen a remote where the power button wasn't at the top?

Do they think that if they make it hard enough to find the button, you just won't turn it off?

Probably the same person who decided that something that's on the back of the tv needed to come in different colors....

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aperry

Mine arrived a few days ago, and I was excited to have a cheap, simple and small (and expectantly high quality) device for outdoor movie nights, connected to a projector and a bluetooth speaker. Unfortunately, my experience hasn't been great. I have two Shield TV's already, so maybe my expectations were a little too high. My observations:

1. This is the first USB-powered streamer that I can't seem to power from the projector's USB port. It only partially boots, and shows an icon asking me to connect it to a proper power supply. Bummer, but not a deal breaker. 

2. I get a persistent audio sync problem with bluetooth audio devices where the audio is always behind the video by a small but very distracting amount. After testing three devices (Bose Portable Home Speaker, Galaxy Buds Plus, and a 2011 Bose Soundlink speaker), the two newer devices always exhibit this sync problem whereas the older device plays perfectly. This is a deal breaker because I bought the expensive Bose Portable Home Speaker specifically for this outdoor environment, and it's always out of sync and basically unusable.

3. As others have mentioned, overall the new Google TV interface is a step backward compared to the older Android TV interface. There's too much content being pushed, and not enough capability to add what I really want to see (like app rows with my content). I can live with it on this device, but I'm terrified to read comments implying the Shield TV might one day get this. Yikes.

4. I can't tell if this is improving or not, but startup is a little strange. Sometimes the thing just sits there with an empty home screen for more than 20 seconds before the content/images finally begin to appear. I can't tell if caches are just slow to fill? Not a serious problem, but kind of weird that Google would be comfortable giving users this first impression. Once everything is loaded fully, I find the UI performance to be reasonably fast. 

The remote? It gets the job done, but it's kind of cheap feeling and not very well organized and doesn't fit the hand very well. Again, maybe I'm spoiled by the (newer) Shield remote, which IMHO is one of the best I've used. 

I'm on the fence as to whether I'll keep it and wait for the bluetooth issue to (maybe) be fixed. For the price I can live with the other issues.

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troyhough
1 hour ago, aperry said:

Mine arrived a few days ago, and I was excited to have a cheap, simple and small (and expectantly high quality) device for outdoor movie nights, connected to a projector and a bluetooth speaker. Unfortunately, my experience hasn't been great. I have two Shield TV's already, so maybe my expectations were a little too high. My observations:

1. This is the first USB-powered streamer that I can't seem to power from the projector's USB port. It only partially boots, and shows an icon asking me to connect it to a proper power supply. Bummer, but not a deal breaker. 

Google has made this very clear and included a power supply that you plug in the wall. If you want more horsepower, you need more power.

2. I get a persistent audio sync problem with bluetooth audio devices where the audio is always behind the video by a small but very distracting amount. After testing three devices (Bose Portable Home Speaker, Galaxy Buds Plus, and a 2011 Bose Soundlink speaker), the two newer devices always exhibit this sync problem whereas the older device plays perfectly. This is a deal breaker because I bought the expensive Bose Portable Home Speaker specifically for this outdoor environment, and it's always out of sync and basically unusable.

No highs, No Lows... must be Bose! Bose sucks.

3. As others have mentioned, overall the new Google TV interface is a step backward compared to the older Android TV interface. There's too much content being pushed, and not enough capability to add what I really want to see (like app rows with my content). I can live with it on this device, but I'm terrified to read comments implying the Shield TV might one day get this. Yikes.

They are getting paid to push content, thus bringing the price of the device down. Switch it to apps only mode and this helps.

4. I can't tell if this is improving or not, but startup is a little strange. Sometimes the thing just sits there with an empty home screen for more than 20 seconds before the content/images finally begin to appear. I can't tell if caches are just slow to fill? Not a serious problem, but kind of weird that Google would be comfortable giving users this first impression. Once everything is loaded fully, I find the UI performance to be reasonably fast. 

The remote? It gets the job done, but it's kind of cheap feeling and not very well organized and doesn't fit the hand very well. Again, maybe I'm spoiled by the (newer) Shield remote, which IMHO is one of the best I've used. 

I'm on the fence as to whether I'll keep it and wait for the bluetooth issue to (maybe) be fixed. For the price I can live with the other issues.

I will buy it off of you if you don't want it.

 

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aperry
6 minutes ago, troyhough said:

 

Well the deal-breaker is the bluetooth audio syncing, and as mentioned it's not a Bose problem. One Bose product works great, one Samsung product works poorly, and one Bose product works poorly. It's certainly a Chromecast problem because all three devices work perfectly on a Shield.

And yeah, sure, they get paid to push content. That's acceptable on a $50 device, so like I said I can live it on the Chromecast (with disappointment). However it is unacceptable on a $150 device that is initially sold to you with no advertising. So I'll be pretty unhappy if they push this crap into the Shield TV.

 

 

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It's hit or miss for me with Amazon's Echo Buds, but most of the time the audio is off over bluetooth. I don't really see it as a deal breaker for me as I'm not sure how much I will really use the bluetooth yet. As far as the power is concerned, I believe the 4k firestick is the same way. I believe the regular firestck, I got away with it being powered by USB on the TV, but the 4k version, I had to plug into a wall outlet, which is understandable as it is faster, so probably because of the internals being faster must require more stable power.

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On 10/5/2020 at 10:20 AM, ebr said:

We are investigating.  I sure hope they haven't blocked this to partners only as well...

Has anyone been able to somehow get Emby to show up in Searchable Apps? It would make the Watchlist screen much more meaningful.

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Nope, I can only find it under "Video Players & Editors". Anytime I do a search, I get the message about finishing setup for more features and I know I am finished with setting up the chromecast. The only search return I get when typing Emby in is "Emby Mellay". Very annoying.

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2 hours ago, arche said:

Nope, I can only find it under "Video Players & Editors". Anytime I do a search, I get the message about finishing setup for more features and I know I am finished with setting up the chromecast. The only search return I get when typing Emby in is "Emby Mellay". Very annoying.

I think they were asking about content from your Emby library showing up in Google Assistant searches.  This works on all other Google devices.

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4 hours ago, ebr said:

I think they were asking about content from your Emby library showing up in Google Assistant searches.  This works on all other Google devices.

Yep. I somehow got Emby installed (I remember it was not straightforward), but it does not appear in the list of apps that Google can search for content. I believe this is configured in the Google Assistant section of Settings. It's a bummer because the Watchlist feature seems like it could be pretty cool to use with Emby content. Since I've disabled all of the services that I don't use (Disney+, HBO, etc), currently Netflix is the only "searchable" app for me. 

Anyway, I was just checking to see if anyone had found a trick to getting this working. 

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12 hours ago, aperry said:

Yep. I somehow got Emby installed (I remember it was not straightforward), but it does not appear in the list of apps that Google can search for content. I believe this is configured in the Google Assistant section of Settings. It's a bummer because the Watchlist feature seems like it could be pretty cool to use with Emby content. Since I've disabled all of the services that I don't use (Disney+, HBO, etc), currently Netflix is the only "searchable" app for me. 

Anyway, I was just checking to see if anyone had found a trick to getting this working. 

This new OS Layer appears to be blocking "non partner" apps.  On all other Android TV devices, this works as you expect and we also have the ability to have our own "channels" on the home screen.

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21 hours ago, ebr said:

This new OS Layer appears to be blocking "non partner" apps.  On all other Android TV devices, this works as you expect and we also have the ability to have our own "channels" on the home screen.

Is there a shake down (fee) to become a "partner app"?

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On 10/13/2020 at 9:45 AM, ebr said:

This new OS Layer appears to be blocking "non partner" apps.  On all other Android TV devices, this works as you expect and we also have the ability to have our own "channels" on the home screen.

Thanks. Pretty disappointing.

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For what it's worth, I upgraded the firmware on my new Chromecast tonight and tried playing some movies that were giving me problems before. A few now work, and I do see that at least some incompatible audio is now getting transcoded, but still having an issue playing 4k UHD Blu-Ray rips in Emby. I am able to play these in Plex (which is presumably transcoding them for compatibility). I think then that I'm able to do essentially what I want on the device, which is to play back my library inexpensively, simply and with fairly good quality on secondary TVs. Ideally, though, all of this would just work in Emby.

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8 hours ago, mhendu said:

For what it's worth, I upgraded the firmware on my new Chromecast tonight and tried playing some movies that were giving me problems before. A few now work, and I do see that at least some incompatible audio is now getting transcoded, but still having an issue playing 4k UHD Blu-Ray rips in Emby. I am able to play these in Plex (which is presumably transcoding them for compatibility). I think then that I'm able to do essentially what I want on the device, which is to play back my library inexpensively, simply and with fairly good quality on secondary TVs. Ideally, though, all of this would just work in Emby.

Hi.  Can you please create a thread in the Android TV forum with specifics for the issue you are having?

Thanks!

 

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  • 1 year later...
Kianouch
On 10/13/2020 at 3:45 PM, ebr said:

This new OS Layer appears to be blocking "non partner" apps.  On all other Android TV devices, this works as you expect and we also have the ability to have our own "channels" on the home screen.

How unfortunate, I was looking for this when I bought the Chromecast :(

Il guess this still nas not changed.

 

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