My thoughts / mini review of the Chromecast with Google TV

[+warwagon]

Yesterday at Walmart I purchased the "Chromecast with Android TV". Thought I would give you my thoughts on it. The User interface is different than Android TV. The Remote is nice and compact. It allows me to control my soundbar as well as allows me to turn my TV on and off with the remote. once setup it also allows me to use my google home to turn my tv on and off as well "Ok Google, turn on my TV".

 

In the view below, when I start playing a video with the sideloaded "S YouTube" app, you may see it say "Loading" shortly after I start playing video. that's because I was only playing 1 second of it and I hit the back button. For some reason when you hit the back button, to go back to your video list it says loading, so you have to press Back twice.

 

One thing I didn't mention in the video which is REALLY nice, is you tie your Google Photos to the chromecast too, and for a screensaver it displays your photos. You can tell it which people you want to show up on the screen saver.

 

If you look online you can also plug a USB C hub into it, which gives you thinks like ethernet, and USB storage. In my case my wifi was working well, mostly because that white thing to the left of the TV is my wifi.

 

All in all i'm really impressed and I'm not sure i'm going to go back to my Roku Ultra any time soon.

 

 

[MS Bob 10]

Did you try to make various formats play like e.g. VP9+Opus audio in WebM, or HEVC+AAC in MKV, or H.264+MP3 in AVI/MP4?  Do they all play?  Also how's the latency on audio or video?

[mrchetsteadman]

27 minutes ago, warwagon said:

Yesterday at Walmart I purchased the "Chromecast with Android TV". Thought I would give you my thoughts on it. The User interface is different than Android TV. The Remote is nice and compact. It allows me to control my soundbar as well as allows me to turn my TV on and off with the remote. once setup it also allows me to use my google home to turn my tv on and off as well "Ok Google, turn on my TV".

 

In the view below, when I start playing a video with the sideloaded "S YouTube" app, you may see it say "Loading" shortly after I start playing video. that's because I was only playing 1 second of it and I hit the back button. For some reason when you hit the back button, to go back to your video list it says loading, so you have to press Back twice.

 

One thing I didn't mention in the video which is REALLY nice, is you tie your Google Photos to the chromecast too, and for a screensaver it displays your photos. You can tell it which people you want to show up on the screen saver.

 

If you look online you can also plug a USB C hub into it, which gives you thinks like ethernet, and USB storage. In my case my wifi was working well, mostly because that white thing to the left of the TV is my wifi.

 

All in all i'm really impressed and I'm not sure i'm going to go back to my Roku Ultra any time soon.

 

 

Okay so I'm not crazy. I bought this by accident because I was trying to avoid buying an Apple TV for $200 just to watch HBO Max. I love this ###### so damn much and I felt bad about that lol. 

[tsupersonic]

Good stuff. But, I already have a Roku, ChromeCast, Xbox, and just one TV. Don't need another box for now. I was tempted to get it, because it comes with 6 months of Netflix, so it'd be like $12 for the device itself. 

[+warwagon]

1 hour ago, MS Bob 10 said:

Did you try to make various formats play like e.g. VP9+Opus audio in WebM, or HEVC+AAC in MKV, or H.264+MP3 in AVI/MP4?  Do they all play?  Also how's the latency on audio or video?

So at the moment, I have it connected to wifi, I installed kodi but didn't try playing any videos. I'm sure someone has a video on youtube trying that.

16 minutes ago, tsupersonic said:

Good stuff. But, I already have a Roku, ChromeCast, Xbox, and just one TV. Don't need another box for now. I was tempted to get it, because it comes with 6 months of Netflix, so it'd be like $12 for the device itself. 

Do you watch a lot of youtube?

[tsupersonic]

6 minutes ago, warwagon said:

Do you watch a lot of youtube?

Yes sir I do.

[jdlarson83]

that other button is to change inputs on your tv

[margrave]

Is there anyway to attach an external usb drive?

[Brandon H]

Thread Cleaned - discussions of how to bypass ads is not allowed per community guidelines

[+warwagon]

21 minutes ago, Brandon H said:

Thread Cleaned - discussions of how to bypass ads is not allowed per community guidelines

Oops I always thought you just couldn’t talk about bypassing neowin’s ads

[Brandon H]

15 minutes ago, warwagon said:

Oops I always thought you just couldn’t talk about bypassing neowin’s ads

we discussed it a bit just to be on the same page in our admin section and all agreed that it's a blanket guideline so not to come off as biased.

we figured that may have been your thought process as well.

 

on topic though I think I heard that new UI will be coming to other Android TV devices too once Android TV 11 starts rolling out. It does look nice.

I hope it's true and will be coming to the Nvidia Shield devices too