I got myself one of them Chromecast last weekend. It was a part of my bigger entertainment strategy. For the longest time we haven't had a TV. For a while we had a basic Epson projector that served fairly well, but it was expensive to run both in electricity and the eventual lamp change, so when we made the TV room into a bedroom for our oldest, and the lamp warning had come on, I decided to retire the projector.
So for about half a year we had no TV at all, using only computer screens to watch things. Then when it rains it pours. My wifes dad got a new TV, so we got his old one, and then her brother got a new TV so we got one for the bedroom too.
I had a Raspberry Pi with OpenELEC connected to our livingroom TV, and an old Wii console, that we use mostly for Netflix. Now I needed something for the bedroom. I like the whole consept with the RasPi XBMC, but I didn't feel it would be a very good fit in the bedroom. Besides, it's a lot of work to get it up and running, mostly just finding a proper remote control, but still, that's a lot easier said than done.
So I decided to give the Chromecast a try. We always have a lot of Android phones in the bedroom, so that's not really a limitation.
I will start by talking a bit about the annoying things about the Chromecast first. The first one is the obvious one, Google doesn't sell them in Finland, or anywhere else outside North America to my knowledge. Google, WTF? This means that you have to get them from verkkokauppa.com that imports them from someone in Germany, who has someone in the US who orders a boatload of them from the playstore. This means that you can kiss the 35 dollar pricetag goodbye, you have to shell out 60€ for the thing, but it's still cheaper than the other alternatives, so I shouldn't complain too much. At least we can get them.
The other thing is that it's still quite buggy. Sometimes the apps just hang, and you have to start them again. Sometime the Youtube app refuses to connect to the CC for long periods of time, restarting the CC or the phone does not help.
The third thing is the app support. For some reason Google have to allow the apps specifically to enable CC support. This is some goddammned Apple bullshit that I never thought I'd see Google do. This is basically the stupidest thing ever.
Having said all that, the Chromecast is freaking awesome! I have nothing else connected to the TV, not even an antenna. It's just a monitor for the Chromecast, and it's the best thing ever. You turn it on, and you can send any Youtube video, Netflix movie, or media from my Plex server to the screen. When it works, it works great. When it doesn't it's annoying. But you can usually get it to work in the end. The image quality is really good. Netflix and Youtube streams 1080p without difficulty, and Plex also seems to work well.
One word of warning though. On accound of the buggyness, this thing is not wife-proof. I tried to get my wife to watch Netflix on the TV and not the laptop, because it's annoying to only hear an entire movie. I showed her how to do it, and it's not difficult, but she gets annoyed at it not working, and gave up even trying after a few times. Apparently the low-res, laggy out of sync version on the laptop is better than the smooth full-hd on the TV, because it's less annoying.
I can forsee a slight problem for Google here. :)