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Now this is genius
- Thread starter Glaucus
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Thanks!
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Some are touting this as an OUYA killer. That might depend on how it works exactly. But if games can send a video feed to that little device, Miracast/AirPlay style, then it might make the OUYA kinda pointless.
Hooking this up to a digital receiver with HDMI switching would make this a killer device for streaming music to your hifi. I want one!
Hooking this up to a digital receiver with HDMI switching would make this a killer device for streaming music to your hifi. I want one!
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I watch stuff on my TV using long thin strands of copper. All of my new stuff has HDMI out and my older stuff has VGA and my set likes them both - and I can play stuff that is locally stored in my devices.
Oddly, this is failing to excite me in any way.
Oddly, this is failing to excite me in any way.
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Ya, well, my HDTV has many HDMI inputs, as well as a component and VGA, and my PS3 can render pretty much anything. But I think you're missing the point here. It's very cheap and ultra easy. You control it with an Android app, an iOS app or a Chrome browser on any platform. And there's an SDK so that list is likely to grow. But wouldn't it be cool to cast Google Maps on your 60" TV? Or you go over to your friend's place, plug in the little doohickey into your friend's TV and force them to watch your latest YouTube rant in full HD glory and surround sound? The first thing that popped into my mind with this is that it's probably easier for me to plug this into my dad's TV and cast photos and videos of Sophia onto their big screen than to copy the files to a USB, then plug that into the TV and struggle with the remote and awkward UI it has. Why not just cast them directly off Picasa using my phone?
The only kinda awkward thing about it might be it's power source, which is USB. But it seems to have an on-board battery so you can charge it up and then take it somewhere. And since most modern smart TVs have USB, they can charge it that way while it's plugged into HDMI.
I'd love to know it's discovered on the network or how it even gets on to the network.
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You see, that's where I always get mystified. I know that a company like google will a) do market research first to see if people would think stuff like that is cool and b) do enough PR to get people to THINK that stuff like that is cool - but I'm not like regular people and hence I have missed several opportunities to make money.
To me this smacks of the same sort of foolishness as when folks would write a note in Word, print it off and then fax it to someone's computer instead of sending email or sending the text directly via modem. Using all those extra resources to end up sending something barely legible that could have been sent faster and in less bits was a kind of madness to my technical sensibilities. I understand that most people don't think along those lines and don't, like me, get offended when they download a 2MB javascript site that renders a 60kB web page using the electricity and bandwidth I pay for to do it because that sort of stuff is mostly invisible and I'm just geeky enough to be bothered by that.
The idea that you can tell a HDMI dongle to go and get some data off the web and show it on you're TV is kind of neat (I guess) but the idea of having to put your pictures up on someone elses' servers where the NSA or whoever can take a copy as it goes over networks hundreds of miles away in another jurisdiction and whoever along the way can rip GPS and datestamp info and do facial recognition and plate recognition and the only payment I get for surveilling myself and my neighbours is I can show my pictures on my TV when I can already do that ... call me underwhelmed.
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DHCP - Wi-Fi. Once it's up it probably calls home and registers itself with Google. You'd think you could do a little local discovery but I would suspect that the whole transaction would be mediated through google servers. That would have the big advantage that Google could then make it not work for certain things and be able to track usage patterns.
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I'd say the tricky part is having it enter the SSID and password without a keyboard is the tricky part. There are ways around it, like not connecting to a wifi network at all but that's not likely (WiFi Direct can be used instead, which is what Samsung Smart Cameras use to connect to smart phones directly). Most likely I'm guessing it can be hooked up to a computer via USB and then along with some Google software it will get the SSID and Pasword from the user and store it in the device - a one time setup. Not as convenient but probably just a one time thing per WiFi network. It would be cool if you could also control it via Bluetooth or NFC.
Also, the Chromecast streams stuff off the net, which means it streams stuff of some server. Who's to say that server isn't your own phone or a media server? One of the advertised features is streaming your screen from the Chrome browser, meaning, whatever you see in your browser is sent to your TV. That might be a direct connection from your machine running Chrome to the TV. Chromecast may be just Miracast + some Google proprietary stuff for the magic effect.
Personally, I'm not concerned with NSA style snoops. I take photos to share, so that's not an issue. If you want absolute privacy you might want to sell everything you own and find a nice cave somewhere.
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Btw, Chromecast supports the CEC HDMI protocol. That means, you can use your phone to fully control your TV (and possibly other connected devices that support CEC). You can be out with your buds watching the CFL game, and just as the Lions are about to run the ball into the endzone you can force the TV to switch to the appropriate input and play your favorite scenes from Marry Poppins streaming from YouTube. Sure you'd need to secretly connect the Chromecast and then tether it to your phone's WiFi, but that very possible.
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OK, now I'm beginning to see the value of this product.
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I know, but that's because you never intend to actively protest your government or try to work for political change.
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Not sure that's totally accurate. If you want to make a change for the better, you have to make yourself vulnerable. If you want the government to be transparent, then so should you. Martin Luther King didn't do what he did behind a cloak of secrecy. And there are ways to stay private when you really need to be. The internet equivalent of meeting secretly in dark allies is heavy use of encryption and things like mesh networks and dark networks like The Freenet Project. If you feel the need for that kind of privacy you can get it, you just need to put some effort into it.
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Not necessarily and not initially. The people who currently have political power certainly haven't made themselves vulnerable nor even generally publicly known. And certainly when you are planning actions and protests and working on messaging you do NOT want the counter-messaging to be ready before you launch. However, those things are logistical and political problems. Far worse are the direct threats and intimidation from powerful interests (which are not necessarily those of any elected person).
He had many private discussions but he was a public person and was killed for his troubles.
There are so many legitimate things that a person would rather keep private and so many accidental associations that could look bad and meetings out in the real world are so much less anonymous than they used to be. Your movement in the world can be tracked by your phone, your car, security cameras and the snapshots of tourists and kids in whose photos you might be background. While you might decline the opportunity to be on TV you don't get to decline to be in the database.
Your travel patterns are mappable, and your location at any point in the day is predictable. If someone doesn't like your opinions and they have access to the data then they can intimidate you in real life. What about if you have access to the Do-Not-Fly list and you don't like your wife any more? Even if you insist that the "government" is benign, anyone with access can abuse the privilege. I guess it's not like criminals have ever infiltrated the authorities though, eh? So annoying the powers that be might be something like announcing criminal wrongdoing by certain parties.
I had a friend back in the 80s who was part of the protests in Alberta against the cruise missile tests at CFB cold lake. CSIS or the RCMP used to stand across the street from the book store he worked in and photograph him. There wasn't much intelligence value in doing that but they just seemed to want him to know that they were watching him and knew where they could find him. That's the kind of creeping creepiness we can expect as data collection gets easier. Make a noise, get child porn in your in-box and a knock on the door to seize your computers, or just have someone casually mention in the Starbucks line up behind you some of the dodgier terms in your google search history. That's often enough to make a squeaky wheel shut up.
