Chromecast

It generally works well. Make sure the apps you are interested in using have proper Chromecast support (otherwise all you can do is mirror the whole screen of your device to the TV). It's good for things like YouTube, iPlayer, Eurosport Player and NowTV (except that Sky have decided that using a Chromecast with your phone counts as two devices out of your 4 device limit, unless you only ever use the NowTV app in cast mode). It doesn't support gapless audio for most music apps, though you can get this by playing from the cloud (only) using the Google Play Music app, or from local storage and DLNA servers using the the third party 'Hi-Fi Cast + DLNA' app. It uses several GB of data a month downloading constantly cycling background pictures unless you use a workaround.
 
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I was having problems watching Netflix and iPlayer amongst others on my 'smart' Panasonic TV and have found the Chromecast invaluable - for what it costs etc, I wouldn't be without it.
 
I've still got my Gen1 Chromecasts, use them for Plex and DSVideo amongst other things, great bits of kit however I'm finding my Amazon Fire Stick being used more and more these days..
 
I have an old one of these and they are ok if you have realy strong wifi but they can get laggy with 1080p stuff.
 
We have three Chromecast devices around the house. Suits what we want to cast. Not much point though if you a smart TV.
 
Some apps manage to block them now such as sky sports but otherwise really good.
 
They are great, we have two gen 1 chromecasts and s chromecast audio.

One sits on an older 'dumb' tv to give us all the catch up services and another on the our main smart Panasonic TV as there are a couple of services that there are not apps available for, namely Disney Life.

The Audio is great in as much that it has mean't I can hide all my CD's away in the loft yet still have access to my full music collection as that that all been ripped to a NAS drive, my wife mainly uses it with spotify. On;y downside is the lack of gapless playback support, but it seem's that you have to pay a lot more than the £30 price tag to beat that so can't really complain.
 
I have V1 and V2 setup and just find it works and is very convenient. Most apps have caught up so can send media via my phone or tablet very easily which doubles up as a remote.
 
bass_junkie83 said:
Only downside is the lack of gapless playback support, but it seem's that you have to pay a lot more than the £30 price tag to beat that so can't really complain.
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The Hi-Fi cast app I link to above has a workaround for this - it splices gapless tracks together before casting them. This works well, except for messing up seek within a track, which becomes very slow. The Google Play Music app also does gapless, but only with tracks stored in the Google cloud. There are some other cheap options, like running a gapless DLNA renderer on a Raspberry Pi in place of the Chromecast.
 
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