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Yesterday, Google announced some very good news for fans of Chromecast, the $35 media streaming dongle that helps folks easily get their photos, video and music onto their TVs wirelessly and efficiently. That news was that Chromecast’s public SDK is final and now available to any developer wishing to add Chromecast support to their apps.
You had to guess Koushik Dutta would be one of those apps. Koush has updated his AllCast app in the Play Store to finally support Chromecast again, a process which the renown developer says took just 20 minutes thanks to how the APIs have been built.
If you don’t remember, AllCast was one of the first apps that implemented Chromecast outside of Google’s bubble, but was quickly shut down after Google disabled the API calls it was using in order for it to function. Koush suggested Google did this to intentionally block third party development, which did have a bit of truth to it. Google says they didn’t want to give developers early access because of the simple fact that APIs weren’t ready, and reassured everyone that they would eventually open Chromecast to all.
We’re glad to see Google held up their promise. The latest upgrade to AllCast can be found in the Google Play Store, but note that you’ll need Google Play Services 4.2.34 in order to use the Chromecast features. That version of Play Services is rolling out to everyone in a staggered fashion, so you’ll have to be patient if it hasn’t shown up yet.
[via Google+]
Sweet. Now I just need to wait for the update to the Play Store to hit my device. So many ignorant people leaving bad reviews because they don’t realize they need the latest Play Store for this to work properly. A lot of devs have underrated apps because of things like this. It’s like they never read the description or knew what the app was for in the first place.
Meanwhile, is anyone waiting for that rumored Feb 4th (today) red Nexus 5 to popup?
My Chromecast is now complete. I’ve received the Allcast update but still waiting for the Google Play Services update to 4.2.34.
The red Nexus 5 doesn’t interest me. I like my phones black, like my current Nexus 5.
Does Allcast provide for a wifidirect connection between phone and chromecast? Or do you need to have both phone and chromecast connect to the same network?
I want to use this to stream shows to hotel TVs when on business travel and I don’t want to have to rely on hotel networks.
Chromecast requires your device and the CC to be on the same wifi network. It’s a requirement by chromecast not the app developers.
That’s unfortunate. Thanks though.
not just the same network….they have to be on the same ap…..chromecast is pretty useless if you have multiple aps in the house.
it depends on your equipment, I’ve had no problems, make sure you have all sorts of guest networks and ap isolation turned off
Yeah, I definitely don’t have any issue roaming among the zones. I have the same cisco model throughout the house too. Chromecast is just not happy with it. It also doesn’t stop streaming when the TV is turned off. It maintains a high temperature all the time. It also freezes up and require unplugging every other day. The whole point of a dongle is that you wouldn’t have to touch the device. That’s certainly not the case.
The chromecast runs pretty hot, but not hotter than my heated up laptop bottom. I’ve never had any of those problems, it sounds like yours might be defective, have you tried contacting google? They respond within 24 hours usually with e-mails support and usually the support is from actual intelligent representatives.
I wanted to cast stuff so badly, I ended up getting Avia and the in-app upgrade for $3. While it’s not too bad, I’ll stick with it for now and see if any changes come rather than pay another $5 for Allcast’s premium feature
So far it seems to work better than Avia. Movies that would stutter and buffer on avia play just fine on the allcast, BUT both still have issues with certain audio as most of my MKVs will not play any audio whether it’s AC3 or DTS. I hope AC3 codec support gets added at least.
you will have a lot more easy-of-use if you keep all your video/audio files at simply being mp3 or mp4
I agree but it’s not convenient. I simply don’t have time to convert video files I download. This is definitely a step in the right direction.
How do I tell what version of Play Services I have?
You more than likely have 4.1.something right now. You should be getting the update sometime between now and the next few days/weeks, or you can sideload it thanks to the wonderful people at Android Police: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/03/apk-teardown-download-google-play-services-4-2-refines-play-games-adds-cast-api-signs-of-auth-enhancements/ Note: If you go this route, you might have some slight graphical glitches due to Google rolling out different apk’s to devices with different screen resolutions. Not saying it *will* happen to you, just that it could.
To check which version you have: Settings>Apps, swipe/slide over to the “All” tab, scroll down to Google Play services. Tap on it, and right below the name should be a subheading that reads “com.google.android.gms version [numbers]”.
Thanks. No sideloading for me as I’m using a work phone, so I guess I’ll sit tight :)
It doesn’t see my Chromecast or my Panasonic Plasma TV but it does see my Fedora 20 Linux box and can cast to it. The behavior is the same on the Nexus 5 and the Nexus 7(2012). Is this working with Chromecast for anyone?
Nexus 5 and 7 here. Not seeing my chrome cast.
Ditto
deleted
Can confirm, make sure you have the latest play store app, download all cast, then it will work.
It now sees my Panasonic TV, it just showed up eventually. The Chromecast problem on the Nexus 5 and 7 is probably due to the fact that the version of Google Play services is 4.1.32 on the Nexus 5 and 7. It seems that the announcement for the new version of Allcast was premature, if the Nexus 5 doesn’t have the required version of Google Play Services then nothing does.
I hope Koush has stopped crying
Now if only I could cast video files from my laptop I’d be set.
Plex
Upload them to Dropbox and open them in Chrome.
Doesn’t plex require I upload to cloud. chrome really supports very few codecs, and its not really a practical nice player. basically i want allcast for windows7. In my room with a smart tv I just use windows media network protocol to send to tv which is a dlna receiver, but in room with chromecast I can’t watch the same videos easily.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFT3kXm7MGQ
go to minute 3:33
Interestingly she says in the video sound doesn’t work when screen casting, in my experience the sound works, but it’s impossible to sink up the video/audio due to lag. Screen casting might work if you had the right equipment, but you’d need a pretty beastly spec’d pc and network.
The best computer I happen to have is only a 2nd gen i5 laptop @2.4ghz w/ 4GB’s of ram. Maybe if you tried it with a 4th gen i7 and 8GB’s of ram it’d work.
The thing is….my smart tv is a dlna receiver, and it does the processing on the receiver side and works great, uses maybe 1% of pc resources. Allcast works similarly doing most of it on the chromecast instead of your phone, so if I could allcast from my pc that would be awesome.
Chrome browser can cast to a Chromecast from any OS, just add an extensions to browse the file system.
Yes it works, but only for a very limited set of codecs that chrome browser support, plus the player is ancient in design.
If you have a Smart TV the best way to view videos stored on your PC is to use a DLNA server. I use Rygel on Fedora 20 and view it on my Panasonic Plasma TV, Rygel also receives casts from Allcast from my Nexus 5. Win8 comes with a DLNA server which seems to be enabled by default (I put Win8 on an antique PC to see what it looked like, I don’t use it but I do see the Win8 system appearing on the Panasonic’s DLNA server list ).
Well one tv is smart and the other has a chromecast.
I use windows 7 and it has dlna server built in through windows media player/windows media network protocol.
The oddest thing is I have some files that windows media player can’t play (i usually use vlc), BUT when i press play to my samsung smart tv, they work perfect, so apparently all the codec description is happening on the smart tv side.
I also find it’s way easier to navigate on pc and push to tv, versus trying to look thorugh pc and pull from tv (which takes an eternity and super confusing file structure).
Does this work better than real network cloud for streaming local content?
real network cloud is free and it streams local content. However, it limits you in resolution. If your file is 1080P (possibly at lower resolution as well), it requires you to upload the file to their cloud storage first.
That pretty much defeats the purpose of local content streaming.
I have since uninstalled it.