Google Breaks ChromeCast's Ability To Play Local Content

sfcrazy writes "Bad news for all ChromeCast users who were thinking of being able to stream local content to their HD TVs. Google has pushed an update for ChromeCast which has broken support for third-party apps like AirCast (AllCast) which allow users to 'stream' local files from their devices to ChromeCast connected TV sets."

Comments

Well that's that

[dorfed]

Why am I not surprised Google?

Re:Well that's that

[Anonymous Coward]

Why am I not surprised Google?

Because removing features from already purchased hardware seems to OK with manufacturers. If they aren't getting something extra from you using it for your own purposes then they'll take that away from you. Bless their hearts.

Re:Well that's that

[Anonymous Coward]

no.. it's that there's a chance you won't buy, rent, or subscribe to any media through their store or one operated by one of their partners.. it's all about the money.. google's money, they don't give a shit about piracy, exactly.. they don't want you playing local content at all, legit or not, when there's perfectly good pay-for media available through the device for which google gets their cut.

Re:Well that's that

[Stumbles]

Oh man and I was just about to pull the trigger on one of those. Am I soooooo glad that did not happen, I would be pissed as hell. Guess what Google; you get zero clams from me.

Re:Well that's that

[aklinux]

I don't remember Google ever advertising the ability to play local content. Allcast essentially reverse engineered their own, undocumented, API. To the best of my knowledge, the device still does everything Google advertises.

Re:Well that's that

[AmiMoJo]

In other words there is no evidence they deliberately tried to break it, they just made a change to their private API that happened to interfere with it. The same thing has happened a few times to people using undocumented Google APIs, like the guy from a few years back claiming that Google deliberately broke his tracking-free search mash-up site when in fact they just retired an ancient Palm version of their homepage he was parsing.

more like

[the_fat_kid]

bad news for Google, who was hoping that I would buy such a thing.

Maybe not completely true?

[ad454]

When I powered cycled my ChromeCast a couple of hours ago, I noticed that it installed a new update.

I then launch my Chrome browser and open several local files of type MP4 (video), PDF, and PPT (powerpoint), and I am still able to successfully cast these to my ChromeCast on my HDTV, with this type of URL:

file://{LOCAL_DIRECTORY}/{LOCAL_FILE}

Even the MP4 video plays nice on my HDTV in FullScreen.

I have not had time to do a packet inspection yet via WireShark, so I cannot speak about the complexity of the protocol used to transmit the content locally.

I am not denying that something with ChromeCast might have changed, since the author is likely telling the truth, and may have been using some "hack" or trick that they used to simplify incorporating their 3rd party support.

But considering that I have my Chrome browser at version 29.0.1547.57 which was not updated in the last 5 days, I would think that any 3rd party app could still be modified to support ChromeCast with the same protocol used by the Chrome browser, NetFlix, YouTube, etc.

Frothy hysteria is fun

[Nimey]

but instead of the boringly predictable GOOGLE IS EVIL!!!!1eleventy karma-whoring[1], shall we examine why exactly this third-party program broke with the new update?

Were they, perchance, using an undocumented API, or one that was known to be unstable?

This seems to be the public API for Chromecast: https://developers.google.com/cast/devprev
but I'm not enough of a programmer to tell if there's explicit support for the kind of thing AirCast does; however, get a load of this:

Warning: The current Google Cast SDK is a preview SDK intended for development and testing purposes only, not for production apps. Google may change this SDK significantly prior to the official release of the Google Cast SDK. We strongly recommend that you do not publicly distribute any application using this preview SDK, as this preview SDK will no longer be supported after the official SDK is released (which will cause applications based only on the preview SDK to break).

Applications using this preview SDK will work only on Chromecast receiver devices that are whitelisted for development. Google will provide whitelisting for Google Cast receivers for development and testing purposes until the final SDK is released. See Whitelisting your receiver.

So it seems my guess was correct and you're all bellyaching about a program taking advantage of an unstable API, with a feature not guaranteed to be there, and when the documentation recommends not distributing production apps yet.

In short, non-story click-whoring. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

[1] I know I'll get modded down for this, but...

Re:ctrl+o

[Nimey]

You mean he worked around the official unstable API and was surprised when it broke?

Unpossible!