Chrome TV: I was getting a little tired of watching political happenings

[MineralMan]

on my cell phone in the evening after I quit working. Then, I remembered that I had installed a Chrome TV dongle on HDMI2 on my living room TV about three years ago. We really never used it after a frustrating time when we tried to watch a movie cast from a Chromebook.

After a quick search on Google, I downloaded and installed the Google Home app on my Samsung Android phone. In it, I selected the little TV set icon and tapped "Living Room," the name I had given the dongle when I first got it. There it was. I tapped Mirror to Living Room.

The Chrome TV switched the TV's input to HDMI2 and there was my phone's display on the big screen. I navigated to the thing I wanted to watch and got to put my phone down and see and hear things much more clearly.

Later, I discovered that I could also "cast" YouTube videos to the TV set. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling my wife about this, and we spent the next hour watching funny dog videos.

There is good and bad to everything, it seems.

[dawg day]

1. There is a moment when I say, "Why do we have this internet?"

and then I remember Youtube funny dog videos and remember.

There is joy in them!

[MineralMan]

2. Yes. However, there is joy, too, in watching

People mill logs into lumber with bandsaw-style sawmills. I watch such videos sometimes. If my wife overdoes the funny dog videos, I shall cast one of my sawmill videos and she shall watch that and learn of the joy of seeing walnut crotch grain for the first time.

Problem solved.

[brooklynite]

3. I don't know about you...

...but I just run an HDMI cable from my Mac to my Samsung TV and can throw anything on my computer to the TV screen. No additional software required.

[MineralMan]

4. WiFi makes it all very easy, really.

I don't have a Mac by the couch in the living room, nor do I have an HDMI cable running from any of my computers for that use.

Now that I've enabled my phone to cast to the Chrome TV dongle, it's very, very easy for me to watch anything I can see on the phone.

The only problem is that the TV doesn't switch back automatically to HDMI1 when I stop casting to it. I have to grab the black TV remote and change the "Source" setting.

Minor inconvenience, really.

I'm sure everyone already knows about all of this phone to TV business, but I'm an old geezer, so I'm sharing my discovery.

[padfun]

5. Yep. I use a 50" TV as my monitor doing that

It works great for 3D gaming.

EDIT: I do have a GeForce 1050 which I think is minimum if you are gaming on a large TV. 1080 would be even better.

[GoCubsGo]

6. The livestream YouTube can be such a huge time sink.

I'm lucky. My TV streams YouTube directly, so I watch Great Lakes ship cams, Cornell's feeder cams, the various Monterrey Bay Aquarium live cams, The Randi Rhodes Show.... The ship cams are much better on the big screen. Wish I could afford a 60" set.

I know what you mean about the funny dog videos. I have similar issues with cat videos, some of which include dogs.

[Leith]

7. Cats, dogs, goats

They're all adorable as the dickens.

YouTube is endlessly entertaining. It isn't hard to bypass the inane and harmful content to find the good stuff.

Another thing I like to watch is live cams when a hurricane is approaching, even if they are knocked offline when storms really kick up.

[GoCubsGo]

11. I love the hurricane cams, too!

And, the Space X rocket launches, and the Jimmy Buffet concerts when he was able to have them...

[honest.abe]

8. We love chromecast.

My kid watches YouTube dinosaur vids and all sorts of other stuff. We watch Netflix and Prime video movies. It’s really cool to be able to control your tv from your mobile phone.

[MineralMan]

9. You can even use voice controls with Google.

"Hey, Google! Show me funny dog videos!" or "Hey Google! Show me some French Television!"

I will not mention porn, because I don't watch porn. Some folks do, though, apparently.

[honest.abe]

10. I never got into the voice command stuff.

It seems weird talking to an object not to mention the potential for getting the wrong thing if you dont pronounce things correctly.

[Demsrule86]

12. You can use Roku, Chrome and fire stick and download app directly. I like Roku as they have the Roku

Channel which has movies. We are cord cutters and have streamed TV for years.

[hunter]

13. It's the only television our children have in their homes. They 'cast everything from their phones.

No cable, no satellite, no broadcast, no DVD/Blu-ray player, no remote control.

Years ago my wife and I had a DVD player, a VCR, and broadcast television. We weren't watching any broadcast television except for new epsisodes of Chuck, which I was recording.

There was a video rental shop next to our grocery store. We rented a lot of DVDs there. It's been closed for many years now and the building hasn't been occupied since. Now we rent DVDs from the Redbox inside the grocery store.

Over the years we've accumulated a large library of DVDs. I've bought many of them in thrift stores. Some we haven't watched yet.

One of our children, home from college, set us up with Netflix (on the Nintendo Wii of all things) and later sent us a Chromecast dongle. We didn't use the dongle much after we got a DVD player that worked with Netflix, but we still have it. Too lazy to change the television input source, I suppose.

I think television is the worst possible medium for news and opinion. I gave up with it in disgust sometime after 9/11. My wife and I get some news from our local public radio station (which we donate to) but mostly we read our news and opinion, and subscribe electronically to a handful of local, national, and international newspapers. I don't miss television advertising at all, especially political advertising.

Traditional broadcast television is as obsolete as video rental stores. My adult children, nephews, and nieces pay no attention to it.

[abqtommy]

14. The best part is that while you're busy doing all that you aren't recommending to anyone that

they inject/drink bleach! to you, Mr. Man