chromecast: Fedora vs Windows

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2015-07-28 at 01:44 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> You seem to suggest that the chromecast connects the TV 
> directly to the router once the connection is established?
> That seems plausible, but doesn't explain the difference in quality.

It's not only plausible, it's how Chromecast actually works. A
Chromecast is not just a Wifi dongle, it's a Linux computer with its
own network connection. It simply uses the app on your phone, tablet or
desktop as a control interface, but for "Chromecast-supported" apps the
actual media processing is being done internally. When you don't have
an appropriate app you're casting a browser tab to the Chromecast, so
the work is being done on your desktop (or phone, etc.). The difference
in quality is probably related to the way this is handled under the
respective OSes, but there are multiple ways that could be affected,
e.g. available codecs, networking protocols, browser versions, ... (I'm
just guessing here as I haven't looked into it; I use an Amazon Fire
stick because of the cool remote and because I got it cheap :-)

> I just tried using a Samsung Galaxy phone in place of the laptop
> to cast the same online TV program to the TV,
> and found this was actually even better than Windows.
> So I'd have to say Android wins the 3-way race.

There you go. The phone and the Chromecast understand each other
better. Maybe they even use a specialized protocol for this.

> I suspect my broadband speed (in central Italy) of 6.6 Mbps
> is on the borderline for this use, though that may be nonsense.

I doubt it has any effect, though if it's HD TV content 6Mbps is on the
low side.

poc