Recently we’ve seen a lot of movement in Chromecast, with a flurry of apps now spruiking support for the popular little media player/dongle following the public release of the Chromecast SDK just a month ago.
The latest addition to apps offering Chromecast support is one of Google’s own, with the Chrome Beta browser being updated with Chromecast support. Previously, casting webpages containing video was only possible from desktop environments, but now, no laptop or desktop is required. Watching a web video on your handset and wish you could watch it on the bigger screen? Now you can.
Enabling the function requires a little bit of digging, but it’s not too difficult. Open Chrome Beta and type “chrome://flags/#enable-cast” in the URL bar. From there you should be able to manually turn on the experimental feature. Relaunch Chrome Beta and it should be active. Now head to YouTube and check out a video, making sure not to launch the stand-alone YouTube app. You’ll see the square Chromecast icon overlaid onto the video, just like on any compatible video app.
Testing in YouTube and Vimeo shows the feature working, however other popular sites — such as DailyMotion — don’t seem to work just yet. This is to be expected with a beta release, but it’s a promising sign of what’s to come.
Streaming just web-pages to the Chromecast still seems to require a desktop at this stage, but when the feature moves to a stable release, it’s possible we’ll see this feature come too.
Sort of related, but more of a general Chromecast question…. You say “making sure not to launch the stand alone YouTube app”… does this mean that you can only cast from Chrome itself, and not ChromeOS apps? In looking into buying a Chromebook, and I’m trying to figure out whether I can run Spotify with a Chromecast connected to my stereo HDMI….
This is Chrome Beta for Android, Will.
On ChromeOS, you can definitely Chromecast YouTube to the TV, or any web-page you happen to be viewing, so Spotify should work.