I don’t trust wifi for streaming in our house…. too many walls…… so the pi running xbmc and the Hacked appletv are both networked with cat5.
Wifi’s OK for browsing though.

My gut feel is that, thinking about video, there’s a fair amount of coding/ decoding required to get the content from PC to dongle – would that cause the issue, if the dongle doesn’t have the necessary processing power??

could be, im not techie enough to understand these things, i just want to get to the bottom of it and find the solution. if that was the case tho, wouldnt everyone have the same problem and chromecast wouldnt be fit for purpose?

@sadex – what’s the wifi reception like in the room with the tv ? The signal has to go from pc to router to tv box. It might be worth moving the router into the room where the tv is or at least nearby.

if i hover the mouse over my wifi signal on laptop, right now its showing 57%. i assume thats not ideal. the router is some way from the ‘scene of operations’ and at present cant be moved. if this is the problem tho ill have to get it sorted but itll cost more. id hate to go to the trouble tho and it still be the same. if general opinion is that this is definitely the hold-up, ill press ahead.

@sadex by the way I find YouTube generally slow and blocky on my computer with Ethernet, Vimeo runs much more smoothly. It could be a problem at YouTube / content providers end.

its still the same with video files stored locally on my laptop tho. what happens is….. i start the film on my laptop, it plays fine at normal speed. i ‘cast’ it to the tv and it starts freezing, going blocky on BOTH the tv and laptop. this surprises me as id have thought whatever the problem is, itd still play normally on laptop. does this mean anything to anyone?

thanks for the suggestions chaps 🙂

I would have thought that if your using Plex on the laptop to throw to the Chromecast dongle then the bulk of the processing is being done by the computer, if the same media plays back fine on the computer then I would feel its the WiFi transfer rate that’s the problem, especially if the router, laptop/tablet and chromecast are in different rooms.

I had a similar issue when using Sky go on my iPad, playback was fine in the house but when using the iPad in the garage whilst on roller sessions ,playback could get very blocky and freeze.

This was down to being at the limit of my wireless range.

yep. problem is my wifi is tied in with work and router is in a different building. id have to sort my own out if i wanted it faster, and a bit of googling shows im in a limited area, no cable, think the usual suspects would be sky, bt or talktalk. just done a speed check on one of the sites which shows d/load speed to be 24 mb/s (altho it was showing 13 for most of the test) and 0.8 upload speed.
in the evenings its shared by more people so id guess that drops a fair bit. never had any probs surfing the net, or streaming music from a squeezebox, but just looks like it might not be able to stream video content effectively :-/

Even at its slowest 13mb that would probably be more than adequate, however if its a shared connection then once more people are using it(contention ratio) it could drop even more.
Could be the chromecast antennae for WiFi is a bit crap if your laptop works fine on the same network.
Is there any possibility of trying the chromecast at a friends house ,if it works fine there it rules out the chromecast as being poor or faulty.
Or for £9.99 you could get a Now TV box(pretty much a rebranded Roku box) side load plex onto that and see if its any better.

ok, tried a few things out. firstly, ive tried youtube on my phone, and it casts perfectly 🙂 same on my wifes phone. same youtube vid on the laptop and its blocky again and freezing. same with my wifes laptop. so….. perfect on 2 phones, rubbish on 2 laptops (one windows, one linux)

i then took my laptop over to where the router is and tried the chromecast in that tv. exactly the same, rubbish. so its not a distance problem. looks more like laptop problems, would you agree?

have i made a booboo do you think? will there be any way of successfully playing media on my laptop on the tv?

the now tv and roku options…… they wont play media stored on my laptop will they?

thanks

the now tv and roku options…… they wont play media stored on my laptop will they

as per earlier in thread, I believe they do. Now TV uses ‘Playto’ and there is a “local media” function (never used it as I dont have anything stored!).

ive tried youtube on my phone, and it casts perfectly same on my wifes phone. same youtube vid on the laptop and its blocky again and freezing.

Youtube will serve up a different version for your phone than for a laptop so it’s not really a fair comparison.
Anyway at the risk of repeating myself – give serious consideration to a Raspberry Pi running either Raspbmc or Openelec OS. They are cheap (£35 or less inc SD card) and work brilliantly. Both OS install with pretty much a single mouse click on your laptop and can very likely be controlled using your TV remote.
Ours has been running for months without being rebooted and it’s flawless.
V2 AppleTV is the other contender but it’s more involved and twice as expensive – on the plus side you get all the Apple Movie rental.

give serious consideration to a Raspberry Pi running either Raspbmc or Openelec OS. They are cheap (£35 or less inc SD card) and work brilliantly. Both OS install with pretty much a single mouse click on your laptop and can very likely be controlled using your TV remote.
Ours has been running for months without being rebooted and it’s flawless.

Pi running RASPBMC is so good it’s bonkers. The bloody thing even does Airplay from my Ipad. I have mine networked cabled to my router , with media sitting on a NAS.

I had thought about putting XBMC on a a NUC box, but for the cash difference over a pi I don’t think the slight performance gain is worth it frankly.

The Yatse app on android is quite slick at controlling RASPBMC/XBMC…although it all works fine off my telly remote.

hmmm…….. ill look into this raspberry pi thing then 🙂 so can you help me out with it a little? do i…….

buy a raspberry pi from amazon.
insert an sd card into laptop and load OS?
put sd card into pi and boot up, it now has OS.
source a usb keyboard to allow pi to be controlled from phone.
instal app on phone to control pi
put sd card into laptop
put 4OD and iplayer zips onto card.
put card back into pi and instal zips.

and…….that about it? i assume then that the pi would be on HDMI1 channel say, same as the chromecast? and i would use phone as remote to watch internet content then?
and how would i then access my local media? and whats going on with the pi that will allow local media to be played without freezing or being blocky?

thanks

We’ve just got a new Samsung Smart tv, it’s our first brand new telly in 17 years we’ve always had the father in law’s cast offs.

It has all the catch up stuff on it and we can plug an external hard drive in and play films from it.
The YouTube app is great, browse videos on your phone or tablet and view them on the tv.
Very simple to set up, just plug and play.

yeah a mates got samsung smart tv too, wish we’d done a bit more research and stayed away from sony 😀

so do you access the tv’s youtube and iplayers etc using your phone as a remote, rather than typing with the tv remote?
i was hoping for a cheap £30 fix, hope i dont have to buy a new tv!! 😀

just found out that youtube has a chromecast button within its own window!! i didnt know! ive been pressing the button on the chrome browser itself. this has solved that problem, i can watch youtube ok now 🙂
obviously it hasnt sorted out the problem of the blockiness from my laptop content.

does this mean anything to anyone? does it show everythings ok (wifi, dongle etc) except for our laptops?

buy a raspberry pi from amazon.
insert an sd card into laptop and load OS?
put sd card into pi and boot up, it now has OS.
source a usb keyboard to allow pi to be controlled from phone.
instal app on phone to control pi
put sd card into laptop
put 4OD and iplayer zips onto card.
put card back into pi and instal zips.

Pretty much but it’s easier than that. Look here for a great way to install an OS
Your TV remote will probably control the pi way easier than a phone will. You can install 4OD, etc all from within XBMC on the pi.

thanks, its a contender.

currently googling up on WD TV. it was mentioned earlier in the thread but not really investigated. anyone got any experiences?

might it work better for me than the chromecast?

ive been recommended an LG bluray player. apparently through wifi they can stream files from laptop and play youtube/iplayer/4OD/netflix apps.

been googling and theres a lot of negative customer reviews. anyone tried them?

looking specifically at this one