Google Chromecast: What you can do with it!

This is not a sponsored ad and I do not make any money from this blog to date so this is purely my opinion.

I love my chromecast. Recently I was trying to get my Viki app working on my Samsung TV, the app has been broken for months and months but I thought I would give it another go. It doesn't work. Completely dead. So then I was trying to get the allshare working between my samsung phone and samsung tv. For some odd reason my model will send the video the very first time for viki but not when you try a second time so I quit on that.
I could, of course, just use the hdmi wire running between my pc and tv but that completely avoids the point of being lazy and in my mind I just have to get viki working on the tv especially since the Roku app went down as well.
  So I sat there, twiddling my thumbs, with my mind jumping back and forth between- buy a chromecast, don't buy one, buy one, don't buy one, 'til I eventually exclaimed soddit and went and ordered one from Amazon.
At the time (4 weeks ago) amazon had not mentioned Amazon Fire TV and if you're in the UK, like me, they still haven't so chances are if you don't pay the extra postage you will get the same courier treatment that I got at no extra cost. It turned up the next day, I plugged it in and it didn't work.
Surprise surprise I had a virgin broadband issue that weekend (and 2 weeks following) that prevented me from using it frequently so...fast forward to when it did work:

You set it up like so:

If there is limited room around the HDMI ports or your Wifi just needs that extra help plug your Chromecast into the adapter supplied and plug into a hdmi port on your television. There's another wire with a USB. Either plug this into a USB port on your television or into the AC adapter it comes with. 

Now sit down with your android phone or tablet, install the Chromecast app and follow the on screen instructions to setting up your wifi.

You now have access to Viki, Netflix, Hulu, iplayer, youtube and several other apps on your devices, which should grow in the coming months as development is now open to the public. I'm really crossing my fingers for a crunchyroll app.

When it has first been set up you will see a range of beautiful pictures, the time and the name of your device, in my case, Piggy the Superior. 

Choose your app, which in this case is Viki, and pay close attention because this is the bit that really stumped me, in the top right corner is a Chromecast symbol like the one next to -connect to device-  press it and the grey box appears. (On Netflix this part makes more sense because there is a choice of 2) this is not a loading screen, you need to press the device you wish to send it to. I thought Viki and iplayer didn't work. I sat there for ages waiting. I even discovered sending the image from the Google chrome browser was easier. Keep in mind you need to Google Chromecast extension for chrome and install that, works a charm. Press a button and it appears on the tv, no more messing with audio and screen resolution.

As you can see from these two images it works no problem. Select your video et voila-

You know watching Mischievous Kiss Love In Tokyo on your television without having to pay Xbox £40 a year for the privilege.

For the price of £30 it is fantastic and took a lot of annoying stress of my mind. Now I just sit back with my nexus 7 or Note 2 and press a button and I'm watching whatever I want to without firing up a console unnecessarily. 

I would like it if they added Chromecast to chrome browser on the tablet and being able to play videos from Dramafire would be wonderful too but I can wait. I'd also like to see Archos video player get chromecast because then I could use tversity through my tablet to the pc if I really want to. Pointless but why not?

Everything in the world is right now for at least 10 minutes!

Roku, Crunchyroll, and Free Drama's!

I'm going to report on a few things that I've found out and haven't found anywhere on the net.
Anyone with a Crunchyroll account and a Roku box can log into their account- providing they are at least paying for an anime subscription  can then access the drama section and watch non premium only shows (which on the american side is most of them) WITHOUT any adverts.

But there are no drama worth watching on the english Crunchyroll - I hear you cry- Akumu-chan aside- you would be correct. This is where Unlock Us comes in, for £3.50 a month you can use hulu, netflix (9/10 different area content), crackle and many many more websites.
Crunchyroll isn't on their official list, anywhere, but rest assured it works. Your best bet, buy a decent router that you can change the DNS server on and it will correct all applicable sites on all devices in your house.

Last point of tech for today-

I just bought a Netgear router WND4500 (N900) and had a few hiccups. I found one roku forum page that says roku 2 works with the N900 router so I gave in and bought it. Beautiful router, but when it came to using netflix, hulu, crunchyroll, etc, after initial setup, it just wouldn't work. Roku was down despite showing an excellent connection rating, ps3 apps were down and I sat there softly weeping into my elbows. Then I tried to log into Netflix on my PC and it sent me to the Unlock Us website, turns out as I changed device my ip reset and all devices were trying to run through the dns server and couldn't.

So me dumb dumb.

I'm passing on these words of wisdom for anyone who sits there relentlessly trying to research any of these topics.

p.s I used to use playmo.tv as it allows you to use it at 2 different houses but crunchyroll isn't included on it for a reason they won't explain