1/10/2024 0 Comments Chromecast with google tv 4k snowIf you’re a YouTube TV subscriber, you’ll see a “Live” section atop the Google TV home screen, with a grid guide showing what’s on TV but at the moment, no other services feed into this menu. Google TV’s “Continue watching” row is extremely useful for picking up where you left off. (It works with Netflix, HBO Max, and CBS All Access, but it doesn’t show content from Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Disney+.) You also can’t use voice commands on a Google Home or Nest Audio speaker to play video from certain apps, such as Amazon Prime and HBO Max, even though those same commands work through the Chromecast remote. Some apps, for instance, don’t integrate with Google’s “Continue watching” row, which lets you pick up where you left off on movies and shows. It’s just so much easier to find new things to watch and stay on top of what you’re already watching when you don’t have to navigate through a sea of individual apps. The resulting experience feels like a revelation. Google TV’s recommendations and watchlist aren’t shunted off to some weird, secondary interface (like they are on Apple TV), and they don’t aggressively favor any particular service (like Amazon’s Fire TV devices do for Prime video). Google isn’t the first company to try building a universal streaming guide, but it’s far more committed to the idea than any of its major rivals. If you need more suggestions, Google TV can drill down into individual genres. By holding the Assistant button on the remote, you can ask for specific shows, actors, or directors, or you can request specific genres such as “action movies from the 80s” or “new comedy shows.” And for any given show, you can view cast and crew information, look up suggestions for similar content, or give a thumbs up or thumbs down to fine-tune Google’s home screen recommendations. Google Assistant plays a role in sifting through content as well. Jared Newman / IDGĬlick on any show, and Google TV will tell you where to watch it and let you save it for later viewing. You can even add movies and shows to your list via Google search or the Google TV mobile app, and they’ll be waiting in your watchlist back on the Chromecast. Instead of managing separate lists inside multiple apps, you can finally have one list for everything you’ve been meaning to watch. Google TV also lets you set up a universal watchlist, which is an idea that’s been long overdue on streaming devices. (You can read more about Dolby Atmos in this story.) The main omission is on the audio front: While the device can pass through Dolby Atmos audio, it doesn’t support Atmos decode, which Netflix requires for object-based surround sound. Navigation feels fast and fluid, and Google made sure to tick most boxes for format support, including 4K HDR video, along with Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG. In terms of tech specs, the Chromecast with Google TV has a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage, though only about 3.5GB of that storage seems to be available for apps. The new Chromecast with Google TV includes a proper remote control. Within Google’s settings menu, you can map each button to a different part of your A/V system, or you can use HDMI-CEC to control everything in unison. The remote also has buttons for power, volume, mute, and input switching, along with an infrared emitter so you can program them to work with your A/V setup. There’s a circular directional pad, a back button, and a home button for getting around a Google Assistant button for voice controls and shortcut buttons for launching YouTube and Netflix. The remote control is similar to what you get with other streaming players, such as Roku’s Streaming Stick+ and Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K, except it comes in a choice of three colors-white “Snow,” light red “Sunrise,” and light-blue “Sky”-that match the color of the Chromecast dongle. It has an actual interface on your TV-apps and all. The new Chromecast isn’t just controlled from your phone. (We’ll talk more about how that software works in the next section.) Jared Newman / IDG The real star is the Google TV software-hence the name-which has apps you control on the TV itself with a proper remote. But on the Chromecast with Google TV, that mode of interaction feels like a sideshow. Like previous Chromecasts, you can still use a phone or tablet as your remote control, hitting the cast button in supported apps to launch media on the TV.
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