Apple TV or Chromecast: Which Is Better for ‘Casting’ to Your TV? – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
What do you get for your money? That’s the question everyone looking to buy a piece of tech asks themselves. It also happens to be the question this recurring feature tries to answer. Is it worth spending extra on high-end gear, or do you get what you need with cheaper models? Every month, we’ll look at some of the cheapest and most expensive products in a given category, testing each to see what their limits are and help you figure out when you can cheap it out, and when to plunk down some extra cash to get what you need.
In this month’s high/low review, we compare two devices for casting your media from a mobile device to a HDTV, the $35 Google Chromecast and the $99 Apple TV.
We may be living in the era of near-omnipresent streaming media, but there is still something to be said for sitting down in front of the Tee Vee every now and then. It’s the biggest screen in your home, and the most comfortable place for watching. But if all of your media lives on a tablet or cell phone, how do you get your media easily onto the big screen? Simple: you plug one of these devices into your TV, and it wirelessly bridges the gap between the new world and the old.
Sure, both of these devices do more than just cast. They each have their own app ecosystems and their own content stores. And yes, there are many devices playing in this field—the Roku and Amazon Fire TV among them.
But many people just want to be able to cast, and we often get asked about those abilities specifically: which device is best for throwing a video, song, movie from a mobile screen to the big screen? Given the substantial cost difference, it seems people are curious if they can get away with a $35 Chromecast or if there’s some reason the Apple TV is worth their $99.
Let’s explore the two and see how they differ.
Google Chromecast
Google goes for a minimalist approach with the Chromecast, a small thumb drive-sized device that plugs into two ports on your television: the HDMI port, and a USB port, where it draws the electricity needed to power the device. If your HDTV doesn’t have a USB port, or if the port on your TV doesn’t supply enough juice to power the Chromecast, Google also throws in a USB power adapter. The internals of this dongle are simple: it is really little more than a Wi-Fi interface and a few chips that output a video image. Most of the heavy lifting is done by your mobile device: a phone, tablet, or PC using software from Google or one of its partners that supports Chromecast.
Google Chromecast.
Alex Washburn/WIRED
This is an important bit: If you’re going to cast from an app on your phone, the app has to be written especially to work with Chromecast. You can’t stream music or video from an…
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/hi-low-apple-tv-chromecast/
AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
