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★★★★★
Auto power on and Auto Switching works
In this review, I will focus on a feature that has not been covered well by other reviewers. In Google's introduction of the chromecast device, they showed how they could press the chromecast button in the youtube app on smartphone and the TV would automatically turn ON and switch to the correct input to play the youtube video. I can confirm that it works exactly like they demoed. It is pretty impressive :-) There a few things you need to do to make it work. Firstly you have to enable the HDMI-CEC feature on your TV. HDMI-CEC is marketed under different names by different manufacturers. Panasonic calls it Viera-Link, Onkyo calls it RIHD and Toshiba calls it Regza link. You will have to read your TV manual and find out how to enable HDMI-CEC correctly in the TV settings. For my Panasonic TV, I set the "Viera Link" to "ON" and "Power on Link" to "Yes". The "power on link" setting allows the chromecast device to Turn ON the TV when you send a video to the chromecast device. Also, for the chromecast device to Turn ON the TV, it should be plugged in directly to a power outlet using the included adapter. If you power chromecast though the USB port on your TV, it will lose power when you switch OFF the TV. Chromecast device with no power cannot turn ON the TV. Make sure you turn OFF everything after changing the settings to test the Auto power ON functionality. After you setup the TV as described above you can send the video to TV and chromecast will turn it ON and switch the input to the one you have plugged the chromecast device into. For users who have an Audio Video Receiver (AVR), the above setup may not be the best. I could set up the TV to send audio to the receiver through Audio Return Channel(ARC). But for some reason ARC would pass through only stereo sound. Not the DD+ 5.1 sound from Netflix. I don't know if this is an inherent limitation of ARC. Also, after watching a youtube video, switching back to cable TV is a pain. You have to manually switch the input on the TV and the receiver. So in my final setup, I plugged in the chromecast device directly into the receiver. With this setup I can receive DD+ 5.1 sound from Netflix movies. With this setup, chromecast can automatically turn ON the receiver and switch to the correct input on the receiver. Note that you have to have the HDMI-CEC functionality enabled on the receiver for chromecast to be able to turn on the receiver and switch the input. Thanks to Mr. Godwin for pointing out that you can use the HDMI-CEC functionality on the receiver to turn On the TV itself. So your chromecast can turn ON the receiver and your receiver could in turn switch ON the TV. I couldn't get my receiver to turn ON the TV. But it has nothing to do with the chromecast device itself. One another benefit of plugging chromecast into the receiver is that you don't have to turn the TV ON if you just want to listen to google music or audio from youtube videos through your receiver. Since my TV does not get turned ON when the receiver is turned on, I can chromecast a song or youtube video from a different room and it will turn ON just the receiver and play the music. The best part is that it doesn't drain my battery as the video is not playing on the phone and hence I do not need to keep the screen on. Overall I am very happy with chromecast. As others have mentioned, the setup was incredibly easy and trouble free. I was pleasantly surprised that a 1.0 device worked so well out the box. I think Google made a smart move by creating the hardware for Google cast and integrating that functionality into two of the most used video apps youtube and netflix. If they had introduced the googlecasting protocol in Android and left it up other manufacturers to implement this feature, it would have met the fate of Google TV, Miracast etc. Now that there is a reference implementation where Google has shown what a good experience looks like third party manufacturers and app makers will take this and run with it. I am excited about the future possibilities.
July 2013 · Unknown · verified purchase
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