Yesterday, we found out that the latest Chromecast update disabled support for ‘video_playback’, which made apps such as Koushik Dutta’s AllCast and Leon Nicholls’ Fling useless. Granted, the only reason why were were able to use these apps were because Koush was able to reverse engineer the Chromecast protocols, thus allowing newly developed apps to run on all Chromecasts, not just whitelisted ones. Google was obviously not too happy about this and made changes with the latest update. My assumption was that Google won’t make local or networked content friendly with the Chromecast in the future. However, there might be a glimmer of hope because The Verge was able to get a response from Google regarding the changes they made….
“We’re excited to bring more content to Chromecast and would like to support all types of apps, including those for local content. It’s still early days for the Google Cast SDK, which we just released in developer preview for early development and testing only. We expect that the SDK will continue to change before we launch out of developer preview, and want to provide a great experience for users and developers before making the SDK and additional apps more broadly available.”
This appears to be good news, but I will continue to be skeptical. Will Google allow playback from DLNA media servers or will they limit it to content physically on your device? The other question is when will the SDK be “broadly available?” I’m thinking sometime in October or November, but that is just my hunch. For now, I can understand why Google would block AirCast, but we won’t really know anything for sure until the Google Cast SDK leaves developer preview.
source: The Verge
Come comment on this article: Google responds to blocking local video playback from Chromecast apps
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