Chromecast: $35 Google Arm TV dongle

Former Member over 11 years ago

Google introduced a $35 Arm-based SoC (Marvel) computer in a dongle format

with a HDMI port that plugs into your TV to stream video. It has 515MB DDR3L SDRAM (Micron)

2GB NAND Flash (Micron), 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth, and FM combo chip (AzureWave).

It uses the Chrome browser on your PC or Android phone for all the controls,

but streams the video directly from the net.

The Arm version and speed is apparently unknown.

Price includes 3-mo Netflix ($24 value). (reportedly this perk got cancelled)

Maybe the next RPi will look like this.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+Teardown/16069/1

morgaine over 11 years ago

Don't touch that device with a barge pole until all Google code on it has been overwritten with something else. That thing is as far from being open as it gets. From Google's Cast release notes:

Note: You may not publicly distribute or ship your Google Cast application without written permission from Google, per the terms of service described on the Downloads page.

This is effectively a Man-In-The-Middle dongle for them to add your video preferences to their targetted advertising portfolio. Google is tightening its grip on content delivery (and hence advertising) in the living room, and recently announced enhanced DRM for books and video. Easy to see the business plan evolving.

In news that is undoubtedly related, Google has now started arguing against net neutrality. It sure didn't take long to transition from "Don't Be Evil" to "Be Evil".
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Former Member over 11 years ago in reply to morgaine

From Oooh! to Awwww... in about three hours. Dang. Rooters, arise! Reflashers, To ARMs. (better pun than I usually make, that!) - Louis (Rooters: those who modify h/w s/w combinations to remove restrictions imposed upon device as-delivered. Clarified to anchor the term to a family-friendly context.)
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morgaine over 11 years ago in reply to Former Member

Louis Roberts wrote:

From Oooh! to Awwww... in about three hours.

Haha, that made me chuckle.

Well hopefully it'll get totally open and more functional community firmware in due course, which is quite likely since its low price offers no barrier to experimenters. But as it stands, the device effectively continues to be owned by Google even after a user has purchased it, because it does nothing other than access Google media services, pure Google content delivery. It's single-mindedly designed for Google's benefit to expand the Google media ecosystem under Google's control, and that's only acceptable for wholly-owned Googlites.
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Former Member over 11 years ago

The device has been root'ed. It's a Marvell DE3005 SOC single core variant of the 88DE3100. Its basicilly a stripped down version of GoogleTV's version of Android that has been made to mirror whatever is sent to it. It does not allow you to install APK's now and most likely never will.

http://hackaday.com/2013/07/29/chromecast-bootloader-exploit-it-runs-android/
http://blog.gtvhacker.com/2013/chromecast-exploiting-the-newest-device-by-google/

BTW: There is already a GameBoy emulator out for it:

https://github.com/acordar/chromecast-gb
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