Chromecast Update Bringing Grief For Many Users 142
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, many Chromecast users were automatically "upgraded" to build 32904. Among the issues seen with this update are placing some users on the 'beta' release track, issues with popular apps such as Plex, HBO GO, (more embarassingly) YouTube, and others. Google so far has been slow to respond or even acknowledge the issues brought by customers, save for the beta release mishap. If you're a Chromecast user, what's been your experience?
Google Beta (Score:1)
Their software never seem to leave the "beta" stage, whether labelled as such or not...
Acknowledgement of issues is also not their forte, as seen again here. Neither is it Apple's except Apple releases pretty well polished stuff.
I guess the conclusion is if you have the money choose Apple. If you have time choose Google. That's how they segment...
Re:Google Beta (Score:5, Funny)
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That term you use, Continuous Integration... I do not think it means what you think it means.
And I don't think it fucking means anything. It's fluffy bullshit.
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At least with Android you get a pop-up asking if you want to perform the upgrade. And you can say "not now."
I've been refusing to "upgrade" my phone to KitKat for a year and a half now. You do have to face the annoyance of the pop-up every 24 hours, but at least you're not forced into a regression.
I'm not, but on the subject of updates (Score:1)
has anyone else's Skype client stopped working with a .dll error lately?
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ah, the main power coupling adjustment. Got it :)
Chromecast the clusterfuck (Score:5, Interesting)
chrome bookmark fiasco (Score:3)
Related to chormeos autoupdates are chrome browser updates. A couple of months ago I woke oneday to find that all my bookmarks where gone in chrome when I was logged in as myself on google. Furthermore they did not just vanish but rather they were all merged into my wife's account. So basically both of us had wrecked user accounts in chrome. Considing I had many hundreds of book marks carefully curated for more than 15 years across browser changes and computer systems, this was a staggering loss. I was
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Related to chormeos autoupdates are chrome browser updates. A couple of months ago I woke oneday to find that all my bookmarks where gone in chrome when I was logged in as myself on google. Furthermore they did not just vanish but rather they were all merged into my wife's account. So basically both of us had wrecked user accounts in chrome. Considing I had many hundreds of book marks carefully curated for more than 15 years across browser changes and computer systems I had a backup of everything and was able to restore. It wasted a couple of hours of mine as I tracked down the issue and resolved it, and caused me to switch from Chrome forever.
Less junk from Google is actually good (Score:1, Insightful)
Less junk from Google you got on your systems, better off you are. Chromecast? Why do you even need it? Seriously, why?
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Amen. I really need a solid alternative to Chrome, that's all.
Why Firefox pisses me off the least (Score:4, Interesting)
Amen. I really need a solid alternative to Chrome, that's all.
I keep using all the various browsers and despite its warts I keep coming back to Firefox as my primary browser. Chrome keeps "fixing" stuff that didn't need fixing and breaking it in the process. Safari has some behaviors I find annoying and (surprisingly) I run into a fair number of website that break on it. Plus Apple never seems to do Windows software very well and you can't get it on Linux. And IE isn't available on anything other than Windows even if I wanted to use it (I don't) so it's a non-starter.
Firefox isn't perfect by any means but it is cross platform, generally stable, generally predictable, and fits my particular work style. Basically it pisses me off the least of the major browser options. It's been my daily driver (so to speak) for quite a few years now. If something better came along I'd drop it without a second thought but none of the alternatives really seem to be meaningfully better.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Don't recommend it. It all went down after they abandoned presto. Compared to the Opera I loved, the chromium version, to quote Dr. Cooper, sucks the big one. They even started rolling out silent updates, and the last one broke the bookmarks (they are gone -- you need to install a 3rd party extension to access your old bookmarks). Alienating their user base this way, they'll be gone sooner
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[Raises little flag]
Opera is still here... Yeah it runs off Chromium... But it still runs fast and is free of a lot of the annoyances of Chrome
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The key annoyance of "chrome" is chrome. Opera is nothing more than a different skin on the same steaming turd. (and their devs have all but said so. They aren't happy with chromium's extreme memory consumption, but there's only so far they can go to "fix it".)
Mysterious power-on (Score:1)
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Isn't that a function of a TV sensing a sudden state change of the HDMI input?
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Works Great. Thanks for asking. (Score:2, Informative)
My two ChromeCasts are working great.
I love a good hysterical conspiracy and am disappointed not to be part of it.
Go on, keep on making up stuff. Perhaps some of it will turn out to be true!
E
Anectode != Data (Score:2)
My two ChromeCasts are working great.
I know this might be a shock but it's actually possible for products to break in ways that affect some users and not others. Weird I know.
Seriously just because it works for you don't mean there isn't an actual problem. Consider yourself lucky.
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It has become a running joke at the office. They are buggy, shitty, and mostly sitting in drawers.
Plug them in and they'll work better.
Re:We have 5.. (Score:5, Funny)
It has become a running joke at the office. They are buggy, shitty, and mostly sitting in drawers.
Whether or not you approve of the über-casual dress code, that's still not a very nice thing to say about your co-workers.
A/B Testing (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like Chromecast has gone the way of Google Chrome: Arbitrary and random A/B testing that you're never notified of, and no way to opt out of.
This seriously pisses me the fuck off with Chome. The browser works great on like 20 machines, and then fucks up on one. You think it is the machine's fault, until you dig and dig and dig into vague forum posts on Google's boards. Then it turns out to be a hidden A/B test, where you have to go into the hidden Chrome settings to force enable/disable some very specific feature to get out of the that one and only that one particular test.
This is EXACTLY what happened to my primary development machine. Chrome had a hidden A/B test for ASync DNS requests. This feature is bugged to shit and back during the test. It would lock the entire browser session (all tabs) for 30-60 seconds at a time while making only certain DNS requests.
Another example is with the internal cache system. There was a bug for a while which would also lock up Chrome for 30-60 seconds at a time just waiting to see if a URL resource is locally cached. There was no fix for this that I could find. My resolution was eventually to have the installers handy for both Release and Beta Chrome laying around. Sometimes Release was the broken build, sometimes Beta was the broken build. So when shit got fucked up, I'd just toggle between the builds.
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but I'd like to keep Chrome around for all the other, usual reasons.
Why, because you like to let Google track you?
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We're all but beta testers in the eye of $software_company
There, fixed it for you!
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We're all but beta testers in the eye of $software_company
Correction: We're all but beta testers in the eye of $advertising_company. Ever notice that their advertising platforms rarely suffer from this kind of flakiness?
Google's stock price would barely quiver if Chrome, Android, GMail, etc all evaporated overnight. Might even go UP like when companies announce staff cuts. Those little freebie side-projects are largely there to convince the public and Google's own employees that they're a do-good technology company. Delivering tested, bullet-proof software apparen
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No, the purpose of Chrome, Android, GMail, etc isn't to show the public they are a do-gooder techno
Chrome updates cause more problems than they solve (Score:3)
Looks like Chromecast has gone the way of Google Chrome: Arbitrary and random A/B testing that you're never notified of, and no way to opt out of. This seriously pisses me the fuck off with Chome.
Amen brother. I used to have our company use Chrome but there was so much flakiness after updates that it became impossible to use. In our particular case weird behavior with PDFs was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. We use a lot of PDFs and Chrome just couldn't handle them in a sane manner, kept changing things and then it would randomly break for a user. It was always a pain in the ass to figure out why there was a problem and then then behavior would change a few weeks later. We don
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And gmail, and google maps, and pretty much everything else.
Google's stuff, while mostly cool and interesting, is essentially perpetually in beta, subject to arbitrary changes, or simply being made to go away.
Google products are endlessly fiddled with, with the users as testers in a lot of cases.
I honestly don't think anybody should be surprised by this. Because
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Because I'm hard pressed to think of a single "product" (and since most of them are free betas that's debatable) which Google has never treated any differently. It's their service, you're just using it in whatever state they give it to you today.
You seem to be confused about their product. You are their product; the advertisers are their clients. That's the service they don't mess with. There's a reason that they don't understand why enterprise customers need Java in the browser or wish they'd stop crying wolf on every SSL cert - selling services to a business isn't their model or one that they really want.
Probably because those customer would say "we need Java to access SuperMicro's IPMI interface on our internal networks. That's the same reas
HOAX (Score:5, Insightful)
The OP includes a link to an IRAQ user saying he can't set up his Chromecast...
and a 9 day old post from someone saying they're now on the beta track and google saying they'll fix it.
Are we really to believe there's a great google conspiracy to disrupt chromecasts, and
in a week and a half NOTHING has been discussed, but now the only two links are
an IRAQI WINDOWS USER and someone who accidentally got into beta.
My money is on hoax.
Ehud
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Google defense force, activate!
how can this be if Googlers are super geniuses? (Score:1)
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Re: Holy shit (Score:1)
Proven cracked? It openly states it has no security I thought.
What does cracking a Chromecast mean?
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I can't tell if you need to be already on the network to use it based on the video.
But, Chromecast had in its FAQ even that anyone on your network had access.
They had some shot in the video of disconnecting and reconnecting to the phone, was that resetting it to search remotely? seems likely that it is possible to do that (play videos on someone else's device in range), but hardly devestating. People have TVs with IR remotes too, they can be "hacked" in pretty much the same way.
What are you talking about Willis? (Score:5, Insightful)
Among the issues seen with this update are placing some users on the 'beta' release track, ...
Google has a non-beta release track for something?
Youtube casting fatally broken. No longer usable. (Score:4, Informative)
This update hosed casting Youtube from my Android phone. It constantly loses the queue. It constantly plays audio only with no video. If another user connects to YouTube the queue is lost. Users constantly booted from being connected. The currently playing box in the lower right disappears preventing any way of controlling the remote device you're casting to. There could not have been any testing prior to this release.
Problems here too (Score:2)
YouTube stopped working, didn;t try netflix. God dammit Google.
It never worked properly anyway... (Score:5, Informative)
...so I doubt this update will make things any worse.
My Number One problem with Chromecast was the dumb setup procedure - the bloody thing is forever losing it's connection with my WiFi, with the only recourse being to do a hard reset and then wade through the interminable setup process again and again...
Of course, Google provides no customer support for the thing - they just send you to a web forums full of raving fanbois who get offensive when you suggest that it's possible for any google product could be anything other than perfect.
</rant>
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I've never had any luck with any of these streaming stick devices. The only thing that works for me a a full-blown computer connected to HDMI.
Of course there are bugs there too. It took Gigabyte two years to release a EFI firmware that fixed the HDMI audio bug where after turning off the TV, HDMI audio would disappear until you rebooted.
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the DRM in hdmi really sucks, but its getting a bit more tolerant.
5 or 10 years ago (back when hdmi was first out) video cards were too strict and the chipsets were, too. if you didn't boot things in the right order, you'd get a race condition. would have to 'reboot the monitor' after the computer started up or you would not get hdmi.
turn off the av receiver and this might turn your tv actually off (switched ac outlet)? that might also cause hdmi to 'go away' and need your pc to be rebooted.
finally all
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They're down to about $25 on ebay these days. How much support to you honestly think you're going to get? A heck of a lot of people have chromecasts which connect to their network just fine. So while it's possible that the chromecast is fundamentally broken, it's more likely that there's an incompatibility between your access point and the chromecast. I'd tend to suspect the AP more than the chromecast based on general experience with those vendors. Is your AP even getting firmware updates anymore? Do the u
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I was having problems because the TV was interfering with the RF signal between the Chromecast and the WAP. Here's what I did, with excellent results:
https://productforums.google.c... [google.com]
$20 worth of cabling, and I got the thing connected via Cat5. Works great now, no disconnects anymore, and it no longer takes up a spot on wireless device list in the WAP.
No issues here (Score:2)
Their tech support is a three ring circus (Score:1)
My Experience (Score:2)
More of the same? (Score:2)
In
Response from Chromecast Community Manager (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the Chromecast Community Manager; I noticed your thread and wanted to respond.
I don't know if you saw my response in our forum, but we posted the below around the Beta issue some users were seeing:
"We've recently updated Chromecast and a small percentage of users received a debug message on the home screen. This update should not have any material negative user impact. We are pushing a fix to those impacted users shortly. If you would like to update immediately, please reboot your device (you do not need to factory data reset your device)."
The OP posted links to our forum but if you have specific issues with the release not being addressed, please post in our forum [google.com].
Jacky