Chromecasting — a cast of problems and resolutions

Technology — making one item match to another — that has been my work and frustration of the day.

We went out today to Best Buy and picked up a Chromecast. We knew we didn’t have an HDMI port on our old HDTV, but there was an HDMI port on the DVD player, and we figured we could plug the Chromecast into the DVD player, and get the feed out of the DVD to the TV. Only it turned out the HDMI port on the DVD player was an OUTPUT port, and wouldn’t take the feed from the Chromecast.

So we went to Target and picked up an HDMI/DVI converter — since the TV has a DVI port. It all plugged in, but the Chromecast still didn’t work. Best guess is that somehow the adapter was actually a DVI/HDMI converter and only carried signal one way.

It took a run to RadioShack to find an HDMI/DVI converter that actually converted from HDMI to DVI. We plugged that in, and the TV screen instantly lit up with the setup screen for Chrome. We thought we were there.

But DVI doesn’t handle audio.  We didn’t expect that to be a problem. We thought we would just play the sound off the computer.  But Chromecast app picks up the audio and video off the computer so there is no audio to play on the computer.  So we are searching for what inexpensive device we can get to split the sound off to feed it to the TV separate from the DVI. With $35 for the Chromecast, $17 for a converter that didn’t work, and $21 for a converter that does, this inexpensive streaming project is getting more expense, but we should be almost there.

So for tonight we are doing a workaround — with two computers.  One Chromecasting the video I mentioned in a previous blog, while the other is playing regular but plugged into our external speakers. The quality of the video is quite good from YouTube to our large screen HDTV. We weren’t sure how good the quality would be — from YouTube to the big home screen — but the YouTube feed, for this one at least, apparently has fairly good quality.

That said, I’ll close today’s blog, by asking if anyone has any ideas for our audio splitting solution, let us know.