Hands on with RealPlayer Cloud and Chromecast streaming
This Christmas, I found myself in the situation of having a relatively slow ADSL connection at the inlaws’, a TV show sitting on my computer at home, and a Chromecast hooked up to a TV taunting me to watch the Christmas show I’d been waiting a long time to watch.
My first attempt to watch the show involved remoting into my computer, transcoding the episode to a deal that Chromecast should like, and painfully downloading it to my phone. I then attempted to cast it with aVia and got pretty much what I expected: it failed. I’d pretty much resigned myself to copying it from my HTC EVO 4G LTE to the laptop and just watching it on a smaller screen.
I got the idea to try RealPlayer Cloud, and started uploading from my phone on the slow ADSL. I was given an ETA in the four hour range. I didn’t have time to wait or battery to spare, so I remoted into my home computer with the higher speed internet, added the video to the RPC My Videos, and as it started uploading it became immediately streamable to the Chromecast.
I let about six percent of the video get uploaded from my home computer before I started it streaming on the ADSL. After I started playing I was a bit concerned that the bandwidth available might make for a crappy experience, but I didn’t notice any buffering, stuttering, or artifacting, and I was able to watch my show being uploaded as I watched over two thousand miles away with no issues.
Considering I spent the past few years associating the name “RealPlayer” with “buffering… buffering… buffering” it was a nice Christmas surprise to have used the software as intended and have it work.
The only issue I ran across is there was a seeking issue right at the beginning, where it jumped to the current position of the upload once, but other than having to seek back once, I experienced no playback issues.
It still is infuriating that this long after Chromecast has been out in the market, there is still no good free direct from device streaming option that works, but in the meantime this works pretty well in a pinch.
RealPlayer Cloud gives you about two gigabytes of storage for your videos for signing up and then you get some additional storage space for connecting devices. Videos can be shared to almost any device, and RealPlayer Cloud handles the conversion for device and bandwidth.
Download: Google Play
