Tip: You Can Play Local Video Files Through Chromecast

We’re still playing around with the Chromecast, and will have some thoughts on it later, but we wanted to point out a feature that you may not have been aware of after watching yesterday’s demo from Google. Chromecast can play local video files from your computer to a TV. That means you aren’t stuck with YouTube or Netflix or uploading your current collection to a cloud service – you can grab files already on your computer and then stream them to a TV. 

Outside of owning a Chromecast device (which is sold out everywhere), all you have to do is install the Chromecast extension on your PC, then find the file path of a local video file that you’d like to play, paste that path into the address bar in a Chrome browser, and then press the Chromecast button to cast it on over. It really is that simple.

One of our readers said he noticed a slight frame rate drop, but it’s not all that noticeable. I tried it as well and thought video looked pretty damn good.

Again, we’re still familiarizing ourselves with Chromecast, but are hoping to have more later today.

Cheers Corey and Leo!

This post was last modified on July 25, 2013 8:48 am

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