Yep, there was a short extender HDMI pigtail in the package, two years ago. There’s a new Chromecast out just now that concedes the inevitable and has a built-in pigtail cord, as well as a new round shape. The main other benefit of the second release is that it can use 5GHz wifi, making it significantly faster (less likely to have to buffer).

I’m still positive about the Chromecast, even as my use of Amazon’s FireTV stick has declined to about zero. Google, as usual, got the minimalist design right, it just streams very well. My new TV (i.e. with RF, as opposed to flat panel display) has Roku built-in, but I haven’t set it up, because the whole “Smart TV” thing leaves me cold. That’s the kind of bundling-for-profit mentality I’m trying to escape as a cord-cutter.

So maybe that explains the fun I’m having these days plugging together dongles and flat panel displays and tablets and media servers and gigabit wifi. I understand that that’s not for everybody, though. Sounds like you’re closer to the appliance preference, but with a willingness to experiment with things like Chromecast.

What you’ve heard about the Amazon license terms is correct, and I’d expect Google’s (and Vudu’s and all the rest) to be the same. That’s what it says, and though it hasn’t happened to me yet (but how would I know, without constantly testing every cloud video and downloaded WMV file to make sure it still works?), it sure doesn’t give me a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. I feel like it’s a bit fraudulent to label the buttons “Buy” or “Purchase”, when you never actually get to take unimpeded possession of what you paid for.

Lots of people resent the current “digital rights [theirs] management” regime, and there’s lots of software to make unencrypted archival copies of videos you’ve “purchased” that way. From what I can tell from the descriptions, most of them are not (they believe) violating DMCA because they don’t break the encryption, they record from the screen after the licensed decoding software has done its work. I can’t imagine that would work well, though, but judging by the size of the genre when you search, people seem willing to settle for crappy recordings for the sense of control they reclaim from it.

I couldn’t get a DVD to play. I bought an add-on from Microsoft and they still wouldn’t play. Windows 8 turned a good laptop into junk as far as I’m concerned. The Chromebook someone gave me doesn’t have that problem.

Now I’m thinking about a new desktop. They all seem to come with Windows 10. I just simply won’t do that. No sense having a desktop sitting over with the laptop, unused and despised.

And it does occur to me that there are probably millions of computers out there with Windows 8 which are performing well for the owners. Which is a grim statement about me.

Actually my biggest beef with the chromecast is it’s shape. It has a bulbous shape to it which means I can’t fit 2 HDMI plugs in at the same time on one of my tvs. I seem to recall there was a 90 degree adapter in the box when I bought it, but haven’t tried hunting down the box yet.

My wife and I have bought a fair amount of content over the years mainly from both Google and Amazon. I’ve not experienced it (yet) but I’ve heard that if a service loses the right to distribute something you’ve purchased–too bad, so sad. It just disappears from your library.

Five years ago everybody who wanted to cut the umbilical pretty much had to start by using a PC to watch video online, and either streamed through a browser or downloaded. I strongly favored downloading back then because I had slower bandwidth so I get better playback from a local copy, and because I figured that if I paid for it, I at least ought to have a “physical” copy on my own computer. I still have anxiety about “owning” a video that Amazon reassures me is stored safely in the cloud where I can “always” get it. Even if I cancel Prime? Might they change their minds some day? Go out of business? You get the idea. BTW, I still do buy downloads, especially to get new releases, but I generally go to YouTube (Google Play in drag) or Amazon first, Vudu last. Vudu for a while had all my business because they had the only 1080, but as soon as everybody else figured out real HD, I shun them–they’re owned by Walmart, and I feel a bit dirty when I watch a Vudu video.

Second stage for me was to start using my Linux development server (located in the living room anyway because that’s where the cable for Internet came in) as a simple “home theater PC”. “HTPC” is a whole open source genre and mostly Linux, but I found that it was fatally crippled by content owner paranoia that it was too easy to break DRM on Linux (DVD encryption was broken on Linux and they still hold a grudge), who made sure that Linux was frozen out of newer technology like bluray. But I could still use the workhorse VLC player (works great everywhere, Android & PC & Mac) and I could wrangle Flash into a browser, so it all limped along.

But that server had its own 27″ flat panel, and everything changed when I shelled out $35 for a Chromecast dongle to plug into the display. I had wifi, and a Samsung Android tablet I hadn’t before used much at all for video, but adding a streaming dongle to the mix was the key to a whole new distributed entertainment architecture. Chromecast and Android work together like hand-in-glove, especially when you get up into Lollipop land (5+).

You get best results when an Android app uses the Chromecast API to “cast” to the dongle. That’s because there’s no workload on the device–it just commands Chromecast to make a connection somewhere and stream some video directly to itself. No workload, and the device screen size doesn’t limit the video size. The latest Chromecast, just released, uses 5GHz wifi to be reportedly faster than snot, and has a few trivial bells and whistles, but I like the Chromecast because it just does that one streaming thing very well, and plays nice with my Android tablets and my Windows PC.

I also have a FireTV Stick dongle, which also runs Android, but takes the approach of trying to be a full smart TV with an “app ecosystem”. Which it pulls off with some success, but also a lot of flops–Amazon runs its own app store with, apparently, lower standards than Google’s. I don’t use the FireTV much these days, because except for Amazon Prime itself, all those apps are available for my tablets too.

Chromecast apps I have on my tablet: Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, CBS, Crackle (Sony’s movie streamer), ABC, TED, Comedy Central, Fox (entertainment), PBS, Google Play, Washington Post TV, and ISS Online (the live feed from ISS).

Chromecast support is built into Android 5+, so I can cast the entire screen to the TV to get: Local Fox, ABC, and NBC affiliates; Lifetime (yeah I know mostly chickflix, but they had this one psychological thriller called “UnReal” which was amazing [remember the waitress from "Roswell"?]), Xfinity To Go (Comcast’s lame streamer), Amazon Video, Fox News (keeping an eye on the loons), CNN, Vimeo, NBC Nightly News, Ustream, USA (have you seen “Mr. Robot”? Wow!)…some supporting apps like Google’s Chromecast app (needed sometimes to manage the dongle), and a VPN client.

Most things I want to watch I can find in there somewhere and watch for free. There are also streaming guides, like canistream.it, which sometimes are helpful. And as a last resort, if I really really want to watch a video right away, I’ll shell out the industry standard (i.e. Apple iTunes-mandated; can you say “antitrust”?) $2.99 for a TV episode.

I recently also got a cheap/refurbished 40″ TV, and for the first time in a long time I can watch over the air TV. For a few minutes I grooved on the nostalgic feel of flipping through the channels, in sequence, one by one, but it quickly wore off. I’ve watched the new “Heroes:Reborn”, but I’m finding the presence of commercials again to be a real shock. God I’ve gotten spoiled! I can hardly watch real broadcast TV for the commercials, and it’s a painful reminder of why I’m willing to shell out $3 to watch a TV episode. I may bail on Heroes and wait for it to show up on Netflix.

Although it does gall me to pay the $3. I once did a little number crunching to use advertising cost-per-thousand times audience figures times the 17 minutes available for advertising, and realized that at $3/episode we’re being gouged by an order of magnitude. The advertisers are paying only a tenth that amount for each of us per “hour” show. I hate advertising, and hate the fact that I’m trapped by an economic arrangement I didn’t agree to, and indeed, nobody living has agreed to advertising-funded media. What idiot ancestor thought it was smart to let somebody else control your information and entertainment because it’s “free”? What morans they were.

Now, the British were smart, with that £145/year television license which pays for the BBC. You get what you pay for, and Britons get a disproportionate share of the world’s best television, with no effing advertising!!!.

And so the BBC iPlayer says “piss off Yank!” and everybody else except Britons because we really didn’t build that. It uses IP geolocation to determine where you’re connecting from, and if your IP address doesn’t resolve to somewhere in the UK, you’re out of luck. If you could only figure out how to get an IP address in the UK, you’d be able to watch the next episode of Doctor Who “live” as it airs in London at 11:40AM Pacific, several hours before anybody in North America sees it on cable-bundle-whore BBC America. If only you could do that somehow.

That’s how I cut the cord five years on. I’ve really come a long way now that I think about it, from a scarcity of content and a shaky technical base, to what now feels like an unlimited cornucopia of video at my fingertips in a mostly-smoothly functioning infrastructure. Hell, I’m starting to worry I watch too much TV. It’s an embarrassment of riches.