I bought a Chromecast with Google TV in December because I liked the idea of having all my streaming apps in one place with a centralised search mechanism, it now offers Apple TV and I'm one of the 7 people still occasionally using Stadia.... anyway, I have to say I'm really unimpressed. There are so many bugs I've already almost given up using it.
Some examples:
- Apple TV+ regularly crashes. We were recently halfway through watching a movie and it just gave up. At other times we've had picture but no sound. This is NOT an Apple problem - we tried force quitting the app, reinstalling it - didn't help. The only solution was to fully restart Chromecast.
- I often have problems with both Prime and Disney+ where I load them up and when I try and play content it informs me that there's a problem with with my connection and it's unable to play. This has to be fixed by exiting the app and force quitting it from the Chromecast settings menu, then starting it up again. There's no problem with my internet connection so this must be to do with how Chromecast interacts with the apps. There's no problem if I try and load them on other devices or via my TV's native Android system.
- There are often problems with jerky playback or lip-sync. I've read that this is because Chromecast defaults to 4K 60Hz playback but this is not always supported in the UK (e.g. BBC iplayer). However Chromecast can't adjust automatically - I have to do it manually. That's just another annoying inconvenience.
Long story short, it's been a disappointing experience so far. Maybe I have just been unlucky, but at the moment I feel it has fallen well short of what I'd expect.
