Folks:
We’re hosting a Glastonbury Festival party at our apartment tomorrow evening (music by Kasabian, Dolly Parton, Massive Attack, et al; “hog roast” and Strongbow cider, which the beer expert at the Fresh Pond liquor store said is better than the American brands despite being one third the price). The photos that I want to show are in a Google Plus directory so I thought that it would be simple to show them on a Samsung “Smart TV” (perhaps it is a bad sign when a product includes the word “smart” as part of its name). As soon as I turned the TV on, however, the software updated itself and removed the Picasa app that can grab photos from Google Plus. I thought “no problem; I will use Chromecast from my Android phone.” The Google “Photos” app sort of works except that it doesn’t tie in with the TV remote for going to the next slide and, more distressing, the pictures are terrible quality (low res? oversharpened?). So I’ve reverted to exported JPEGs 1920 pixels wide to a USB stick and plugging that into the back of the TV.
Am I missing something simple? Can it be that Google Chromecast is incapable of doing this with reasonable image quality?
Thanks in advance.
[Update: pork roasting photo gallery; the 14.4 lbs. was all consumed by 9 pm so I think we can declare victory on the roasting front.]
I don’t have a good answer for you but perhaps it is some sort of bandwith/compression thing.
Maybe this is a hint:
http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2013/03/21/google-now-allows-full-rez-photos/
I would just get a (long) hdmi cable and a mini hdmi adapter for my phone/tablet. I have a cheap chinese Android tablet with a mini-hdmi out and I am amazed at the quality of the video it sends down the HDMI.
I did find the first picture I showed on Chromecast came up low resolution then a full res version was shown a couple of second after saying that looks crappy, I just used my phone to swipe through the pictures. I was using a Nexus 5 phone.
I can’t test again as I left my Chromecast at my Mom’s place so she could use it for Netflix.
You are in luck. Just last week Android and chromecast were updated to do device screen mirroring. It works great and you could simply put up a slideshow on browser or any app.
@Abhay, yes, this is on my Nexus 7 (2013) but not my older phone.
Strongbow is to cider what Coors is to beer. I feel for you if it’s that much better than American ciders.