Thursday, July 12, 2018

Android Casting Observations

A few months back we cut our cable TV and subscribed to HULU. Recently, we took a trip were we were able to use the casting feature of Hulu and our Android tablet on a variety of TVs. The short answer, it works.

Observation #1
 When the Android tablet is shutdown, casting to the TV still continued. The obvious implication is that the router transmits directly to the TV and bypasses the tablet. Good news to a degree.

Though casting continued continued with the tablet shutdown, it seemed that after a while the router would "lock-up". Especially, the next morning after casting on all night.  Getting the TV functional again simply required rebooting the TV.

There was one TV where casting, for unknown reasons, could not be implemented for a time span of approximately one hour. Very frustrating. After a while and doing some experimentation we simply accepted this "feature" (flaw).


Observation #2 
When casting HULU from the Android tablet to the TV, casting at times was flakey. It seems that this degradation was due, in part, to multi-tasking with the tablet. This was resolved by closing the HULU application on the tablet. This allows the user to use other applications on the tablet.

Of course closing the HULU application on the tablet prevents switching to a different channel (program). This was resolved by temporarily reactivating the HULU application on the tablet. After switching to the new channel (program), the HULU application was shut down.


Observation #3 
The HULU applications offers the opportunity to "stop casting".  When done with casting from the tablet to the TV, it seems that taking the "stop casting" option is the appropriate action. As noted in Observation #1 above, simply turning off the tablet does not stop casting. If casting is allowed to continue, after a period of time the router tends to "lock-up" effectively degrading casting.  Taking the proactive step of stopping casting when done resolved this issue.