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Webpages are really slow thru gscreen... cast device too weak, or gscreen overhead somewhere? #45

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tobefound opened this issue Sep 23, 2015 · 1 comment

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@tobefound
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Hey all gscreeners,

When I load webpage X in a tab and then "normally" cast that tab to a Chromecast, it displays quite nicely and responsively on my TV screen.

But when adding X as a URL in my greenscreen channel Y and then cast the channel the greenscreen way, X is r-e-a-l-ly laggy. Ads and animation stuff moves in slow motion.

I can't understand why there would be a difference... yes, gscreen probably uses an iframe in which it injects the URLs listed for a particular channel and then cycles through these based on the timing interval set. But that shouldn't really matter I think. Or hope...

Or am I completely misunderstanding what the chromecast does internally?!? I was under the impression that a chromecast simply is a small computer with a chrome browser installed. Whatever gets cast/sent to the device, is simply a command to the small computer to load whatever receiver webpage I feed it with.

For "normal" casting mode however, I see two options: a) it means it's the chrome tab URL which is the receiver webpage, or b) it is actually only the tab video and audio data that gets sent to the device, bypassing any internal webpage processing.

I think it must be option b. Why? Because if I close down my computer or move it away from the device, the casting stops. This doesn't happen when casting Youtube, Netflix, or... tada... gscreen stuff.

For gscreen it's a custom receiver (setup-chromecast.html) which loads upon gscreen sending the "connect to my device" command.

So, is option b the answer to this question? The processing power of the chromecast device is far inferior to that of my laptop, hence the difference? If so, all of a sudden, we have a dealbreaker... :(

Anyknow who knows this? Thx!

@superhawk610
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@tobefound When casting a tab, it actually renders the browser's tab as a video feed and then pipes that over to the Chromecast to render (which can lead to choppy performance over slow networks, but generally you're only limited by the PC you're casting from). YouTube, Netflix, etc all write their own Cast apps using the Cast SDK, and when casting them, the Chromecast DOES just load and render a URL's contents like you suggested.

I just published multicast, Greenscreen's spiritual successor for the new Castv2 API via mDNS. This new API is a lot easier to work with and should have virtually no overhead. If you have any issues casting a tab, open up an issue here and list the device specs for the computer you're casting from as well as the page URL(s) you're attempting to cast and we'll look into potential performance bottleneck causes.

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