How to Cast Your Desktop
To display your entire computer desktop on your TV via Chromecast, your Windows computer and Chromecast device must be on the same Wi-Fi network. Open the Chrome browser on the computer and then:
What Desktop Casting Is Good For
Casting your desktop works well for static items like a slideshow of photos saved to your hard drive or a PowerPoint presentation. As with casting a tab, casting video isn’t great. If you want to play a video on your television, either hook up your PC directly via HDMI or use a service built for streaming video over your home Wi-Fi network such as Plex.
How to Cast a Chrome Browser Tab
You can also cast a single tab from the Google Chrome web browser.
What Tab Casting Works Well For
Casting a Chrome browser tab is ideal for anything that’s mostly static, such as vacation photos stashed in Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. It’s also good for viewing a website at a larger scale, or even for displaying a presentation PowerPoint online or Google Drive’s Presentation web app. What it doesn’t work as well for is video. Well, kind of. If you are using something that already supports casting, like YouTube, it works just fine because the Chromecast can grab YouTube directly from the internet, and your tab becomes a remote control for YouTube on the TV. In other words, it’s no longer broadcasting its tab to the Chromecast.
What Is Casting?
Casting is a method of sending content wirelessly to your television, but it works in two different ways. You can cast content from a service that supports it like YouTube, which is actually telling Chromecast to go to the online source (YouTube) and fetch a particular video to play on the TV. The device that told Chromecast to do that (your phone, for example) then becomes a remote control to play, pause, fast forward, or choose another video. When you cast from your PC, though, you are mostly streaming content from your desktop to your TV over a local network with no help from an online service. That is different, because streaming from a desktop relies on the computing power of your home PC, while streaming YouTube or Netflix relies on the cloud.
Why Cast?
Google’s $35 HDMI dongle is an affordable alternative to set-top boxes like Apple TV and Roku. Primarily, it allows you to view all kinds of content on a TV, including YouTube, Netflix, video games, and Facebook videos. But the Chromecast also helps you put two basic items from any PC running Chrome onto your TV: a browser tab or the full desktop. This feature works with the Chrome browser on any PC platform that supports it including Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, and Google’s Chrome OS.
Casting Services Like Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook Video
Not a ton of services have built-in casting from the PC version of the web to the Chromecast. This is because a lot of services have already built it into their mobile apps on Android and iOS and haven’t bothered with laptops and desktops. Regardless, some services do support casting from the PC, notably Google’s own YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix. To cast from these services, start playing a video, and with the player controls, you’ll see the casting icon—the outline of a display with a Wi-Fi symbol in the corner. Select that, and the small window appears once again in your browser tab. Select the nickname for your Chromecast device, and the casting begins.
