Plex is amazing!

Away visting my parents in-law and had to try out some new things.

I decided not to bring my HDMI cable to my Surface Pro 3 but instead try to view movies a bit more wireless to their TV. I brought my Chromecast.

First of all it was the issue of connecting it to their wireless. It was already paired to my wireless at home and it consistently refused to accept connecting to a different WiFi even though password and everything was correct. The Chromecase app on the Surface just hanged. I had to google and find a way to hard reset the dongle by pressing the button on the dongle (I never even noticed) for 25s.
After that the pairing worked perfect and almost instant! Amaze me a bit how Google didn't get a thing like that right...

After that it was the issue of getting the movie over to the Chromecast. I previously tried opening them in Chrome and cast the tab but I was never really happy with the result and it never was able to open anything else than pure mp4 files.

I stumbled over the latest version of Plex and gave it a go by installing it local on the Surface, creating an account and connecting the local server to the account, opening the Web app and then getting a "Cast" icon in the web app which worked to cast to the dongle! Amazing!

Started to watch a movie and it looked perfect but after a while it began to stop about a second and then started to repeat this about every 5-10 seconds, i.e. totally unwatchable.

Tried the settings in the web app and the transcoding settings in the server but nothing really seem to have any effect. Even connected a wired network to my surface to make sure it wasn't a bandwidth issue on their WiFi but the problem persisted.

I finally found the setting on the Chromecast icon in Chrome to change the resolution which was set to the highest! So apparently the bandwidth on their WiFi wasn't enough to stream best quality 720p. But as it worked for about 10-30 minutes after starting to studder it seemed more like a Chromecast bug than a limitation of the network.

I might try to increase it to the medium setting but the low 480p was definitely watchable.

Very impressed by Plex though! Plex + Chromecast is definitely going to be something I will strongly consider replacing my WDTV + NAS setup which I currently use for watching my movies.