The All New Chromecast with Google TV HD Is Pretty Great For $29! Hands-On Review

The device in question is an Android-based streaming media player that has been modified to support various types of emulation. The creator of the device wanted to test out its capabilities, and as such, they added some ROMs to it to see how well it would perform.

One thing to understand about this device is that it's not capable of running high-end games or applications. While it can handle some PSP games with decent performance, it's not going to be able to handle more demanding titles like Chains of Olympus. However, for easier-to-emulate content like NES, SNES, and Neo Geo games, the device performs quite well.

The creator has tested out various emulators on the device, including RetroArch for NES, SNES, and Neo Geo games. They have also tried out PlayStation One emulation, which works great on this low-end chip. Additionally, some Game Boy Advance games can be played on the device, although they may not run perfectly.

The creator has also experimented with Nintendo 64 (N64) games, using a modified emulator that runs on Google Play. In one test, Diddy Kong Racing was played on the device, and while it did experience some lag, it was still playable. However, other N64 games may not run as smoothly due to the limitations of the chip.

In terms of performance, the device can handle cloud gaming services like GeForce Now and Stadia, although there are some limitations. The creator has been able to play various Xbox Cloud games on the device using a sideloaded app, although they did encounter an issue with a message asking for an update to the app.

One of the standout features of this device is its ability to handle 1080p video playback, making it a great option for those looking for a streaming media player. The creator notes that while there may be other devices available with similar capabilities, this one offers a unique combination of emulation and 1080p playback at an affordable price point.

The device's performance can vary depending on the game or application being used, but overall, it provides a decent experience. The creator notes that while some TVs already come with built-in streaming media players, adding a dedicated device like this one can provide additional benefits and extend the life of your TV.

In terms of pricing, the device is currently available for $29.99 in its HD model, although the creator notes that they would have preferred to see an upgrade to 4K resolution at this price point. However, they acknowledge that 1080p playback provides a solid alternative, and the added benefit of emulation capabilities makes this device a great option for those looking for a streaming media player with some extra functionality.

Overall, the device is a great option for those looking for a streaming media player with some extra features, such as emulation capabilities. While it may not be able to handle high-end games or applications, it provides a solid experience for 1080p video playback and various types of emulation.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new Google Chromecast with Google TV from Google so yeah uh this is the HD version brand new to the market with a price tag of 29.99 in 2021 they released the 4K model and the price on that is around 49.99 so we are getting a significant price drop here but keep in mind this is the HD version no 4K here it'll only do up to 1080 60 which should be plenty for a lot of people and keep in mind when Black Friday comes around or these big sales from Amazon and different companies we're going to see a price drop on this hopefully around the 20 price tag so the big difference between the Chromecast with Google TV and the Amazon Fire stick is we've got Pure Google here instead of running Amazon Fire OS we've got Google TV which I'm a huge fan of and we do have access to Google Play so if that's something that was keeping you from the fire stick then I would definitely jump over to the Chromecast either the 4K a model or the HD which we're taking a look at in this video along with the dongle itself we also get our remote still supports voice glad to see that here and with the HD model we only have one color variant so with the 4K model they released in 2021 you could pick it up in blue pink or white with this we've only got the white variant to go on and of course we also get our power brick our USB type-c cable and some batteries for the remote so everything's here ready to go and when it comes to Specs this is a step down from the original 4K model for the CPU we've got the amlogic s805x2 four A35 cores at 1.8 gigahertz for the GPU we've got the Mali g31 mp2 1.5 gigabytes of RAM as opposed to two with the 4K Model 8 gigabytes of storage plus this does support OTG storage over USB type c and with the s805x2 we do have av1 support with this chip so with the original 4K model we got that s905 and to tell you the truth I don't think you know gaming performance and emulation performance is going to be much different on this version here with the 805. all right so here it is obviously we're running Google TV this is an Android TV I mean it's not far off but there are some people out there that really don't like Google TV since they've been using Android TV for a while but I'm kind of used to this everything I need is basically right here on the front page if I scroll down I've got all of my apps that I've installed and uh in this video we're going to be testing out some light games and some emulation plus video playback when it comes to wide Vine DRM we're level one here so if you did want to watch your HD content from Netflix Prime video Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max you're good to go you're going to get HD but remember only up to 1080p 60. on cheaper Android boxes they're not wide Vine Certified so you're only going to get standard definition and here with all of these apps we get the TV version of the app so it's going to scale really well to a larger display up the very top we've got our live videos movies shows apps library we head into Apps we can actually do a search here and you can do a voice search if you want to Real Racing results for Real Racing and you will be a bit limited when it comes to games uh it kind of keeps some of the lower end stuff but let's go ahead and install one more so directly from Google Play installing it not bad at all so yeah limited on storage given that we only have eight gigs and really only like five gigs for the user to use but you know for these lighter apps you should be good to go especially if you're just going to be using this for video playback and that's the first thing I want to check out so it's really hard for me to show you you know Netflix and stuff like that due to all the copywritten content but we can do some YouTube and I've just jumped right into a 1080p HDR video here got stats for nerds On Screen through this whole video I had zero drop frames and I'm connected over Wi-Fi right now using my Wi-Fi 6 router and you know I expected this to work quite well at 1080p that s805x2 isn't a super top of the line chip but it does 1080p playback and under very very well I also went through and did a quick test with Netflix and HBO Max everything loads up very quickly and you can play your favorite videos at 1080p from all of those apps just fine next thing I wanted to test out was some native Android gaming now with something like this don't expect to be playing pubg or Call of Duty mobile at full speed I mean if you could sideload it it wouldn't run well anyway but these lighter games the Indie stuff the 2D stuff is going to work great on this chip and by the way with crossy road right here I'm just using the remote that came with the unit you can connect a Bluetooth controller I'll show you that in a second but I'm going to move over to another game real quick foreign another thing I wanted to take a look at was Bluetooth controller support and yep works out well I've connected an Xbox controller to the Chromecast no issues there I also wanted to see if we could add some kind of OTG to this device be it extra storage ethernet a Micro SD card reader and yeah this also works so what I've got here is just a USB type-c adapter it's got two USB 3.0 ports full size and micro SD card slot HDMI now on something like this you're not going to get HDMI out but it does have an ethernet port and all of this works we can actually add extra storage to the Chromecast very easily this adapter that I have here is definitely a bit bulkier but it's got everything that I need you can buy smaller ones on Amazon I just grabbed this one because I had it laying around and it definitely works so you can even plug in Ethernet here and get a wired connection I've also plugged in a 32 gigabyte USB drive and if we head over to the settings you can see that it is detecting it as a USB drive so I've got it set up for portable storage right now but you could always format it and use it as internal storage just keep that in mind and what I've done with this is just add a couple ROMs to it because we wanted to test out some Dreamcast N64 PlayStation and some PSP on this device I definitely wanted to test out some emulation and one thing you got to understand this this isn't going to run the high-end stuff I mean some PSP games will run on this device but when it comes to like chains of Olympus it's going to be falling on its face all the time you can turn frame skip to two and get a pretty decent experience but that's not what this little thing's about we've got a low end chip here so no PS2 no GameCube no Wii No 3DS but when it comes to the easier to emulate stuff you can have a pretty good time with this NES SNES PC engine you want to do some Neo Geo CPS one two three even Playstation One emulation works great on this little chip and by the way for the Game Boy Advance you saw and Playstation that's running right now I'm using retro Arch FPS is up in the top right hand corner and these games are definitely playable even some N64 games work really well like this one here at Diddy Kong Racing I'm using the mupin 64 plus FZ core from Google Play and we get a few dips here and there but overall I wouldn't mind playing this another one I tried was 007 GoldenEye and unfortunately it was just way too laggy and it really came down to the sound lagging out on this chip but yeah I mean there are some N64 games that will work on this device and PSP so you'll see here right at the beginning of Tekken 6 we got a couple dips we're at 1X resolution with filtering turned completely off and no frame skip whatsoever this game does run at a pretty constant 60. got a couple dips down to around 58 every once in a while but it's not bad at all now first and foremost I would pick this up for video playback but you know as a side perk we can get some emulation out of the way the final thing I wanted to take a look at was a little bit of cloud gaming and from Google Play directly on the device we can get GeForce now and stadia but we can't get Game Pass so this is one of my favorites what I did was just side load it from my USB drive you can also send files over if you want to and this worked out much better than I thought it would the app itself isn't made for Google TV but if you sideload it we do have Google Play services so it will start right up and we can play our favorite Xbox Cloud games here and there is one issue that I've run into if you take a look at the bottom we've got this message please update the app and uh this actually wasn't showing at first it was a different message telling me that I could play my favorite games on Android and since I don't have a touch screen I can't get rid of that message but I'm sure if I plugged in a mouse I could navigate to The Little X and get it out of the way but I wanted to show this off because performance here isn't bad at all even over Wi-Fi I know there's a lot of people out there that aren't really in the cloud gaming but you know with the internet connection I have here I've had really good luck with basically all of them stadia GeForce now and especially Game Pass so overall not bad for thirty dollars but this would be an even better deal when it goes on sale for like Black Friday and different sales throughout the year at Best Buy right now price is sitting at 29.99 for the HD model here but if it was up to me I'd actually spend the extra and get the 4K just because you know we'd have 4K video playback when it comes to Native Android gaming and emulation performance these are basically on par with each other the HD versus the 4K I really can't see much of a difference except for the fact that we don't have 4K on the HD model so yeah I do think that this will be a great choice for somebody who's looking for a 1080p playback device but you got to keep in mind that you know a lot of TVs nowadays already have this kind of stuff built in of course some of them are slower than others and adding something like this can get you a few more years out of your television but you know in the end it's really up to you I will leave links for the 4K and the HD model in the description and you know if there's anything else you want to see running on the HD model just let me know in the comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this one like oh ways thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new Google Chromecast with Google TV from Google so yeah uh this is the HD version brand new to the market with a price tag of 29.99 in 2021 they released the 4K model and the price on that is around 49.99 so we are getting a significant price drop here but keep in mind this is the HD version no 4K here it'll only do up to 1080 60 which should be plenty for a lot of people and keep in mind when Black Friday comes around or these big sales from Amazon and different companies we're going to see a price drop on this hopefully around the 20 price tag so the big difference between the Chromecast with Google TV and the Amazon Fire stick is we've got Pure Google here instead of running Amazon Fire OS we've got Google TV which I'm a huge fan of and we do have access to Google Play so if that's something that was keeping you from the fire stick then I would definitely jump over to the Chromecast either the 4K a model or the HD which we're taking a look at in this video along with the dongle itself we also get our remote still supports voice glad to see that here and with the HD model we only have one color variant so with the 4K model they released in 2021 you could pick it up in blue pink or white with this we've only got the white variant to go on and of course we also get our power brick our USB type-c cable and some batteries for the remote so everything's here ready to go and when it comes to Specs this is a step down from the original 4K model for the CPU we've got the amlogic s805x2 four A35 cores at 1.8 gigahertz for the GPU we've got the Mali g31 mp2 1.5 gigabytes of RAM as opposed to two with the 4K Model 8 gigabytes of storage plus this does support OTG storage over USB type c and with the s805x2 we do have av1 support with this chip so with the original 4K model we got that s905 and to tell you the truth I don't think you know gaming performance and emulation performance is going to be much different on this version here with the 805. all right so here it is obviously we're running Google TV this is an Android TV I mean it's not far off but there are some people out there that really don't like Google TV since they've been using Android TV for a while but I'm kind of used to this everything I need is basically right here on the front page if I scroll down I've got all of my apps that I've installed and uh in this video we're going to be testing out some light games and some emulation plus video playback when it comes to wide Vine DRM we're level one here so if you did want to watch your HD content from Netflix Prime video Disney Plus Hulu HBO Max you're good to go you're going to get HD but remember only up to 1080p 60. on cheaper Android boxes they're not wide Vine Certified so you're only going to get standard definition and here with all of these apps we get the TV version of the app so it's going to scale really well to a larger display up the very top we've got our live videos movies shows apps library we head into Apps we can actually do a search here and you can do a voice search if you want to Real Racing results for Real Racing and you will be a bit limited when it comes to games uh it kind of keeps some of the lower end stuff but let's go ahead and install one more so directly from Google Play installing it not bad at all so yeah limited on storage given that we only have eight gigs and really only like five gigs for the user to use but you know for these lighter apps you should be good to go especially if you're just going to be using this for video playback and that's the first thing I want to check out so it's really hard for me to show you you know Netflix and stuff like that due to all the copywritten content but we can do some YouTube and I've just jumped right into a 1080p HDR video here got stats for nerds On Screen through this whole video I had zero drop frames and I'm connected over Wi-Fi right now using my Wi-Fi 6 router and you know I expected this to work quite well at 1080p that s805x2 isn't a super top of the line chip but it does 1080p playback and under very very well I also went through and did a quick test with Netflix and HBO Max everything loads up very quickly and you can play your favorite videos at 1080p from all of those apps just fine next thing I wanted to test out was some native Android gaming now with something like this don't expect to be playing pubg or Call of Duty mobile at full speed I mean if you could sideload it it wouldn't run well anyway but these lighter games the Indie stuff the 2D stuff is going to work great on this chip and by the way with crossy road right here I'm just using the remote that came with the unit you can connect a Bluetooth controller I'll show you that in a second but I'm going to move over to another game real quick foreign another thing I wanted to take a look at was Bluetooth controller support and yep works out well I've connected an Xbox controller to the Chromecast no issues there I also wanted to see if we could add some kind of OTG to this device be it extra storage ethernet a Micro SD card reader and yeah this also works so what I've got here is just a USB type-c adapter it's got two USB 3.0 ports full size and micro SD card slot HDMI now on something like this you're not going to get HDMI out but it does have an ethernet port and all of this works we can actually add extra storage to the Chromecast very easily this adapter that I have here is definitely a bit bulkier but it's got everything that I need you can buy smaller ones on Amazon I just grabbed this one because I had it laying around and it definitely works so you can even plug in Ethernet here and get a wired connection I've also plugged in a 32 gigabyte USB drive and if we head over to the settings you can see that it is detecting it as a USB drive so I've got it set up for portable storage right now but you could always format it and use it as internal storage just keep that in mind and what I've done with this is just add a couple ROMs to it because we wanted to test out some Dreamcast N64 PlayStation and some PSP on this device I definitely wanted to test out some emulation and one thing you got to understand this this isn't going to run the high-end stuff I mean some PSP games will run on this device but when it comes to like chains of Olympus it's going to be falling on its face all the time you can turn frame skip to two and get a pretty decent experience but that's not what this little thing's about we've got a low end chip here so no PS2 no GameCube no Wii No 3DS but when it comes to the easier to emulate stuff you can have a pretty good time with this NES SNES PC engine you want to do some Neo Geo CPS one two three even Playstation One emulation works great on this little chip and by the way for the Game Boy Advance you saw and Playstation that's running right now I'm using retro Arch FPS is up in the top right hand corner and these games are definitely playable even some N64 games work really well like this one here at Diddy Kong Racing I'm using the mupin 64 plus FZ core from Google Play and we get a few dips here and there but overall I wouldn't mind playing this another one I tried was 007 GoldenEye and unfortunately it was just way too laggy and it really came down to the sound lagging out on this chip but yeah I mean there are some N64 games that will work on this device and PSP so you'll see here right at the beginning of Tekken 6 we got a couple dips we're at 1X resolution with filtering turned completely off and no frame skip whatsoever this game does run at a pretty constant 60. got a couple dips down to around 58 every once in a while but it's not bad at all now first and foremost I would pick this up for video playback but you know as a side perk we can get some emulation out of the way the final thing I wanted to take a look at was a little bit of cloud gaming and from Google Play directly on the device we can get GeForce now and stadia but we can't get Game Pass so this is one of my favorites what I did was just side load it from my USB drive you can also send files over if you want to and this worked out much better than I thought it would the app itself isn't made for Google TV but if you sideload it we do have Google Play services so it will start right up and we can play our favorite Xbox Cloud games here and there is one issue that I've run into if you take a look at the bottom we've got this message please update the app and uh this actually wasn't showing at first it was a different message telling me that I could play my favorite games on Android and since I don't have a touch screen I can't get rid of that message but I'm sure if I plugged in a mouse I could navigate to The Little X and get it out of the way but I wanted to show this off because performance here isn't bad at all even over Wi-Fi I know there's a lot of people out there that aren't really in the cloud gaming but you know with the internet connection I have here I've had really good luck with basically all of them stadia GeForce now and especially Game Pass so overall not bad for thirty dollars but this would be an even better deal when it goes on sale for like Black Friday and different sales throughout the year at Best Buy right now price is sitting at 29.99 for the HD model here but if it was up to me I'd actually spend the extra and get the 4K just because you know we'd have 4K video playback when it comes to Native Android gaming and emulation performance these are basically on par with each other the HD versus the 4K I really can't see much of a difference except for the fact that we don't have 4K on the HD model so yeah I do think that this will be a great choice for somebody who's looking for a 1080p playback device but you got to keep in mind that you know a lot of TVs nowadays already have this kind of stuff built in of course some of them are slower than others and adding something like this can get you a few more years out of your television but you know in the end it's really up to you I will leave links for the 4K and the HD model in the description and you know if there's anything else you want to see running on the HD model just let me know in the comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this one like oh ways thanks for watching\n"