One More Thing, Vacation Edition!

This would’ve been really neat – if it had worked…

Occasionally when we travel, I’ll remember to bring along the cables needed to wire up an iPad or my laptop to the TV in our room so that we can watch something on Plex after the kids go to bed.

This was not one of those occasions, however I was pleasantly surprised to see that Disney added a wireless option where (in theory) you can stream from your own device directly to the TV via Chromecast!

I say ideally because I fought with the thing on and off for about an hour and never could get it to work. The Chromecast connection itself was fine and you could in fact see my screen mirrored on the TV, however best I can tell is that Disney’s guest wifi simply isn’t strong enough to maintain consistent bandwidth both to my device (from my Plex server back at home) as well as to the TV (from my laptop to the TV) at the same time.

I tried lowering the video quality, which worked a bit, and eventually downloaded the movie file to my laptop to eliminate one of the streams, but it just wasn’t cutting it. Ironically, the next night we broke down and signed up for a month of Disney+ so that we could watch some of the new Daredevil reboot and that streamed just fine, although I didn’t check but for all I know maybe there’s a data connection for the TV channels that also carries Disney+ to ensure a good signal there!

It’s still nice to see them making tech improvements, even if they’ve still got some more testing to do.