Show your baby photos and videos on your parent’s TV with Chromecast
OK, so the scenario works like this. Your parents have a TV, they want to see videos of their grandbaby doing things, pictures of you at Disneyland, etc when you go visit. You’ve probably got everything loaded on your phone, the cloud, etc and chances are you’re not traveling with a 27 inch screen to show the grandparents video, pictures, etc. That’s where Chromecast comes in.
Chromecast allows you to send your pictures, videos, movies directly to the TV as long as it’s got an HDMI port. I’m not going to go too much into what it can do, as well, if it’s video it can probably play it, but there’re some interesting uses the ITPerson with the IT Baby can do to bring the world a little closer.
So we’ll skip over what you can do with the thing, chances are if you’re considering Chromecast you’re looking at it in the “take the dongle to the parent’s house and plug it in and show them the kiddos” – what you may not be considering is that as long as there’s an internet connection at the parent’s house, you can have them change the channel to that HDMI input and send the video to the Chromecast while you’re on the phone talking with them.
It’s a little more advanced setup, you’ll need to set up a VPN so that your Android, iOS, Windows device thinks it’s on the same network as them, but from there you can be on the phone and push pictures and videos while you’re speaking to your parents.
Now, the VPN is something you’ll probably need a little advanced networking knowledge to set up, and you’re going to be limited in the speed at which you can push videos by the speed of their connection, but you get the idea. Rather than having your parents huddled around a tiny screen they can watch the baby show on their TV.
If they’ve got a computer, you can also skip out on the VPN and just use a remote desktop connector like Ammyy Admin (it’s free) or set up routing and remote desktop and push the videos to the Chromecast/TV. But these are just thoughts.
The cool thing about this is Chromecast is only $35 normally. At the current time it appears it’s sold completely out and people are reselling them for $70+, but if you wait a bit they’ll be back in stock at the $35 price point.
You can take them with you and force friends to watch your movies and slideshows… or bring the Avengers and reward them for watching your baby’s first roll-over.
