- I'm a big fan of the new Google Chromecast,
and if you wanna see my entire review
of this from when it came out,
you can check that out in the description below,
I'll have a link to it.
But anyway, part of the reason I'm such a big fan of it,
is because it comes with a remote
and it has its own operating system,
and all that stuff that makes it look
and feel more like a real streaming device.
And with all of that other stuff comes more opportunities
to make your device even better.
The old Chromecast was, well, it was super simple,
some people preferred that,
I prefer this version because,
yeah there are things you can do
to make it work even better.
We're gonna go through some of those today,
I'm gonna give you a few tips and tricks
to get the most out of your new Chromecast device.
And so, if you've got one, go ahead and plug it in,
grab the remote and follow along, let's get started.
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If this video is helpful to you
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All right, let's dive in to the new Google Chromecast,
and how to get the most out of it.
The first thing I would say,
is you've got to get to know your remote.
There are a few things that it can do
beyond just off of the sleep pointing and clicking.
Now, there are a few buttons on here
that you may wanna get to know.
Right down here, you see YouTube and Netflix
these little buttons right there.
Simple enough, you could just use those
to open up YouTube and Netflix.
On the other hand, you can long hold that YouTube button,
and it's going to pull up all of your YouTube apps on there.
So you can do YouTube, YouTube TV, or YouTube Kids.
The Netflix button does not have an option
to remap it to another one, except it kind of does.
And we're gonna get there right now.
There is an app, let me go to my app list here.
It's called Button Mapper.
All right, so if I open up Button Mapper,
it's exactly what it sounds like.
You can take just about every button on here
and remap it to do something else.
Now, there are some buttons that there's a premium version,
you'd have to unlock the premium version
to remap it like the back button.
But for the most part you can go ahead
and remap most of everything on here.
So in my case, I've remapped button to my YouTube button,
so that I can have it do different things
because frankly it's easy for me to open up YouTube
and I don't do it as often as I do some other things.
So I thought it would be fun to try to remap it.
With a single tap, I open up prime video instead of YouTube,
with a double tap, I open up Spotify.
And if I long press on this now, I get the Twitch app.
So yeah, there are levels of it,
if you wanna get the premium version,
because you just hate having the back button
be a back button, then, yeah,
I mean, I guess you can do that.
But it is still pretty nice to get those other two buttons
the YouTube and the Netflix buttons
to do whatever you want them to do.
The last thing I'll mention on this remote
is this home button.
If you leave it as is, you know,
you haven't remapped the home button,
then you can long hold that,
and that will open up your settings menu
that kind of sidebar.
So you can go to the settings,
or you can go right over here,
and turn on your screen saver right away.
So let's say you've got, I don't know,
a house party going on because it's, you know,
post COVID let's use our imagination.
You got a house party going on,
you've turned on your Spotify playlist
and you just wanna run some Google photos
on your screen saver.
Well you can do that just by long holding
on that home button.
All right, your next tip
is going to be rearranging your home page apps.
If you go to your homepage, click on home a couple of times,
it takes you to your home page
and right down here under the top picks for you,
it shows you your apps.
It's only going to show you 12 apps on here.
And you can go in here right on this front page,
you can long press on those
and move them around a little bit on there.
But you're only going to be able to move those 12 apps.
I'm gonna move this up into that gray section,
that is what's going to show up on your home page.
And by the way, I've got quite a few apps on here,
and I actually ran out of room.
I had to delete some apps that I wasn't really using
to make room for some other ones.
And if you want to do that,
consider getting a USB-C adapter.
The device itself, the Chromecast device
has a USB-C port on the back,
you plug into USB-C adapter
or something that splits into a few different inputs
and you can add a thumb drive
and still have it plugged in to the wall.
All right, tip number three
is to keep up with your recommendations.
One of the great things about the new Chromecast device
is the Android TV or the Google TV platform,
I should call it.
The Google TV platform is really, really great
at making recommendations across a lot of different apps.
And if you want the device to do that effectively,
you need to give it a little bit more input
than just watching shows on it.
So, for instance, you can go to your watch list,
and if you have gone through and watched a few things
from your watch list,
just make sure that you've marked it as watched
and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down.
So in this case, yes,
I've already watched "The Living Daylights"
and you know what?
I love it, Timothy Dalton as James Bond in his first outing,
it was great.
Okay, so I'm gonna give that a thumbs up.
Make sure you do that,
take the five seconds after every time you watch a show
or a movie and mark it as watched,.
and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down,
and that's gonna give the algorithm
just more information to give you good recommendations.
Get the most out of this machine.
Tip number four is about how to download apps
to this Chromecast device.
So if I go to the apps library here on the device,
one of my least favorite things about it,
is that it is kind of difficult to search for apps.
You can use the voice search menu,
but you know, it's not always the most reliable way
to find an app.
It's a great way to find content but not necessarily an app.
And if you wanna go through all of these categories
and search for something that looks interesting,
that can take you a little while.
So, go onto your phone or your PC
and go into the Google Play Store.
And then when you go to download an app,
you find one that you want to use,
and hit download on your PC or your phone,
and you'll see a little down menu
to choose any compatible device that you're signed into.
So phones, tablets, the Chromecast, et cetera.
You can download that app from your,
you can say on your PC,
download it to my Chromecast and it will do that for you.
All right, so I brought up the voice search option
a moment ago and said, you know,
it can be a little bit clunky for some things.
And I do wanna talk a little bit more
about what you can do with that voice search button.
So like I said, you can long hold it to voice search,
or use the Google assistant and it'll do that for you.
That's fine.
But if you want to be a little bit quieter, I don't know,
maybe you're doing some private listening
with your headphones,
which we'll talk about in just a second,
or for some reason you don't want to use the voice search,
you can single click on that instead of long pressing
you just press it for a moment
and you can bring up a little keyboard for you to use.
It's a little bit clunkier,
it's gonna take a little bit longer
but if you wanna be silent, you can do that.
Alternately, if you go from your homepage
and you go to the search feature app on the top,
you click on search instead of clicking on the button here,
you're actually gonna get some more recommendations
of stuff to watch right there at the bottom of it.
Travel TV show, classic movies,
adventure movies, and whatever.
We've got a lot of good recommendations here
within those categories.
So I have actually found myself
using that more than once on this device.
And the last one I have for you is Bluetooth.
Don't forget that these devices
these days all come with Bluetooth.
So, if you've got this Chromecast in your bedroom,
or you just don't want to wake up the whole house
by watching something in the middle of the night,
you can use headphones for private listening.
Or if you go to the apps menu here,
there are gates scroll all the way down to the bottom here,
and they do have some games
that you can play with the remote itself
or that you can play by using the Bluetooth
on a compatible controller like this PS4 controller,
an X-Box controller or there's a million
third-party Bluetooth controllers out there
that you can plug in.
So all you need to do,
again, I'm gonna long press my home button
and go to the settings.
And if I come down here to remotes and accessory,
I want to pair a remote or an accessory.
And in this case, it's gonna be my headphones,
and there you go, they are paired and ready to go.
So, hopefully the tips and tricks helped you out,
hopefully there's something here
that will make your experience
with the new Chromecast even better.
Thanks for watching everybody,
and don't forget to subscribe
because I do have more videos like this one.
You may have seen a hint it on my apps page,
but I am gonna be doing a top 10 hidden gems
on the new Chromecast,
so make sure you're subscribed for that.
We'll talk about some really great free content
you can get on this device.
All right, I'll see you next time.