This was going to be impressions of the Chromecast which just went on sale officially in the UK.

So far all I want to do is take my heavy duty hammer and crush it into little pieces.

What’s involved. Opening the box, inserting the Chromecast dongle into your HDMI slot on your TV, connecting some power to the dongle via USB or a power socket. Then follow the link to install the app on your android phone, install and follow the simple setup instructions.

Chromecast is advertised to work with Google’s own apps including YouTube, Google Play Movies and Music, and then others like Netflix.

Google Play Music doesn’t work. The other apps work as advertised but the one I was most interested in was being able to cast my music. So I performed a hard reset Friday night on my Note 3. And it made no difference with a clean phone. Same problem. I then tried my wife’s iPhone 5S (I should have done this first) and Play Music wouldn’t cast.

So far Google Support are still investigating. If they can’t resolve the Chromecast will be castoff.

But … with a crew of tech gurus involving @jhoneyball , @Raktkat, @davidmarkrich and @gilroyneil and 2 hours later all is resolved. It turns out that my BT Homehub 4 router wasn’t playing nicely with the Chromecast. Now what’s annoying is Google support didn’t even mention they are aware of an issue with their BT Homehub 4 and 5 routers. Since resolving this issue I found the support knowledge article by Google Google Homehub and Chromecast.

Thanks to Dave, I actually had to temporarily disable the firewall and then re enable again as well as turning smart access off, which is a real pain in the arse if you change devices a lot.