How to Cast Your Desktop
To display your entire computer desktop on your TV via Chromecast, your Windows computer and Chromecast device must be on the same Wi-Fi network. Open the Chrome browser on the computer and then:
Select the three-dot menu icon in the upper right corner of Chrome and choose Cast. Select Cast desktop and then choose your Chromecast’s nickname in the device list. After a few seconds, your desktop starts casting. If you have a multi-monitor display set-up, Chromecast asks you to choose the screen you want to display. Choose the correct screen, select Share, and the correct display appears on your TV. When you cast your entire desktop, your computer’s audio comes along with it. If you don’t want that to happen, either turn off the audio that is playing on your desktop—iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. —or turn down the volume using the slider in the Chrome Mirroring window. To stop casting the desktop, select the blue Chromecast icon in the browser. When the Chrome Mirroring window appears, select Stop.
What Desktop Casting Is Good For
Casting your desktop works well for static items like a slideshow of photos saved to your hard drive or a PowerPoint presentation. As with casting a tab, casting video isn’t great. If you want to play a video on your television, either hook up your PC directly via HDMI or use a service built for streaming video over your home Wi-Fi network such as Plex.
How to Cast a Chrome Browser Tab
You can also cast a single tab from the Google Chrome web browser.
Open Chrome on your computer and navigate to the website you want to display on your TV. Select the three-dot menu icon in the upper right corner and select Cast from the drop-down menu. A small window appears with the names of any cast-friendly devices on your network, such as a Chromecast or Google Home smart speaker. Before you pick your device, though, press the downward facing arrow at the top, then the small window says Select source. Choose Cast tab and select the nickname of the Chromecast. When it’s connected, the window says Chrome Mirroring along with a volume slider and the name of the tab you have open. Once a tab is casting you can navigate to a different website, and it will keep displaying whatever is on that tab. Look up at your TV and you’ll see the tab taking up the entire screen—though usually in letterbox mode to keep the viewing ratio correct. To stop casting, close the tab or click the Chromecast icon in your browser to the right of the address bar (it’s blue). That brings back the Chrome Mirroring window. Now click Stop in the lower right corner.
What Tab Casting Works Well For
Casting a Chrome browser tab is ideal for anything that’s mostly static, such as vacation photos stashed in Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. It’s also good for viewing a website at a larger scale, or even for displaying a presentation PowerPoint online or Google Drive’s Presentation web app.
What it doesn’t work as well for is video. Well, kind of. If you are using something that already supports casting, like YouTube, it works just fine because the Chromecast can grab YouTube directly from the internet, and your tab becomes a remote control for YouTube on the TV. In other words, it’s no longer broadcasting its tab to the Chromecast.
What Is Casting?
Casting is a method of sending content wirelessly to your television, but it works in two different ways. You can cast content from a service that supports it like YouTube, which is actually telling Chromecast to go to the online source (YouTube) and fetch a particular video to play on the TV. The device that told Chromecast to do that (your phone, for example) then becomes a remote control to play, pause, fast forward, or choose another video.
When you cast from your PC, though, you are mostly streaming content from your desktop to your TV over a local network with no help from an online service. That is different, because streaming from a desktop relies on the computing power of your home PC, while streaming YouTube or Netflix relies on the cloud.
Why Cast?
Google’s $35 HDMI dongle is an affordable alternative to set-top boxes like Apple TV and Roku. Primarily, it allows you to view all kinds of content on a TV, including YouTube, Netflix, video games, and Facebook videos.
But the Chromecast also helps you put two basic items from any PC running Chrome onto your TV: a browser tab or the full desktop. This feature works with the Chrome browser on any PC platform that supports it including Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, and Google’s Chrome OS.
Casting Services Like Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook Video
Not a ton of services have built-in casting from the PC version of the web to the Chromecast. This is because a lot of services have already built it into their mobile apps on Android and iOS and haven’t bothered with laptops and desktops.
Regardless, some services do support casting from the PC, notably Google’s own YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix. To cast from these services, start playing a video, and with the player controls, you’ll see the casting icon—the outline of a display with a Wi-Fi symbol in the corner. Select that, and the small window appears once again in your browser tab. Select the nickname for your Chromecast device, and the casting begins.
