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Chromecasts are great for casting all sorts of media from all sorts of services.
Netflix, Hulu, Play Movies, and YouTube are all great examples of streaming services that work perfectly with Chromecast. Sometimes, though, you want to share something in your own files on your Chromebook.
Luckily, there’s a way!
While this won’t work with fully local files, it works perfectly from files stored in Drive. So if you have a file you want to share, simply place it in a Drive folder and double-click the file from there, effectively playing it from the cloud.
Once the player launches, you will see the familiar cast button in the bottom right corner. Pressing that button brings up the now-familiar cast menu where you can select your cast device and begin watching your content on your big screen.
One other quick tip for large files like movies; if you have those files in your Drive, copying it to your Downloads file will assist greatly in the streaming of the file. Because of the way Chrome OS deals with synced files, once you’ve downloaded the file it makes the resource more readily available for you.
If you don’t download the file first, be prepared to wait a sec for the video to start when being played directly from Drive. It will work after a few seconds.
While this isn’t groundbreaking or the newest thing in Chrome OS, we thought this little tip may help some of you enjoy your casting experience from your Chromebooks a bit more.
