If I buy chromecast - can i watch/ feed this UK stuff on my tv?
Funny you should mention that, because I just got one myself and have been playing with it all week.
Right now, the technical answer is (under the right circumstances) yes, but the practical answer is no. I\'ll explain and try not to drown you in technojargon while I do it:
So the Chromecast does two things in two different ways: one, for services that it supports (and right now that means Netflix, YouTube, and the Google Play media services; more are coming and eventually there will be a way for any service to support the Chromecast on their own if they want to), it can be told to stream and play back content on its own, meaning you find whatever the thing is on your phone or PC that you want to watch, you tap the Chromecast icon, and that basically says \"Okay, Chromecast, pop open a Web page and load this up for me, and take it from here.\" And at that point your phone or PC acts as a remote control; you can pause and scrub through the video and change volume and such, and since the Chromecast is doing all of the work you can even close the app and do something else (say, a call comes in) and it will keep going and you can come back and start controlling it again at any time.
The *other* thing it does: you can load up anything in the Chrome browser, a Web page, a video, a blog, a game of Bejeweled, this very site, whatever the hell you want, and tap the Chromecast icon and it will mirror that page on your TV screen, but all of this is being pushed from your computer over your network and the Chromcast displays it as it\'s sent. This is where the \"technically\" comes in: yes, you could do this with a non-supported video service and yes, the video will display on your TV if you set it up right. (Basically, you have to be running the video *in the tab*; you can\'t go full-screen with the video.) Realistically, though, the performance is dreadful; over my wireless, I\'m pretty sure I could draw the pictures faster than it displays them. I don\'t know if it\'s faster when the PC in question is wired instead of wireless (and therefore more wireless bandwidth is available for the actual pushing of the bits to the Chromecast) because I haven\'t dragged the thing out to try it on my living room TV yet, but even if it is, I doubt it\'s usably so; it might jump to 10 frames per second up from the 2 or 3 (at best) I\'m seeing now.
Now, it\'s a very young product, and firmware is going to upgrade and performance is very likely to improve over time (and that\'s why I bought it; I want to see what happens), and for YouTube and Netflix it is a ridiculously frictionless experience; I have a *lot* of devices capable of both services but the Chromecast is far and away the easiest and fastest to use. But for the precise function you are asking about: not happening right now.
(That said, are you using a laptop? A single HDMI cable will do *exactly* what you want to flawlessly.)
