What does Chromecast support?

Question

I'm wondering what web technologies the Chromecast supports. I know there's not a comprehensive list as mentioned here but I actually would like a list of supported and performant features.

How different is it from normal web development?

Is there hardware acceleration, WebGL, or Web Audio support? How's the performance for these.

Any sort of thing an old-fashioned web developer would want to know? Any weird quirks?

Answer 1

There is no support for plugins like Flash player, Silverlight, Quicktime and Unity.

Regarding HTML5 support I did a simple receiver which do nothing but redirecting to http://html5test.com . I did the same with http://css3test.com.

Here are the results of the tests :

Note that Chrome Canary 34 get a score of 475. Mostly the differences are in 3D graphics and User interaction support.

The score to css3 test is 61% (Canary scores 62%).

Cheers

Answer 2

I'll be answering this question as time goes on because I've only just started working with the Google Cast API. Because of the newness of the technology there will be some notable difference to traditional web development.

Development:

How different is developing for Chromecast?

If you normally use Chrome and use its devtools you're in luck! The Chromecast has its own devtools you can get to by visiting it's ip address at port 9222. Along with this comes its own console where you can run Javascript just like you're used to. And window is still the global object.

Theres no refresh button! Do I really have to kill and reload the receiver everytime?

Nope. In the console you can run location.reload(true);. The true parameter performs a forced reload that flushes the cache of the receiver application.

Is there anything different about working with a TV?

Yea, keep in mind most TV's will experience screen burn if non-moving content is displayed for pro-longed periods of time. This can be avoided by just moving things around or having them appear in different areas.

Supported:

swassr's answer has a pretty detailed list using http://html5test.com/, although, it looks like there are a few things that the tester gets wrong:

WebRTC

After some testing, it doesn't look like WebRTC is supported even though html5test.com says it is. The only reference to this I've been able to fine is a mention on this thread

Web Audio API (partial)

Using the Web Audio API to get spectrum and waveform data isn't supported either. There is a bug filed for this here

Weird Quirks:

No hardware acceleration.

Don't expect anything to have perceivable hardware acceleration or advance rendering applied to it. Meaning CSS Transitions, canvas, etc. don't have that smoothness we've become used to. At times, even animating with Javascript causes less jank than CSS Animations.

That doesn't mean all performance optimizations are thrown out the door though. Tricks like transform: translateZ(0); still work to drop elements on their own drawing context and separate out repaint concerns.

...

Know something I don't? Feel free to add to this answer!