Using a Chromecast in hotel rooms

A good friend of mine gave me a Chromecast recently. I’m firmly in Apple’s camp, device wise, but I was intrigued by this small USB stick shaped TV do-dah (that supposedly ‘just works’), not least because I’m spending a lot of time travelling.

Having set the Chromecast up at home and tested it with Plex, I thought it would be the ideal way of watching Game of Thrones on that lovely large LCD TV hotels put in your room these days.

Turns out it’s a bit more difficult than you’d think. To be more precise, one and a half hour’s worth of “more difficult than you’d think”.

“You know nuthin’, Jon Snow”

Basically, I encountered three problems:

1. Despite working in technology (broadly speaking) I didn’t anticipate manufacturers, you know, actually making locked down TVs especially for hotels, meaning I couldn’t switch inputs from the remote.
2. Whilst I could get the Chromecast to connect to the hotel wifi, most hotels – by which I mean, ‘the one I was staying in’ – enable access point/client isolation, which needs to be off.
3. Although the Chromecast broadcasts itself as a wireless network, you can’t connect to this network and cast stuff to it directly.

The first of those ended up being a non-issue really – though the TV had a generic dumbed down remote (i.e. not the one the TV comes with), there was a small joystick style affair on the back of the TV that allowed you access to menus to switch inputs.

For some reason I went off on a tangent at this point, thinking I could download whatever Plex compatible app exists for Smart TVs, thus circumventing any need to use the Chromecast at all. But, even through the menus I gained access to, I couldn’t find any options to connect the TV to a wifi network.¹

So what to do? My first thought was to see if I could share my wifi connection from my phone. And then I remembered that the iPhone does not function as a wifi repeater.

Then I tried my Macbook Air. But again, that doesn’t function as a wifi repeater when connected to wifi itself – though if you’re connected via Ethernet you can setup internet sharing via wifi. Luckily I remembered I had my ethernet adapter and the hotel usually has an ethernet cable somewhere in the room.

Usually, but not this time, though. [sigh]

‘Excellent, five minutes tops and I’m golden’, I thought to myself…

A phone call to reception and a nonsense conversation about how they were wifi only (taking place whilst I was staring at the ethernet ports above the desk) and one ethernet cable is delivered to my door 20 minutes later.

‘Excellent, five minutes tops and I’m golden’, I thought to myself…

Except that when I ran the Chromecast setup from my Macbook Air, the first thing it did was tell me to unplug my ethernet cable (obviously but, you know, rage), thus disabling my carefully set up internet sharing wifi network.²

God damn you Google

The rather convoluted solution? Connecting my iPhone (or iPad) to my Macbook Air’s wifi network and setting up the Chromecast, via the phone, to connect to the same internet sharing wifi network.

A few (three) reboots of the Chromecast, one of the Phone and eventually all of them were talking to each other.³

Finally⁴.