KyoCast for rooted Chromecast released, allows third party access
KyoCast is the first application I’ve seen to make use of a rooted Chromecast, and essentially all it does is redirect traffic bound for the Google Whitelist servers to a list maintained by the developer of KyoCast.
The current Chromecast security model evidently involves only allowing a whitelisted set of applications access to cast, with local content playback having to be approved by application. With this release, unfortunately not too much happens for the end user yet. You can rig Flingcast to work, although it involves changing the apk, and you can wait for someone to develop a local media streaming application, which is now possible as long as it’s whitelisted on the KyoCast servers. My guess is we’ll see some sort of mods shortly, as this was released this morning.
KyoCasted Chromecasts still require a whitelist. That list is maintained by the developer of KyoCast, which may sound sinister, but what doesn’t when you’re dealing with exploiting vulnerabilities in locked down devices?
Since the release of the Chromecast the hardware has been locked down and not very useful for people who want to do something other than YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu. The dream was serving local media, extending the desktop smoothly, playing phone games on the TV using the phone as a controller, and being generally more than a mirrored dumbed-down application that currently exists on the XBOX 360 or PS3. Hopefully with this application release, we’ll see some development and a renewed interest in rooting the Chromecasts that are on a firmware other than the initial release versions. And hopefully Google will open up the developer API so we can do some fantastic things with these devices such as use them as remote controls, which supposedly the specs allow for.
If you haven’t rooted your Chromecast and you’re connected to a network, chances are it’s too late for you to root it now that there’s finally a reason to. If you’ve kept it off network or are picking up a new one, there’s still a chance to root the thing for future amazingness.
[xda-developers]
