As expected, it only took a few days for the dev community to open the full potential of the Chromecast dongle. The device has been rooted and it is only a matter of time before more Chromecast functionality and hacking techniques start seeing the light of day. That is all fun, but there is something a bit more interesting our friendly hackers discovered.
It turns out the Chromecast dongle is not based on Chrome OS, as Google mentioned during the announcement. The device is said to be more similar to Android and Google TV. “To be specific, it’s actually a modified Google TV release, but with all of the Bionic / Dalvik stripped out and replaced with a single binary for Chromecast”, says GTV Hacker.
This doesn’t really change much in terms of functionality, but it could mean that an able developer could probably flash Google TV into it. Or who knows, maybe Google is planning to bring more Google TV features to the Chromecast.
We are sure this voids your warranty and there are some risks of damaging the device, so make sure not to root your Chromecast unless you are sure of what you are doing/risking. All responsibility falls on you if the device may fail. If you are sure of what you are doing, though, you can go straight to GTV Hacker’s site and get going.
There is not too much you can do with a rooted Chromecast just yet, but we are sure our friendly developers are hard at work. Running an emulator and playing games is a good start, so you can test that out if you want.
