For fans of ZDancer Liz: as much as you may enjoy her live zoom classes and/or recordings on your devices, doing them on a large TV screen whenever you want is awesome! 10 video files for $10 a month is a great offer and I am very thankful to have known about this deal from its first month of March which is now no longer available to new subscribers. I recommend downloading the monthly files from Liz's Google drive before they are replaced at the end of each month.
If you are using a laptop to play a video and do not have a mobile device like a smart phone, the easiest method to stream a video to your dumb HDTV is with an HDMI cable. There are several devices that will enable wireless options, 2 of which I own. You can cast video files and videos on streaming sites, including Google Drive from a laptop to a Chromecast or even mirror your laptop screen but results will depend on many factors. The ROKU can play some downloaded media files with its media player (still cannot figure out why some files show up and others do not). I do not like the results of mirroring on a ROKU and do not like using servers like Play On or Plex to host video files
To access videos stored on Google Drive and stream them to a dumb TV from an android mobile device without a cable, I use either a ROKU or a Chromecast. I strongly recommend getting the Web Video Caster app on the mobile device. Most videos just seem to stream better from my android phone with Web Video Caster to either the Chromecast or the ROKU.
I open the Google Drive app on the mobile device to access the video folder and copy its link using the drop down menu in the upper right corner. Then for Chromecast, I open either the Web Video Caster browser app or Chrome browser ( the video plays better on the Web Video Caster app). If using a ROKU, I open the Web Video Caster app. Then I paste the link address into the url address bar of the browser by pressing the url address area till paste comes up as an option. You can then save the folder or any videos to your home screen or bookmark them for future access. (I did pay $3.99 to Web Video Caster to have more options and no ads.)
Alternative method:
If you have the link in an email, open the emailed link on your mobile device and copy that link and paste it using the appropriate browser.
If you want to be independent of Google Drive and have your own downloaded copy of a video file, you can download any file to your mobile device or pc from Google Drive. You can play or stream the file from your pc or you can download the file to a laptop and transfer the file to a phone to stream the file. For ROKU, you can use the ROKU phone app to play the file. For Chrome, I prefer playing the video on my phone with VLC and under playback, render it with Chromecast. (I also prefer this method when playing a file on my laptop). Web Video Caster can also play video files stored on your phone with either of the devices. WVC enables downloading of streamed video into a ts file
I have a sd card on my android phone and download the files to it because my phone has limited internal storage. .
The above post is to help others who have subscribed to the monthly ZDancerLiz ZOOM recordings which are my favorite current source of MUving. liz
