Their hardware used to be good though.

Nexus 7, Nexus 5 were good unlocked, inexpensive devices. After that i really hoped their project Ara (block phone) to take off but they abandoned it.

Only the Chromecast is interesting, but that is really becoming less and less every day due to their aggressive advertising.

Being kind of a cheapskate, I've tried chromecast and the Amazon one and then bought an AppleTV device. I haven't had issues like I did with other dongle-like devices with having to restart them when there was a hiccup or crash of some kind - which is especially annoying when watching live sports.

I now have two AppleTV devices

(I use the word 'device' because they also have a streaming product called AppleTV+, which btw has some really good shows, and I think you can get the streaming service w/o the device)

I am still pissed off since buying a Chromecast just to realize there was no way to watch videos on a harddrive on the home network.

You might want to check Videostream for Chromecast ? There's both a mobile app that links to your PC and also a desktop app. Last time I checked, VLC also allowed casting of videos on your PC(although iirc was more iffy with subtitles, etc) though not sure if there's mobile support, and I believe there are also other paid apps that can be used to cast videos. If you're referring to seeing videos directly from a hard drive without a PC, a TV with usb support should take care of that (long time ago, I had even a Bluray player that had usb and was used in similar fashion to cast videos from a usb flash drive)

At the time, like 4 years ago, I could make nothing work except poor screencasts. That functionality should be native.

It is easier to just plug a laptop into the TV than using a Chromecast.

Maybe I should give it another try.

On my PC I can open chrome and stream to the Chromecast on my network. I drag videos from the desktop onto chrome and it plays fine.

Only reason I have chrome installed lol.

BubbleUPnP for DLNA/Chromecast