The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how to control your Chromecast with a standard TV remote control and explain why you might want to. I've tested out a bunch of streaming media devices and have ultimately settled on Chromecast as the tool of choice for our household.  If you are interested in my full rationale, you can check out my video on this, but basically, it's cheap, efficient, easy to use, and the original versions don't have their own easy-to-lose remote.  Chromecast has you use your own device (smart phone, tablet or computer) to choose the show you want to watch and then you simply hit a button in the app to cast it (or wirelessly stream it) to play on your TV or monitor or whatever you have your Chromecast attached to.   In 2020, Google launched Chromecast with Google TV which comes with it's own dedicated remote, but the original remote-less system is elegant and usually works well. Th...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you why my family has switched over entirely to using Chromecast as our streaming technology after trying out almost all of the others. I'm definitely an early adopter for certain kinds of technology and apparently streaming tools are one of those.  We got an Apple TV back in 2007 when they released the first generation device and since then have tried Roku, Amazon Fire stick, Google Chromecast, and a bunch of different Smart TVs.  For a while, we were using Roku, but now we have entirely switched over to Chromecast and let me tell you why.  First of all it has a  Pros: Light interface - Chromecast works different than most other streaming devices.  Other streaming devices require you to fire up the interface on the TV, choose a channel like Netflix, log in with your credentials using their awful on-screen keyboard, laboriously type in a show name ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I’ll show you how I create automatic photo slideshows for special occasions to play on my TV. I am a big fan of using the largest screen in my house -- our TV -- as a digital picture frame.  I did a video a while back about how to turn your TV and computer into digital picture frames using Google Photos.  So, that describes the process of getting all of my thousands of digital photos to scroll randomly on my TV and computer. But sometimes, there is a special occasion where I just want a certain group of photos to play in an automatic slideshow.  Usually, these are commemorative events.  Here are some examples: We all contributed photos for a slide show that played during my grandma's 90th birthday party. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law moved across the country and I pulled all of the photos from our weekly get-togethers with them and their children ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I make to if the main screens in my house into digital photo frames using Chrome and Chromecast!  This is part of a series of videos on how I manage and access digital photos.   The way we appreciate photos now is SO different now than when my kids were born.  When is the last time you sat down and looked through an album of printed pictures?  By far my favorite way to enjoy pictures is through a randomly scrolling slideshow, playing as I'm doing other activities.  Let me show you how to do this on both a PC and a TV.   If you have watched any of my series on organizing and accessing digital photos, you know that I use Google Photos to access and share pictures. All of my photos are replicated in the cloud through Google Photos.  The good news is that Google Photos has a variety of apps on a variety of platforms that allow you to play a...