While many new routers are quite good at automatically recognizing types of traffic and automatically prioritizing streaming services over other services to ensure they have enough bandwidth, not all routers do this and most older routers do not. QoS rules allow you to prioritize certain types of traffic over other types of traffic to provide a better user experience. This is where Quality of Server (QoS) rules come into place. If you have a lot of connected devices in your home chewing up bandwidth in their various ways (people gaming, downloading updates, file sharing, etc.) the performance of individual activities can suffer and in the case of more time/lag sensitive activities like streaming video the quality of playback and suffer greatly. The first kind of congestion is the kind of congestion you inflict upon yourself: heavy local traffic. In extreme cases where you, say, have a very thick and well- shielded plasma HDTV or the like against a lathe plaster wall at the edge of your router's reach, you might need to extend your Chromecast further away from the body of the TV and wall with a longer HDMI extension cable. The easiest way to that is to use the small HDMI extender included with the Chromecast (which you should be using anyway because it protects your Chromecast from shearing damage if anyone or thing puts pressure on the connection point). Related: What's the Point of the Chromecast HDMI Extender? Do I Need It? To that end you need to get your Chromecast away from the body of the TV and/or away from the wall. ![]() If your other device has a strong signal by the television but the Chromecast does not, there's a good chance that the position of the Chromecast itself is the culprit. Extend the Chromecast for Less Interference To decide which approach is most appropriate, take another Wi-Fi enabled device like a phone, tablet, or laptop over by your HDTV and check the signal strength. If you have poor signal strength, per the Chromecast's reporting, there are two primary approaches you can take. You can find the return instructions here. If neither swapping out the power source nor factory resetting the device solves the blackouts and/or reboot loop, you'll need to return your Chromecast (if it's less than one year old for a new unit or 90 days for a refurbished unit). If you want more information about the ins and outs of soft and hard resets, check out our guide here. The short of it is this: hold the physical button on your Chromecast (near the power port) for 25 seconds until the power light blinks. To resolve your issue you can perform a soft or hard reset (although if it is cycling quickly a soft reset is generally out of the question). Related: How to Reboot or Factory Reset Your Google Chromecast If your Chromecast gets stuck in a permanent reboot loop that isn't resolved by simply unplugging the unit's power source for a few minutes and plugging it back in, there's a good chance that something went awry during a firmware update or a key bit of data on the device was corrupted (potentially as a result of a the kind of poor power supply problems we highlighted in the previous section). The following tricks are focused on improving your general Chromecast experience if your Chromecast is giving you specific error messages we recommend using Google's handy error troubleshooting menu here. It shouldn't be very frustrating, however, so let's run through a list of things you can do to troubleshoot a misbehaving Chromecast to get the smoothest user experience possible. That said, the user experience of the Chromecast usually falls into two distinct categories: unbelievably easy to setup and use or very frustrating. ![]() We loved it when we reviewed it back in 2013, and we still love it. In the realm of streaming HDMI sticks the ease of use and application integration the Google Chromecast enjoys is as-of-yet unparalleled. Note: Although we've focused on the Chromecast due to its popularity and the number of reader requests for assistance we receive based on that popularity, most of the following tips and tricks can be applied to just about every streaming HDMI stick including the Amazon Fire TV Stick and the Roku, as they address quite a few issues that apply to the entire hardware category.
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