Don’t buy a Chromecast just to play PS5
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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For years, Sony’s PS Remote Play app has been a neat way to sling your PS5 and PS4 games to another room of your house — with clients for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and as of 2020, the PS4 itself. I’ve spent hours playing Yakuza and Genshin Impact from the unofficial Steam Deck version.
As of yesterday, it works on a $50 Google Chromecast, too! But I had a hell of a time finding and installing the app, and I suspect it won’t be a great experience for everyone.
The good news: it does work and work decently if you’ve got your PS5 plugged into your router with an ethernet cable. You can stream from a PS5 or a PS4 and play with either the PS5 or PS4’s gamepad, which both pair easily with your Chromecast via Bluetooth. You can enable both HDR and the high frame rate mode. It’s definitely not 4K, but I suspect I’m looking at 1080p at 60fps streaming from my PS5.
The app easily found my PS5 and remotely started it over the internet just by signing in to my PSN account with a handy QR code — and it gave me a handy menu to disconnect (and put my PS5 back to sleep) when I hit my controller’s home button.
But there’s an annoying amount of audio lag, some input lag, and some visual stuttering even with an ethernet cable and Game Mode on my TV — and if you’re trying to make it work over a pure Wi-Fi network, well… I don’t recommend it!
With ethernet plugged into the PS5, I could play a rhythm game like Thumper, poorly, while holding the controller a single foot away
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