Stubborn 'won't fix' Google U-turns on Chromecast vid judder twitching-eye blunder

Euro customers: 'Well, that was unexpected'

Google has surprised European fans of its Chromecast TV dongle by suddenly acknowledging a screw-up with the vid-streaming device, after effectively stonewalling complaints late last year.

As The Register reported at the time, users were griping about an annoying video quirk with the Chromecast, which caused some European users' eyes to twitch.

However, despite the moans, Google alarmed fans by saying it wouldn't be coming up with a solution to the problem because it was just too damn complicated.

The original bug report was tagged as "WontFix" and stubbornly stayed stuck to that Google snub until the early hours of Saturday morning when the status suddenly switched to "Acknowledged".

Chromecast fans were jubilant to discover that the judder gaffe was now being taken a little bit more seriously by Google.

As one customer put it: "That was unexpected but good news, none the less."

Back in November it was a different story, when a Google engineer had this to say on the Chromecast bug tracker feed:

Chromecast cannot attempt to handle changes in HDMI refresh rates since it is very hard to accurately identify the incoming frame rate.

Blu-ray players can handle this issue because discs have extra metadata that would allow players to output at the most suitable rate. This is very hard to pull off with streaming content.

Google began selling the Chromecast dongle to European customers in March last year. Not long after, complaints began to pile up.

The problem? Most vid content in Europe is delivered at either 50 or 25 frames per second. The Chromecast, on the other hand, is hard-wired to send video over its HDMI port at a refresh rate of 60Hz. The European standard, meanwhile, is 50Hz.

The end result was a jittery picture for plenty of Euro folk.

Now that Google has at least acknowledged the blunder, customers are hopeful that a fix may materialise, after all.

Vulture Weekend advises you not to hold your breath on this one, however. ®

Juddernote

Hat-tip to Reg reader Gavin for flagging this one up to us.