Ever since Jelly Bean, the reasons to switch to a custom ROM (as opposed to a stock, rooted build) have been slowly shrinking. But today ClockworkMod Recovery developer Koushik "Koush" Dutta gave us a reason to be incredibly excited for upcoming builds of CyanogenMod. With a little tweaking of the famous ROM family, he's managed to integrate Chromecast streaming across the system, making any video or audio app compatible.

[EMBED_YT]https://youtu.be/MTWHL30gyg4

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Koush's demonstration video is convincing. Start an applicable audio or video player, and a "Play on Chromecast" notification will pop into the tray. Tap it, and the file will play on your Chromecast TV dongle, no muss and no fuss. And more importantly, there's no need for developers to update their apps with the Chromecast API. Presumably this addition to the CyanogenMod ROM includes the ability to stream local files and cloud files, as Koush demonstrated previously.

This method seems to work so seamlessly between Android, Chromecast, and any apps that use media APIs, that you have to wonder why Google didn't try to do something similar by baking in some of this functionality into Android 4.3. As usual with CyanogenMod, there's no word on when end users will see this added functionality, but I'd expect it to pop up in CyanogenMod 10.2 builds (Android 4.3) before too long.

Source: Koushik Dutta (Google+)