Google’s new Chromecast is a little limited in what it can do. It won’t store a video library for you to play back later. It won’t play Quicktime files. But, it will play lots of other files on your television–things like Flash streams and MKVs you’ve downloaded from, say, a torrent tracker. Contrary to a lot of what’s been reported, you can watch local files on a Chromecast device. Pretty much anything that plays in a browser will play on your TV. Instead of streaming directly from Netflix or YouTube or some other Cloud source, as Chromecast does when you launch an app using the Googlecast SDK, you can also sling video directly from your computer to the device by using the Chrome browser. This opens up your TV to lots of, um, alternate sources of video. MKV files, MP4 video, AVI. You want to make sure you’re grabbing an MKV that’s encoded using AAC and not AC3, as it’s one of the formats Chromecast does not yet support.