The beauty of Google’s $35 Chromecast streaming device is that the company as well as third parties can keep adding support for additional products and features, which means ultimately it just gets more and more useful.

Google announced an update for its Chrome OS operating system, which powers Chromebook devices, to enable Chromecast support for media files stored on Google Drive.

Not only does this mean more functionality for your Chromecast, it’s more of a reason to store media files in Google Drive, if you have a Chromebook.

This isn’t the only addition with the Chrome OS update. Here’s what Google said about it in its release notes:

The Stable channel has been updated to 39.0.2171.85 (Platform version: 6310.48.0) for all Chrome OS devices except Dell Chromebook 11, HP Chromebook 14, Acer C720 and the Toshiba Chromebook. This build contains a number of bug fixes, security updates and feature enhancements. Systems will be receiving updates over the next couple weeks as the team takes a break over the holiday. Here is a list of Chromium changes.

Some highlights of these changes are:
Enable Chromecast support for media files stored on Google Drive
Update Network Error page design
Display apps installed in Google Drive in the Chrome OS Launcher
If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using ‘Report an issue…’ in the Chrome menu (3 horizontal bars in the upper right corner of the browser).

While Chromecast has some new competition, it does continue to gain additional third-party app support as well as additional device support for Android screen mirroring.

Image via YouTube