I recently switched over from the Chromecast to Nexus Player and Android TV. Severely disappointing. Among a host of things, I just don't understand why they've totally ditched volume control. I don't have CEC on my older TV, but that was never an issue with Chromecast. I still want to be able to use my phone as my remote, and adjust my music volume as I walk around my house without having to go back to the living room and pick up my TV remote. Is there any workaround for the lack of volume control on content? Even content cast from the phone can't be controlled. The volume appears to go down but then resets itself with an error message.
There are a couple of rationales that might lead to this omission. 1.) The nexus player is a "player", like your DVD player. You don't control volume on your DVDs from the DVD player. It's full volume out, and controlled after leaving the device. This is to improve signal to noise ratio in analog, or bit depth fidelity in the case of digital devices. 2.) Have you ever accidentally turned down a device, but turned it up on the receiver, and then switched inputs to a much louder, window-rattling, eardrum-rupturing, neighbor-scaring level on another device? I have. This is why its best when dealing with more than one device for the outputs to stay at a consistent line level before the receiver or TV, and volume be controlled by the END device. Google no doubt took this into consideration.
Those are the rationales i see. Still, I'm not really defending the rationale, and I don't know if that's enough to justify leaving it out and giving the user the option on how to use (or misuse) the NP.