With over a decade of writing experience in the field of technology, Chris has written for a variety of publications including The New York Times, Reader's Digest, IDG's PCWorld, Digital Trends, and MakeUseOf. Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. Both are officially approved devices Roku says will work, but they all hang on a "Connecting" message before timing out without any helpful status messages.Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. We tried getting Miracast working on a Roku 3 after enabling the new Screen Sharing feature and were unable to, both with a Nexus 4 running Android 4.4.4 and a Surface Pro 2 running Windows 8.1. Time and time again, both coordinated tests and people trying to use Miracast in the real world have struggled to make it work. Related: What Is Wi-Fi Direct, and How Does It Work? This shouldn't be necessary if it was a proper standard - you don't need to check if your model of phone or laptop is compatible with your Wi-Fi router, after all. If you look at help pages for devices like the Roku 3, you'll often see a list of devices that have been tested to work with the receiver. Miracast Problem 2: It's Unreliable and Often Doesn't Workīut here's the biggest problem with Miracast. It's an open standard and Miracast-certified devices are supposed to communicate just fine with other Miracast-certified devices. With Miracast, you can't have separate controls on your phone - your TV just mirrors everything on your phone's display. Or, you could play a video game and view only the game world on the screen, with a separate set of controls on your phone. So you could watch a Netflix video and view the playback controls only on your phone, so they wouldn't get in the way on the TV. These protocols also allow you to display something different on your device's screen and on your TV. With Miracast, your phone's screen would have to stay powered-on and streaming the video for the entire length of the Netflix movie, draining its battery. You could then set your phone down and it would go to sleep. Your phone would then tell the Chromecast to play the video, and the CHromecast would connect to the web and stream it directly. However, they can also be smarter.įor example, you could open the Netflix app on your phone, locate a movie you want to watch, and tap the Chromecast button. Both Apple's AirPlay and Google's Chromecast can mirror a device's screen - yes, a Chromecast can even mirror your Windows desktop and all your running applications. Banishing the HDMI cable is nice, but Miracast doesn't have the "smarts" competing protocols offer. In practice, even if Miracast worked perfectly, the core design would still be a problem. Everything on your phone's screen would be mirrored on the TV. So, if you wanted to start a Netflix video on your phone and play it via Miracast, you'd have to leave your phone's screen on the whole time. Miracast functions exclusively as a "screen mirroring" protocol. Check out our comparison of AirPlay, Miracast, WiDi, Chromecast, and DLNA to understand the differences between all these different protocols. Unlike protocols like Apple's AirPlay (on the Apple TV) and Google's Chromecast (on the Chromecast and Android TV devices), Miracast is designed to be a cross-platform standard. Rather than physically connecting your laptop, smartphone, or tablet to a TV like you would with an HDMI cable, Miracast provides a wireless standard that allows devices to discover each other, connect to each other, and mirror the contents of their screen wirelessly. Miracast is a standard that hopes to one day banish the need for HDMI cables. Related: Wireless Display Standards Explained: AirPlay, Miracast, WiDi, Chromecast, and DLNA Microsoft it even selling two Miracast dongles of its own, for some reason. Amazon's Fire TV and Fire TV stick also do Miracast. The Roku 3 and Roku Streaming Stick recently gained support for Miracast.
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