How are cheapo DLNA / Miracast dongles?

[kingmustard]

I want to use the Cast button in Android and iOS apps to cast videos to a non-smart TV and do not want to use Google Cast or Apple AirPlay.

 

Does anyone have any experience with cheapo DLNA / Miracast dongles?

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=DLNA&_sacat=0&LH_BIN=1&rt=nc&LH_PrefLoc=1

[LAwLz]

I have some experience with the more expensive models and I'd say those weren't great. At least not in my apartment where I had quite a lot of interference. 

 

I wouldn't count on those dongles working very well. Why not use a chromecast? It's not that much more expensive.

 

Please note that the cast button won't work for Miracast. You can mirror your screen using miracast (using the screen mirroring function), but it will be lower quality than Chromecast will give you. That's because with miracast it will be your phone downloading the video, and then it reencodes your screen and sends that over Wi-Fi. It will be an additional video encoding step, and your phone will try and do it quickly to avoid latency (which means quality isn't a priority). 

With a Chromecast, you essentially just send an instruction to the dongles to fetch the video. Then the dingle itself becomes the device that downloads the video and plays it. It will as a result be a perfect copy of the video itself, rather than a reencoded copy.