Android Miracast on Panasonic P55VT60
/So I love my Panasonic 55" plasma - built in Netflix, VUDU, Amazon Prime, Skype, good picture quality. What is a little underwhelming is the Panasonic Android Tv Remote2 application. Sure it works, but it cant power on the TV, and touch screen remotes cant replace (IMHO) tactile feedback of a traditional remote where you don't have to look at the remote to know what button you are pressing.
What does work in the app is the content sharing - from within the application, flip a picture, audio file, or movie up to the screen and voila - there it is from your phone to the TV. (I've read that video sharing doesn't work with the Apple app - but it works well for my Android devices).
Well, my new Droid Maxx supports Miracast - the "standard" ad-hoc wifi method of streaming HDMI-quality content. So I poked around in the apps of the TV and there was Display Mirroring so I figured I'd give it a try. Seems easy enough -
- Select that on the TV - The TV then indicated it was waiting for a connection
- go into Settings->Display-Display Mirroring on Droid, turn it on (you can short cut to here from the Motorola circles widget if you have a Droid, or from the settings drop down) - Turn it on and it saw the TV
- Select the TV on the droid, and on the screen of the television it prompts if I wanted to allow the connection. Hit yes and..... nothing but spinning wait circles on both.
I repeated the above steps countless times, and would only get either spinning circles, or sometimes the phone would think it was mirroring, but the TV would say disconnected.
After banging my head for 30 minutes on this, I disconnected both devices from my 5g WiFi network and connected them to my 2.5ghz network. Repeated the above steps and what eureka! it worked!. Sort of.
The problems were:
- The number of steps it took to get it to go meant it was a 2 minute process to connect the phone (including the pairing time, searching time by the droid while it looked for wireless displays etc)
- The Television didn't mute the prior input (coming from my AV receiver), even when I streamed video or audio from the phone so I had to turn off the receiver or switch the TV to an unused input as yet another step.
- There was severe pixilation. I tried Angry birds and a short movie I had recorded on the phone - both were basically unwatchable with any fast movement.
- And the biggest problem, after disconnecting the droid, the Panasonic refused to connect back to my network (it seemed to get stuck in the ad-hoc world and wouldn't see any wifi networks.). Ultimately, I had to power off the Droid (even though the display mirroring was turned off on both), and reconfigure the network on the TV. Another 3 minutes of time.
I'm not sure who is at fault here - I'm leaning toward Panasonic's implementation of the Miracast not being up to snuff. While I am running the latest firmware on the TV, it still seems buggy at best - particularly the mess it made of the WiFi connection and the audio overlay. I suspect if they would pair at 5g, the pixilation problem would go away.
All in all, the setup time and disconnect time, and general flakiness was completely unacceptable. I suppose if I had to do a presentation of some static/slow moving screen on the android device (not video/music/photo files but actual applications or see the home screen etc,) it would suffice - since there is no way to do that from within Panasonic TV remote application, but for general media content I will stick with the Panasonic Remote Application. It did not exhibit any pixilation on video files. As for something like Angry Birds? I'll stick to just looking at the phone's screen.