Mirror mirror not on the wall or the TV screen: casting problems

hybernia

almillar wrote: »

What is this 'Samsung Galaxy Android Tablet'? It could be ancient, and not up to streaming the video. It could have very old WiFi that's not up to the job. It also may not have the processing power to stream the videos, even if playing locally is OK.

It's the Samsung Galaxy Tab A, 10" screen, only 3 years old. It's typical Samsung: lots of impressive waffle but unimpressive substance.

No doubt the money Samsung spends on advertising with the companies responsible for so many so-called 'independent' review websites explains why its products get off so lightly.

This Tab A is a miracle of inept design, with touch sensitive controls that you can't avoid touching positioned at the bottom of the screen's frame, so that you repeatedly disrupt anything you're doing on or with the tablet and have to go back to where you started because the device has flipped back to some earlier task or closed the screen altogether.

Not a word of criticism of this nonsense appears in any online review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A, this despite the obvious fact that the damn thing is pretty much unusable straight out of the box, as any reviewer would discover on first encounter.

However: having bought and paid for it, we're keeping ours, and tolerating Samsung's ineptitude.

As for casting or mirroring anything, we understand from a Samsung forum that yes, this used to be easy once upon a time when Samsung devices included 'Miracast' but that has since been dropped.

Instead, our Galaxy Tab A comes with a variety of display options which we all need in every day usage, such as: "Color Inversion'. Gosh golly wow: well done Samsung, we so need to turn all our colours upside down eather than watching stuff mirrored from the tablet to our TV.

No wonder this is the same company which thinks a bendy phone screen is top of the list of every consumer's requirements, and then goes ahead and wastes $millions on creating one which then doesn't work.

steviebabes

You need the Allcast app for Fire TV. You then need the Allcast app on your tablets/phones. There is even an official Youtube app for Fire TV now Amazon and Google have made friends.

hybernia

steviebabes wrote: »

You need the Allcast app for Fire TV. You then need the Allcast app on your tablets/phones. There is even an official Youtube app for Fire TV now Amazon and Google have made friends.

Thanks SB, sorry for belated response but thing have been busy at home. The problem with all the various apps out there is that they promise the same thing but seem, in general, never to deliver.

I only find out that the apps are rubbish after paying for them.

I'd really like to try AllCast but umpteen times bitten means I'm now just a bit shy.

Additionally, I've found out from a Samsung forum that there's something called 'Smart Things' whatever that is from Samsung. And that I should be using that to mirror stuff. Wow: can Samsung actually be 'smart' at anything?:(

accorian

hybernia wrote: »

Additionally, I've found out from a Samsung forum that there's something called 'Smart Things' whatever that is from Samsung. And that I should be using that to mirror stuff. Wow: can Samsung actually be 'smart' at anything?:(

You actually answered your own question in an earlier post:

hybernia wrote: »

It's the Samsung Galaxy Tab A, 10" screen, only 3 years old. It's typical Samsung: lots of impressive waffle but unimpressive substance.

No doubt the money Samsung spends on advertising with the companies responsible for so many so-called 'independent' review websites explains why its products get off so lightly.

Best way of solving a problem with a Samsung device is to chuck the Samsung device in the bin: it's not worth the time and trouble.

Samsung was, once upon a time, pretty good. That hasn't been true for quite a while now. Your badly designed 10 inch Tab A was known on release to be a dog's dinner of a device, but as you say it was -- like all Samsung products a few years ago -- praised to the high hills by online review sources, all of whom I believe receive free airline tickets and hospitality from Samsung to visit the various international tech shows. It's not about 'advertising', because Samsung does very little direct advertising. It's about who to provide with freebies in exchange for favourable reviews.

The 10 inch Tab A I had was (like yours) a shabby piece of work, so poorly engineered that if you squeezed the frame the tablet stopped what it was doing and doidsomething else. I also had an earlier Samsung Galaxy mobile phone, until that also went deservedly in the bin.

But that Galaxy phone had the virtue of a very clear, very straightforward on-screen option: click-here-to-mirror-screen. Mirroring was even indexed in the user manual. By contrast, the much later Tab A has no such index reference and no such easy-to-access mirroring facility.

As to "Smart Things", it is one of the dumbest apps I've ever encountered, a signal by Samsung that it's still stupid enough to believe in The Internet of Things and even more stupid to think Samsung will take a commanding lead in it. "Smart Things" has replaced the original mirroring function on Samsung tablets, but you'll only find out how to use it by downloading an updated copy of the Tab A User Manual.

And then you'll find it doesn't work.

When activated, Smart Things is so dumb a thing that it spends a small eternity searching your home for 'smart' Smsung products like wi-fi connected fridges, freezers, brooms, alarm clocks, coffee makers, dustbins, roller skates and bird cages, none of which I happen to have.

After methodically listing on screen all the Internet of Things things I don't have (from Samsung or from anywhere else) it then pretends to have actually found stuff by accessing the device's Bluetooth connection history, and pretending that Bluetooth is 'Smart'. The pretence is as silly as the app's name. Wifi and Bluetooth are not one and the same thing, and there's nothing clever about a Samsung app which lists all the "paired" devices you've ever accessed in hope of fooling you into thinking that 'Smart Things' is itself a smart piece of software engineering.

Finally, after thumbing backwards and forwards between a tiny bottom of screen icon called 'devices' and another icon called 'dashboard', your tablet WILL connect to the Amazon firestick, just so long as you have that running in mirroring mode on your non-Samsung TV screen. You must persevere at this, because your Tab A will keep on reporting that the Firestick is not available, even if you've rammed your Tab A hard up against the Firestick while that's still in its HDMI slot. This mirroring can take between 5 minutes and 50 minutes to achieve, and there's no guarantee -- at all -- that once 'Smart Things' has successfully initiated the process, it will continue on that way: if you're mirroring a home video from Tab A to the TV,the video will stop or suddenly vanish altogether at any point after starting.

Samsung today is uncannily reminiscent of Asus of yesterday, which brought out an excellent product in 2013's 'Transformer' but then fell in love with its own marketing department and re-styled the product to make it lighter, slimmer, and more expensive but absolutely no better. After that, successive versions got worse, with Asus showing no care at all for disgruntled customers or their legitimate complaints.

If, however, you can get ahold of an early Transformer, then your screen mirroring problems are solved. It must be an early version, not one of the posh later versions that were so idiotically designed to make them Apple slim that the ports in the case had to be angled in such a way that any connector plugged into them immediately fell out (not something ever mentioned in online Asus product reviews, probably for the same reason that Samsung used to get such an uncritical reception.)

I still have my 'ancient' Asus Transformer and thankfully am still able to connect it to the TV with a 12 ft length of HDMI cable. It may not be smart. It may not be how Samsung would do it (actually, it definitely isn't). And it may not be the future of device to device communication. But though it's a pile of junk in all other respects, it works quickly and easily as a means of mirroring. And does so every time. . .:)

hybernia

Thanks accorian. I've tried the "Smart Things" app on the tablet and it is, as you say, awful. One would've thought that in 2019, the quickest and simplest thing in the world to do would be to mirror what's on a small screen to a much larger screen, but this pretty elementary innovation has escaped the collective brain cells of all the trendy young designers and software coders out there, determined as they are to lumber me with an AI kitchen bin or a 3D wristwatch fitness tracker (gosh, how "cool"!!)

I'm not convinced that any of the software apps mentioned so far are going to be any good and I'm not about to keep paying out for the them until finding one which actually works.

It seems to me that (failing my ability to use an old Asus as a wired device to my TV) that the way to go now is to follow dipsomaniac's suggestion earlier in this thread, and go for a hardware/software solution in the form of Google Chromecast.

Thanks again.