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Ronnie asked: “I have an iPad Mini and a samsung Tab S2 and a Samsung Note 5 phone. I want to be able to mirror information between all those devices as well as on my Mitsubishi and LG TVs. Looking to be able to mirror all those without getting a bunch of devices.”
Well Ronnie, you may just not be able to.
You will probably be able to share some information, like files you can put into a Dropbox or a similar service, and those files would be accessible on your phone and both your tablets, but your TVs won’t have access to those.
If you just want to mirror your content on the TVs, as in “playing video or audio” on the TV, you would probably have to buy a device like a Chromecast or a Roku Stick to do it, but even then you won’t be able to play from a tablet to a phone, or between tablets, or on all devices at once for that matter.
Also, you’re using probably at 5 different operating systems, one for the Mitsubishi TV, on for the LG TV, one for the iPad, one for the Note 5, and one for the Tab S2, so you won’t be able to sync them and make them look the same either.
We think you may be expecting more than your devices can deliver on this one.
If you are open to buying at least a Chromecast or two, you may be able to get a partial version by casting media to your TV. If you’re willing to get a network hard drive, you may be able to stream files between most devices a little faster than if you used a service like Dropbox, but even if you do spend the money you don’t want to spend, you probably won’t get the functionality you’re after.
To make matters more confusing, sometimes individual apps will have streaming (or “casting”) capabilities that the OS on the device itself does not. One of our staffers with a Samsung TV, a Roku, and an Apple TV all on the same network sees all three options when playing YouTube videos on his iPhone. That’s coming from the YouTube app, not the iPhone.
But most of these technology demos you see where content is tossed easily from one screen to another are either faked, or using a fair bit of equipment that’s often just from one brand, and sometimes a little of both. It can be done, but it requires that you sort out connecting each source device with each destination device individually, when you have all these dissimilar brands.