A few days ago our cable company had an outage, so no internet.
I have a Chromecast and thought I could use it to just stream from my home server. No dice. That's lame,, and it seems there's no work around for it.
So started looking for alternatives. So far, the mi box looks like the best match for my needs. While reviews indicate casting is spotty, I've yet to see anything about how it handles casting without an internet connection.
I'm aware there's other options to stream to it from a home server, but a combination of curiosity and plain stubbornness needs an answer regardless of what I end up doing.
So, has anyone here tried it at all? If so, does it function? If not, is there anyone willing to try it just for poo and giggles?
You can stream what you see on your phone's screen to the Mi Box with Google Home without an active internet connection, as long as the phone and the Mi Box are on the same wifi network.
I seem to remember the quality is pretty good, but not stellar. That was using Wireless N from rather far away. The Mi Box supports dual band wireless AC and so do most phones made in the last 18 months. I imagine quality using that kind of setup would be even better.
Of course, these days with any app that has some screen casting method built in, it always works by fetching high quality video off the internet with the phone or other initiating device simply acting as a remote, telling the TV app which video to fetch off the internet.
If you have videos stored on your phone or hard drives connected to a desktop or laptop system there are way better ways to play those videos than casting them, needless to say. Put the videos on a thumb drive. Use Windows simple, built in SMB file sharing, etc.
Download SPMC onto the Mi Box and use it to play videos from shared folders on your home server. I've only done it with Windows, but that takes mere minutes to set up. I'm sure there's similar quick file sharing for whatever type of file server you want to set up.