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Hi guys,

I’m looking to add airplay functionality to my conference rooms. I would love something that was similar to Apple TV/Airplay, but that did ANY device. We’d like to give consultants/clients the ability to bring in their laptops and present on our TVs without the use of a cable . I’m tentatively looking at this product AirMedia® [Crestron Electronics, Inc.]

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks for your help.

6 Spice ups
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Chromecast?

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Unless we’re talking about AirPlay from iPads/Macs to an Apple TV…I haven’t seen this work particularly well anywhere. You’re adding an extra layer of complexity for negligible gain. Just provide a nice-looking panel for hookups, and a set of short-ish cables.

Frequently, visitors will have limited administrative rights on their laptops, and you’ll end up having to fall back on a cable anyway.

If you really must avoid hooking up visitors’ devices via cables, then provide a dedicated, highly secured PC exclusively for presentations (and enforce a policy that your visitors must use it).

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Chromecast is too limited. I’m really looking for something that’ll do mirroring with reasonable refresh

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The problem is, how is ANY device going to communicate with a piece of new technology connected to the TV if the device/computer was not originally designed for it? Then you’re talking about a hardware accessory to broadcast the signal, or software to do it over IP.

Software solution: AirParrot 3 | Mirror & stream content from your Mac or PC to Apple TV, Chromecast & more

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Yeah, I understantd the inherent difficulty/absurdness of the request – when I say ANY, I mean most or a lot. If I could provide 75% of the devices that come in with an ability to stream wirelessly to our TVs, that would be a huge win.

Does anyone have experience with Intel WiDi?

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We tossed Apple TVs on all of our conference room projectors. The goal was to provide easy, cable-less and wireless solution for our laptop and ipad users during meetings. It works pretty well on iDevices except when the network gets really busy; you may start to see some lag.

For windows based PCs, we install AirParrot; again, works ok. Sometimes you run into issues where it cant fine the Apple TV for the room you want, so you end up having to restart the airparrot client or waiting a few minutes for it to see the broadcasts; so make sure PC users get to the meeting early and fire up Airparrot so it can scan for the Apple TVs (Bonjour). Like Airplay for IOS and OSX, this solutions also relies on a robust wireless network. If you can hard wire you apple TVs on the same vlan as your wireless network, you will see better performance. I would test it in your environment first AirParrot 3 | Mirror & stream content from your Mac or PC to Apple TV, Chromecast & more

But as brandonwardlaw mentions, we had to have a cabled solution as a backup; so each room still has a good old fashioned VGA or HDMI (with vga adapter) cable ready to go. There is nothing worse then having the CEO come into your office because the wireless projector solution is acting up during his presentation after you tested the wireless solution a thousand times. There is simply no way to predict wireless traffic patterns during a meeting.

Another solution is putting the Apple TVs on their own wireless network (SSID) and vlan. During meetings, participants need to join that meeting rooms SSID and connect to the corresponding Apple TV. This adds some complexity to setups, but I have found it helps performance.

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I actually just read a LifeHacker article that wanted to achieve something similar in their home. Airplay on any device:

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I love AirParrot & AppleTV - use both all over home & work… that said, the last time we had a client want this (no software to install, primarily used by laptops/Win) we went with a C2G Miracast adapter:

It’s a steal @ retail compared to the other options and I can do $51.99 - not a bad solution for the money. The client who used this solution has zero on-site IT support staff and the end user(s) ended up very happy. I was totally skeptical but it’s been installed now for about 4 months.

Cheers! Starr

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Look up Miracast and Intel Wireless Display. We use a Netgear PTV3000 and it works great with our android tablets and our Dell laptops for wireless displays.

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We do wireless from the conference room table to the tv. One cable from whatever the device to the table.

Running a wireless hdmi transmitter\receiver. Transmitter inside the table and the receiver tucked above the drop ceiling.

Works fairly well and has good device comparability. Anything with an hdmi or vga output can be put on the tv in our main conference room.

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This may not fit the OP’s needs exactly, since it requires the installation of an agent, but we use Prijector, a $149 device . It also provides out guest wireless…

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wireless hdmi