How to connect Fairphone to a vga projector or TV

Help Fairphone 1
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It’s funny- I would imagine FP is particularly popular with educators and speakers who might give demonstrations in venues with poor facilities. But Fairphones have no way to send presentations and videos to old-fashioned displays via a cable. Previously I did it very simply with a 3rd generation ipod touch.

But it can be done wirelessly! I spent under £25 instead of £250 buying a new projector. I’ve looked around for a simple explanation and couldn’t find one- so here it is.

You will need an existing WiFi connection and a couple of small things:

  • A screencast dongle. These can be called “Miracast” or "EZcast"
    dongles. I used the cheapest model by Measy. They plug straight into
    the back of TVs or projectors with an HDMI connector.

  • If your projector is so old it has only a vga connector then you will
    also need a “hdmi female to vga female adapter” I did not invent that
    terminology: that is what you have to search for to find the correct
    item. (I call mine a dingle).These are cheap little things but harder
    to source than the “male to female” type. I found one on ebay. They often come with an
    extra wire to plug the audio into the speaker or sound system of your
    choice.

Attach the “hdmi female to vga female adapter” (dingle) to the Miracast dongle and then into the TV/projector. Plug the dongle into a power socket. Happily you can use the same cable as the one for your FP for this :smile:

Download the EZcast app to your fairphone. It’s free.

Switch on your projector/TV. Launch the EZCAST app on your fairphone. It will instruct you on how to setup the dongle. It will require your WiFi password to create a mini-network between the FP and your display. It will install its software on the dongle. The process takes less than 5 minutes and only needs to be done once.

All done! Now you can stream the web, show photos or documents on the big screen.

You can also use this method to cast media from your Windows PC or Mac OS 10.7+ to a display screen- but that is for another forum… There is no open source alternative yet but there will soon be one called Miraclecast.

There is a rumour this can also be acheived via the cross-platform open source media software called VLC. I have not suceeded with this, nor have I found any proper instructions for it.

I hope this helps other people looking for the same thing.

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I can’t comment from a personal perspective as I have not attempted (and probably will not) to do anything as ambitious as this.

But thank you very much for posting this, I’m sure others will find this really helpful. Hopefully as some point we’ll have a “how to” section on the forum and we’ll get this moved into there. :thumbsup:

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What I can say is, within the VLC app there is a setting to allow cloning the screen “to an auxiliary screen”, mentioning Miracast. But as I don’t have a Miracast device, I can’t tell you :slight_smile:

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VLC is a great tool but has very little documentation suitable for non-technical people. I couldn’t find any instructions at all for casting. I did have a go but couldn’t understand most of the terminology. I get the feeling you have to also install VLC on the dongle. If anyone knows how to do this and get it working please let us know here!

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Yes I wish you could just do it with one simple cable. HDMI capability is definitely on my list of required features for the new Fairphone. There are lots of places I would like to give presentations or show movies where there is a TV screen or a projector but no WiFi. In my opinion MHL capability would be nice but it would still require a bunch of dingles for ‘backwards compatibility’

http://www.meetmhl.com/HowtoInstallMHL.aspx

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I don’t understand if I can connect my FP1 by MHL?
Thanks

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No, the FP1 does not have MHL. I don’t know about the FP2. You cannot connect the FP1 to an old fashioned TV or projector with any cable, even if the cable appears to fit :cry: . But if you have a good WiFi connection, you can use a cheap wireless dongle to stream it instead. That’s what the above instructions are for.

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