Miracast over Ethernet / Indirect Wifi?

Question

I'm not sure if this is the right place for the question, but I looked at all the sites of stackexchange and found this one to fit best.

I'm looking for the best way to allow a lot of devices to use a single tv and speaker system, without connecting the devices to the tv using a wire (HDMI etc.). As I searched the internet I came across solutions like sonos, chromecast or mediacenters like XBMC, but with those solutions, the device is playing the sound/video while the laptop/smartphone/tablet is acting as a remote. But this is not what I want. In sonos/chromecast, the device needs to support the video/audio source and have access to it. If that is not the case, you're out of luck. The same applies to a mediacenter. It needs access to the media you want to play, and if the video is on your smartphone, you need to copy it first, before you can play it. Those are all not really good solutions in my opinion.

Then I found a technology called "Miracast", which lets you send the audio/video you are playing on your laptop/smartphone/tablet to your tv & speaker system. It looked very good at first, but then I realized that this only works over WiFi-Direct. This makes it totally useless, because you can normally only connect to one WiFi-Device at once. This means, that if you connect to your TV, you lose the connection to the Access Point and thus your internet connection. So you are not able to play music or videos you are streaming from the internet on the TV&speakers.

So, if I wanted to occasionally watch youtube videos or listen to google music all access or watch TV on my smartphone, I can't stream it to the TV with miracast. The only way i know to do this is throug a solution like sonos/chromecast or a mediacenter. But then I couldn't stream my local videos/music on the smartphone and also can't show games to my friends on the TV.

Now the question: Is there an all in one solution to this?

I imagine a solution like this: I have an old TV that only has an HDMI input port. Second, I would need some sort of device with an ethernet port or WiFi(so that I can connect it to my network), and an HDMI output port. After connecting it to the network & to the TV, I would be able to stream the video/audio from my laptop/smartphone/tablet (which is also connected to the network) to it. This way I still have internet connection and I still can stream local media in addition to youtube/google music.

Is something like this on the market?

Answer 1

Actually a WiFi-Direct connection works additionally to your "normal" WiFi Conection, so there shouldn't be a problem in your case. You can even have your normal indirect WiFi Connnection and more than one WiFi Direct Connections at the same time. Only your normal WiFi Connection is limited to one Connection at a time. WiFi Direct ist completely independent from the normal WiFi Connection