This may not be overly relevant for the excellent BS Player, because a full-capability player is actually not needed to forward a movie file to a display.
I have meanwhile tried a few adapters that receive video streams via Wi-Fi. The most interesting one is called EZCast, and I still use it for certain purposes. The thing, , can do four different protocols, namely:
- Miracast
- DLNA
- EZCast
- AirPlay
AirPlay is an Apple protocol. DLNA ist mostly uninteresting because of its severe limitations to only a few video and sound protocol combinations. Miracast works fairly well and simply redisplays the mobile device screen and sound via Wi-Fi Direct.
That leaves the perhaps most interesting protocol, the proprietary EZCast, which does what I wanted—it streams a video file to the display via Wi-Fi or via Wi-Fi Direct.
The EZCast people are in China, and they are pretty active. They send a firmware update about once a month to their adapters, and they are approachable in their support forum, although their support front is not composed of excellent English speakers.
Unfortunately, both Miracast and EZCast suffer from some limitations. They work very well with DVD-resolution videos with stereo sound, and I can recommend that. EZCast comes with its own app, and its "player" nicely remote-controls the streaming, and unlike Miracast it does not show video or sound on the mobile device. However, both cannot stream any kind of surround sound and they drop frames from HD material when there is enough movement in a scene, at least on my OnePlus One smartphone.
This shows perhaps the two weak spots that BS Player might have to overcome—HD video and surround sound. If BS Player wanted to stream such video material over Wi-Fi, it might have to recompress and possibly convert formats like DTS to AC-3 to use DLNA. Or it would have to talk to the EZCast people and join their fray if they allowed outsiders to use their protocol.
Even so the biggest problem may be that contemporary mobile devices do not have enough processor or graphics engine power to smoothly rescale HD material (for example a TV recording from 1080i24 to a projector's 720p60 or a German TV recording from 720p50 to a TV set's or projector's 1080p60) and at the same time convert a DTS-HD MA 7.1 stream to AC-3 5.1 to be DLNA-compatibile or compatible to some other standard.
And I am not sure whether the BS Player crew even wanted to do anything like that at all, because their strength is to display a movie on the mobile device, not to stream its content somewhere else. But if they did it, I would be a happy customer.
I don't know where Chromecast comes into this. It seems unnecessary, but since Google has pushed quite a few of their adapters into the market, BS Player may want to support these as well.
It looks like a different product though. BS Player displays a movie on a mobile device screen, while an app that wanted to stream a local movie from a file to a remote device would be quite a different animal. If the BS Player crew wanted to do that, they might as well write a second app and call it BS Streamer or BS Cast. (Remember, you've read it here first, and I don't reserve any rights for these names.
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