BBQScreen: Phone to PC Mirroring (Android)

BBQScreen lets you see your Android device’s screen on your computer at fullspeed. Unlike many Phone-to-PC screen sharing app, BBQScreen lets you see your device’s screen in realtime and at a high framerate. It’s super easy to setup, and can work through Wi-Fi, USB Tethering, or even Bluetooth tethering (best experienced with Wi-Fi or USB Tethering).

It’s a Miracast alternative for PCs, without the need for a dongle. You can share your phone screen through your PC to friends, family and colleagues. Generally, the concept is great and it’s great to see this feature finally being implemented. No need for HDMI cables, or weird connections like MHL. For Nexus 7 users without a dedicated HDMI output, this works wonders.

Check out the video for the BBQScreen demonstration and the responsiveness of the mirroring.

Bugs

It has the potential to be a great app, but for now, critical bugs do exist that I recommend that you wait awhile before committing to it. For the matter, some phones have reported problems with the connection, and it seems that most of the issues stem from users of ParanoidAndroid, or ROMs based off Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

It promises to support rotation and both landscape and portrait modes. But a number of S3 users have reported that the application crashed in landscape mode, which have resulted in me holding back for now.

Update: I took the plunge and installed it on my Samsung Galaxy S3 loaded with ParanoidAndroid 3.10 ROM (4.2.2). Suffice to say, the earlier worries were untrue, both mirroring and rotation work. Some applications resulted in a grey screen or incomplete mirroring, but generally, the application worked as promised. Framerates were on the low end, approximately 10-12, and I had to reduce the scaling to 50% for a more usable framerate of about 15-20.

Only video mirroring. Sound is still isolated to your device which can be a bummer if you are looking to screen videos, but currently, the framerate just isn’t good enough for that yet.

Installation

App is still available from Google Play Store.
But the parent web site seems down. Advised not to get it for mirroring purpose. Not worth the dough.