Our TV is relatively old. There is no way to cast directly to the TV. We have a Firestick, but can’t cast directly to that from our phones as we used to when we had Google Chrimecast.

I’d like a little device that just let us cast the phone or laptop screen to the TV. A standalone little device, maybe? Or would we be better off getting a Chromecast?

I looked at something called a Roku, as that was something that came up when I was searching, but I couldn’t actually tell if you could cast to mirror the phone or laptop screen to it. Does anyone have any experience/advice?

I had a Roku media player on one of my TVs for a while. It was ok, but quite slow and clunky compared to an Apple TV.
It might be in a drawer somewhere. I’ll take a look and if I’ve not given it to a charity shop you are welcome to give it a go.

It looks like casting is supported.
https://www.cloudwards.net/how-to-cast-to-roku/

That would be great Dr Z, thank you. There are instances when we really want to cast to the TV. Russell got a quiz board game for Christmas, and you can cast it to the TV which would work well for us for boardless play but we can’t actually do that currently. Similarly Darwin sometimes has things like PowerPoint presentations to watch for homework that would be easier to view together cast to a big screen.

Why wouldn't you get a Chomecast? This is what they're for.

Because if I can find my spare Roku, the net cost is zero, though I suspect I charity shopped it.

We used to have Chromecasts and they both became unusable, so we switched to fire sticks.

Even though you can enable Display Mirroring on the firestick itself, when you try and cast from a phone it can never see the device

I had this problem, do you have pixel phones by any chance? If so it just doesn't work with really anything except a Chromecast.

If Dr Z can’t find his Roku by the time we see him then I will probably look for a Chromecast. But yes, we had two of them from different years and they both became unusable after a while, so we’ve had Firesticks since then.

Russell has a Pixel and I have an iPhone, but we can’t cast anything to our TV through a native service, and the firestick needs a second party app, but they are all really flaky, so would rather a device that handles it a bit more reliably.

The Chromecast we've had for a couple of years is still working fine so maybe they've improved them a bit.

Google actually don’t make Chromecast any more. They’ve stopped production and there are none for sale anywhere. They’ve changed to a Google TV streamer device which is a lost more expensive at over £100, so not really what I’m looking for.

But fortunately: eBay.

Yeah, I’ve been looking on eBay but they’re really expensive on there. Quite a lot more than the original sale price. That’s why I was asking if there was an alternative device that’s a bit easier to come by and a bit cheaper.

This works great with my Apple device. The Android won’t connect, but we can run the stuff we wanted off the iPhone so it’s superb.