Screen mirroring is laggy or stuttering

Why is my screen mirroring so laggy?

Some delay is inherent: wireless mirroring runs about 100 to 300 milliseconds behind, because your phone encodes video continuously and sends it over the air. Beyond that, stutter is usually Wi-Fi congestion, distance, or the phone heating up and throttling itself.

Step by step

1. Accept the floor, then fix what is above it

   No wireless method gets below roughly 100 milliseconds. If you are trying to play a fast game or anything where input timing matters, no amount of tuning will make mirroring suitable - skip to the cable.

2. Move to the 5GHz band

   2.4GHz is shared with microwaves, Bluetooth and every neighbouring router. If both devices support 5GHz, join both to that network. Many routers publish the two bands under different names, so check you are not on the wrong one.

3. Reduce distance and walls

   Miracast makes a direct device-to-device link rather than going through your router, so it degrades faster with distance and obstructions than normal Wi-Fi does. Being in the same room makes a visible difference.

4. Stop the phone throttling

   Encoding video continuously heats the phone quickly. If playback is smooth for five minutes and then stutters, that is thermal throttling: take the case off, stop charging while mirroring, and close anything running in the background.

5. Lower the resolution if the app allows it

   Dropping from 1080p to 720p roughly halves the data being encoded and transmitted, and on a TV viewed from a sofa the difference is far less noticeable than the stutter it removes.

What cannot be fixed

When to use a different method

For gaming, or anything where the delay is the problem rather than an annoyance, use a USB-C to HDMI cable. It has no interference, no throttling and effectively no lag.

Related

• Why does screen mirroring keep dropping out?
• Why does my phone say it does not support screen mirroring?
• Check whether your phone and TV are compatible at all

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