I have more than a decade of experience reviewing TVs, projectors, and other AV devices. I was formerly the video editor and primary TV and projector tester for HomeTheaterReview, and I previously contributed display coverage to Home Theater Magazine, Electronic House, and other publications.

A wireless HDMI video transmission system consists of a transmitter unit that connects to your HDMI source(s) and sends the signal wirelessly to a receiver unit connected to your display. This type of system has three main uses:

• If you want to connect video sources and TVs located in different rooms: Most wireless HDMI systems can transmit the AV signal through walls. In some cases, you may have a primary home-entertainment setup in one room, but you’d like to be able to send the AV signal to an additional TV in a secondary location.
• If your sources are in a different part of the room than the display device: You can send the signal wirelessly instead of running long cables across the floor, under the floor, along the baseboards, or in the walls. This is an especially common situation with projectors.
• If you mount your TV on the wall and want to cut down on cables: You still need to run a power cord to the TV, but the AV signal from your source can transmit wirelessly to the small HDMI receiver box, which (in some systems) can draw power from the TV’s USB port.

A wireless HDMI video system is meant for use with sources that have HDMI outputs, such as media streaming devices, cable or satellite boxes, gaming consoles, and Blu-ray or DVD players. If you’re looking to send an AV signal wirelessly from a non-HDMI source such as a phone, tablet, or computer, most newer mobile devices already have built-in tech, such as AirPlay, Chromecast, or Miracast, that allows them to mirror their content or stream video wirelessly. If your device doesn’t, there are systems that allow you to attach a plug-in dongle to the mobile device and transmit wirelessly to a TV.

In a perfect world, a wireless HDMI video transmitter would do everything an HDMI cable does, just wirelessly. In reality, unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Wireless HDMI systems can’t transmit high dynamic range video or high-frame-rate 4K video. Many of them can’t even transmit multichannel audio.

A good high-speed HDMI cable will always do more—and do it more reliably—than a wireless HDMI system. If it is at all feasible for you to go the wired route, do so. But if not, here are the things to think about when you’re shopping for a wireless system.

Multiroom or in-room: Most of today’s wireless HDMI systems use one of two wireless protocols. Many of them are Wi-Fi–based systems that transmit on the 5 GHz band, so they can send the signal wirelessly through walls and around the house but with some compression that may hinder the picture quality. Some Wi-Fi–based systems let you add more than one receiver unit, so you can send the signal from one source to multiple locations.

The second protocol, called WirelessHD, transmits over the 60 GHz band without the compression you get from Wi-Fi systems, so it delivers a better-looking picture. But you need line-of-sight between the transmitter and receiver, so it’s a single-room-only option. It’s an especially good choice for use with front-projection systems.

Resolution: Pretty much every wireless HDTV system can transmit video up to 1080p resolution and a 60 Hz frame rate. Some wireless HDMI systems support 4K resolution but only up to 30 Hz. (We talk about how this might affect performance with our budget pick.) In most cases, we don’t think the step up to 4K is necessary when you’re sending video to a secondary TV, but it may be helpful when you’re sending video to a projector, since projectors deliver a much larger image, where the improved resolution might be noticeable.

As we noted above, no wireless HDMI system supports high dynamic range video, so you cannot get the full Ultra HD experience, via streaming or Ultra HD Blu-ray disc, through this kind of device. If you want that support, look for a long active high-speed HDMI cable or another wired HDMI option.

Stereo or multichannel audio: The majority of wireless HDMI systems available today support only stereo audio pass-through, which is fine if you’re connecting the receiver unit directly to a TV in another room. But if you want to send a surround-sound signal from a source to an AV receiver or soundbar, look for a system that supports multichannel audio.

USB power: If the transmitter and/or the receiver can draw power via USB, you can connect the box directly to a source’s or TV’s powered USB port (if it has one; most TVs do). The benefits: You don’t have to place the boxes near power outlets, and they will turn on and off with the connected devices. It’s more common for the receiver unit to support USB power than for the transmitter unit to do so.

Infrared pass-through: Some wireless HDMI systems can transmit IR signals, which allows you to control the video source that’s attached to the transmitter, such as your Blu-ray player or cable box, from the secondary location, using the source’s own IR remote control. If your source has a Bluetooth- or RF-based remote that works through walls, like the remotes that come with Chromecast and Apple TV media streamers, you don’t need IR pass-through.

Number of HDMI inputs: Do you want to connect two sources to the transmitter at the same time? If so, look for a system with two HDMI inputs. There aren’t many. (Our top pick is one.)

HDMI output: If the transmitter unit has an HDMI output, you can feed your source into the transmitter, send the signal wirelessly to a distant display, and connect a nearby display to the transmitter at the same time.

You may not need all of the features described above. Think about how you plan to use the transmitter and the AV systems you’re connecting it to. Which features are essential to that purpose?

In deciding which wireless HDMI systems to test, we looked at both multiroom and in-room options from brands we know, including DVDO, Iogear, J-Tech Digital, Monoprice, and Nyrius. In recent years, we’ve seen a surge of wireless HDMI systems offered on Amazon, all of which look pretty similar and come from brands that we’ve never heard of—and tend to disappear after a few years. From that group, we purchased one of the Amazon top sellers, the BovBox system, to see how it would fare against the brand-name competitors.

We dismissed systems that cost significantly more but offered the same basic features, and we chose newer models over older ones to ensure that the systems in our test group would be compliant with more recent HDMI specifications. We did not consider a 4K resolution to be essential because in most situations—and due to technology limitations—you’re usually better off sending 1080p.

I tested each system using a combination of three sources (an Apple TV 4K media streamer, a Google Chromecast media streamer, and an Oppo UDP-203 Ultra HD Blu-ray player) with three TVs (a 4K LG OLED, a 4K Samsung LCD, and a 1080p TCL LCD). The TVs were in fixed locations, and I experimented with moving the sources to different parts of my tri-level, 1,950-square-foot home.

My torture test sent the signal from the far corner of the family room (first floor) across the house to the opposite-corner bedroom (third floor). In between those corners are various walls, stairs, doors, Wi-Fi routers, and smart speakers, all of which had the potential to generate interference during my test.

I evaluated the following attributes of each system:

• Signal reliability: Is the signal generally stable, with minimal stutters, freezes, and drops in the picture? All wireless HDMI systems have signal interruptions from time to time. The better models keep those interruptions to a minimum.
• Picture quality: Does the wireless transmission degrade the picture? Wi-Fi–based systems compress the video signal to make it more manageable, which results in visible compression artifacts. These artifacts can take many forms, but generally they make the picture look softer, noisier, or more digital.
• User-friendliness: Is the system easy to set up? Does it come with all the cables you need? Do features such as IR pass-through and USB power work as they’re supposed to?

If you want to send an HDMI signal wirelessly to a secondary location in your home, the Nyrius Aries Home+ is the best wireless HDMI video transmitter for the job. It delivers a clean, reliable signal through walls and other obstructions, and it has the best assortment of useful features to integrate into any type of AV setup. This system is a bit more expensive than the competition, but it has the flexibility to change with your AV gear in ways that other models don’t.

It offered the most reliable performance in our tests. This Wi-Fi–based system transmits over seven channels (or frequencies) between 4.9 GHz and 5.9 GHz, using dynamic frequency selection (DFS) to automatically switch to a different channel to stabilize the signal when necessary. It supports video resolutions up to 1080p 60 Hz, with a claimed range of 100 feet.

Even in my long-range torture test across the house, I didn’t see a lot of signal freezes or dropouts. The experience with the Aries Home+ was stable enough that I often forgot I was using a wireless system, which was never the case with some of the other models I tested.

Equally important is that the Aries Home+ delivered a particularly clean video signal, producing far fewer compression artifacts than we saw with any of the other Wi-Fi–based systems we tested. In our picture-quality test scene (chapter two from the Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Blu-ray disc, where Ethan Hunt is chained up in a dark basement), I saw a tad more noise in the dark backgrounds through the Aries Home+ than with a direct HDMI connection, but the effect was minor enough that you may not notice such things. Only the Monoprice Blackbird Pro 16049 delivered cleaner picture quality, but that’s an in-room-only system.

It supports multichannel audio. In our tests, this system successfully passed a variety of multichannel soundtracks, including Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital EX, and 7.1 PCM—but not the highest-quality, uncompressed Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats. Most other Wi-Fi–based competitors are limited to stereo audio.

It has the best assortment of features. The transmitter unit has two HDMI inputs, so you can connect two AV sources and switch between them via the supplied remote. The box also has an HDMI output to connect directly to a nearby TV. When we used the HDMI output to feed a wired HDMI signal to a local TV, we detected minimal lag between the direct HDMI connection and the wireless connection in the next room.

The receiver unit can draw power from a USB port on your TV or projector (if your device has a powered port), which brings several benefits. You don’t have to position the receiver close to a power outlet, you get a cleaner look with a wall-mounted TV, and the receiver automatically turns on and off with the TV—so you don’t have to worry about its power and connection lights distracting you when the TV is off.

The receiver unit is small enough to tuck behind many wall-mounted TVs or to sit atop a projector, and a keyhole insert on the backside allows you to wall-mount it (the hardware to do so is included). The transmitter unit is more than twice as large as the receiver and sits vertically in its stand, but you could lay it on its side if you prefer, and it too has a keyhole insert for wall-mounting.

Unlike the other multiroom systems we tested, the Aries Home+ does not come with optional screw-in antennas, but in our tests it didn’t need them to improve signal performance, and the absence of antennas makes for a nicer, more discreet look.

The IR pass-through function worked fine with my Oppo UHD Blu-ray player and its IR remote; the Nyrius package includes an IR cable that plugs into the transmitter unit and connects via a sticky pad to your source’s IR window. For many of my tests, I used the Google Chromecast and Apple TV 4K media streamers with Bluetooth/RF remotes that work through walls, so I didn’t need the IR pass-through.

Setup is simple. Despite including so many features, the Aries Home+ has a straightforward setup process that does not require the use of an online portal (as many Wi-Fi systems do). Just connect your sources to the transmitter, connect the receiver to the desired TV, and power everything up.

Overall, the Aries Home+ distinguished itself from the pack with its consistent performance and its full list of features, all of which worked as advertised. If you’re certain you won’t need the transmitter’s HDMI output and second HDMI input, you can save a little money by getting the Nyrius Aries Home instead.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Aries Home+ isn’t perfect in its signal reliability. This is true of all wireless HDTV systems; inevitably you will encounter instability issues such as the picture freezing, disappearing, or breaking up for a moment. This system corrected itself pretty quickly in our tests, but your results will vary depending on the size and construction of your house, the sources of wireless interference, and the distance between the transmitter and receiver units.

It can be a little slow to lock on to the signal when you first power it up, if it detects interference. During most of our testing period, the system started up quickly, but on occasion it had to search for the most stable channel (frequency) to use. When the system is doing this, you can see the channel selection flashing on the screen. But once it found the most stable signal, everything was fine.

The package doesn’t include a USB cable to power the receiver unit. You need to supply your own Mini-USB–to–Type-A cable if you want to power the receiver via your TV or projector’s USB output.

Also, you don’t get an IR port or cable for the receiver unit, so you need to point the source remote directly at the receiver for it to work. That means you can’t hide the receiver behind a TV if you’re relying on IR pass-through to control the source.

If the Nyrius Aries Home+ is unavailable, or if you’re willing to sacrifice some features to spend less, the J-Tech Digital WEX200V3 is a good alternative. In comparison with our top pick, its design is less home-friendly, but it delivers the essential functions that most people need, for a lower price.

It performed almost as reliably as our top pick. The WEX200V3 is a Wi-Fi–based system that operates in the band from 5.18 GHz to 5.825 GHz, allowing you to transmit up to 1080p 60 Hz video through walls, up to a claimed 200 feet.

Like the Aries Home+, it delivered a mostly reliable signal in our tests. I saw the occasional stutter in my longest-range test, but from most locations in my home, the picture from the WEX200V3 was generally free of stutters, freezes, and dropouts.

When you do encounter interference, this is the only system we tested that lets you easily change the wireless channel (that is, the frequency it’s using to transmit the signal) from a list of seven options. You do so by pressing a button on the transmitter unit or by using an online portal.

The ability to manually change channels offers a level of instant control that some people may really like. Then again, others may prefer the automatic channel-changing process of our top pick.

You can add extra receivers (sold separately). Whereas our top pick supports only a single transmitter-receiver combination, this system gives you the option to add more receiver units to send the AV signal to multiple rooms simultaneously.

From a picture-quality standpoint, the WEX200V3 represented a small step down from the Aries Home+ in our tests. Compression artifacts appeared in our Blu-ray demo scene from Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. The black backgrounds in chapter two had some macroblocking (which looks like lots of little, shimmering squares instead of a smooth, clean background), and that effect obscured fine details.

Compression artifacts already exist in lower-quality streaming and cable or satellite signals, so if one of those is your source, you may not see any further degradation with this J-Tech Digital system. But with a high-quality Blu-ray signal, you’d probably notice it.

Additionally, when we fed the WEX200V3 a native 1080p 24 Hz Blu-ray signal, it sent the signal to the TV as 1080p 60 Hz, and in doing so it created choppy motion that was unwatchable. You can easily get around this problem by setting your player to output 1080p 60 Hz instead, but the Aries Home+ does not have this issue.

It supports only stereo audio. That’s all you need if you’re connecting the receiver unit directly to a TV or using a two-channel soundbar—but it isn’t ideal if you want surround sound.

The transmitter unit has one HDMI input, as well an HDMI output to pass the signal through to a nearby TV, but it lacks the second HDMI input that the Aries Home+ provides.

The boxes look utilitarian and lack USB power. J-Tech Digital aims its systems at the professional and custom-installation markets, and this model’s design reflects that. The boxes sport black, metal cases with hard edges, and the package includes a pair of optional, large screw-on antennas for both the transmitter and receiver units.

The boxes also use proprietary, locking power cables, which means you can’t power the receiver box from your TV’s USB port. This limitation is an inconvenience, especially when you add in the fact that the receiver has bright blue lights that don’t turn off. Since the receiver unit has no setting to turn itself off along with your TV via USB, you have to unplug it to turn off the lights (though you could also cover the lights with electrical tape).

On the plus side, the WEX200V3 has IR pass-through and comes with IR extender cables for both the transmitter and receiver, so you can easily tuck away the boxes out of sight and still control your IR-based sources with their respective remotes.

If you need to send the AV signal across a single room, instead of through walls to other rooms, we recommend the Monoprice Blackbird Pro 16049. This system is an amazing value for a 4K-compatible wireless HDMI transmitter, and it’s an especially good choice if you need to wirelessly send an AV signal to a ceiling-mounted video projector.

It’s an in-room system. The Blackbird Pro uses WirelessHD 60 GHz technology, which allows for the transmission of uncompressed video up to about 98 feet away but requires line-of-sight between the transmitter and receiver. So you can’t use it to send AV signals between rooms.

In our picture-quality test using the Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Blu-ray disc, we saw no added compression artifacts and no clear difference, in terms of detail, between the Blackbird Pro’s performance and that of a direct HDMI cable.

With 60 GHz technology, you will encounter stability issues if obstructions sit between the transmitter and receiver boxes. I transmitted the signal across two different rooms (at a distance of 20 feet in one room), and for the most part, the signal was stable. At times I would see a little stutter when I walked between the transmitter and receiver, and if I stood right between them for a while, the picture would eventually disappear. So you should position the boxes in a way that you won’t have a lot of foot traffic causing interference, and obviously you can’t tuck them away in a gear cabinet or behind a TV.

It can transmit 4K video. The Blackbird Pro has been our budget pick for years. It originally supported video resolutions up to 1080p 60 Hz, but a recent upgrade increased that to 4K 30 Hz video. We retested it to confirm that the newer version could successfully pass a 4K signal, and it did. But we need to stress that no wireless HDMI system supports 4K at 60 Hz or 120 Hz, nor do any of these systems support HDR video. If you want to distribute high-bandwidth 4K HDR video signals around your home, you need a long-range wired setup instead.

You can set up most 4K sources to output the video signal at 24 Hz or 30 Hz instead of 60 Hz. However, with content that displays at 60 Hz, such as HDTV channels, the motion can look choppy or unnatural when shown at 30 Hz. With TV and sports shows, you might be better off transmitting at 1080p 60 Hz; but for Ultra HD and Blu-ray discs, you can set up your player to output films at 24 Hz, and the motion will look just as it should.

It also has full multichannel-audio support. We successfully transmitted a variety of 7.1-channel soundtracks, including those in the higher-quality Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats.

You can power both the transmitter and receiver units via USB. As a result, you don’t need to position them near power outlets, and they turn on and off with their connected devices. The transmitter unit has one HDMI input. It lacks an HDMI output and IR pass-through, but since this Monoprice model is an in-room system, those features aren’t necessary.

The transmitter and receiver boxes look identical. Both are notably petite and visually discreet, but they’re so small and light, even when attached to their tiny stands, that it’s easy for heavy HDMI cables to pull them over. The boxes have no keyhole inserts, and the package includes no wall-mounting hardware—but really, the boxes are small enough that you could adhere them to the wall with a large sticky pad.

Since we created this guide in 2014, we’ve tested a number of wireless HDMI systems, many of which have been discontinued over the years. Here are some systems we’ve considered or tested that are still available:

BovBox Wireless HDMI Extender: This multiroom, Wi-Fi–based kit sells on Amazon and looks quite similar to many other Amazon offerings available under different names. As with the J-Tech Digital WEX200V3, you can add extra receiver units to this system. BovBox claims that its system works at distances up to 656 feet—but in our tests, the 1080p 60 Hz signal was unstable at much shorter distances. The picture flickered a lot in our long-range test across the house, and it wasn’t even that stable with only one wall and about 5 feet between the transmitter and receiver boxes. Transmission is locked in at 5.8 GHz, as the system offers no ability to manually or automatically adjust the channel to deal with interference. And in our Blu-ray test, we saw a lot of compression artifacts that really hindered the picture quality in dark scenes.

DVDO Air 4K and DVDO Air 2K: Like the Monoprice Blackbird Pro 16049, these DVDO systems use 60 GHz technology to deliver, respectively, 4K 30 Hz or 1080p 60 Hz video and multichannel audio. They are designed for in-room transmission between source and display and are priced significantly higher than Monoprice’s offering for the same basic features and functions, so we did not test them.

Iogear GWKIT4K: This is one of the few multiroom, Wi-Fi–based systems that claim to transmit at a 4K 30 Hz resolution, but we were never able to transmit a resolution higher than 1080p 60 Hz, despite much back-and-forth with the Iogear team. Even at 1080p, the signal was not as stable as what we saw from our Nyrius and J-Tech Digital picks, and compression artifacts appeared in our Blu-ray test. This is the only system we tested that also lets you screen-mirror content from mobile devices, but it supports only stereo audio, lacks IR pass-through, and doesn’t have an HDMI output on the transmitter. So even if we were just dealing with a defective sample, the GWKIT4K is lacking in features compared with our picks.

Iogear GWLRSSKIT4K: This kit is geared more toward professional and custom installations; you can add transmitters or receivers, and it features connections such as Ethernet, RS-232, and USB for peripherals. The Wi-Fi–based system claims to support up to a 4K 30 Hz resolution at up to 600 feet, but considering the problems we had with the similar GWKIT4K (see above), we chose not to test it. Like our J-Tech Digital runner-up, this system supports only stereo audio and can’t run off USB power, but its higher price makes those limitations harder to overlook.

Iogear GW4K30GH60: We did not test this 60 GHz, in-room system because it has technology and features (with only stereo audio) similar to those of our Monoprice budget pick but costs a lot more. The boxes do have an interesting triangular design, though, if you’d like to make a visual statement.

J-Tech Digital W6: We chose not to test this 60 GHz, in-room system because it’s similar to the Monoprice Blackbird Pro in the technology it uses but is far more expensive. The one perk it offers over the Monoprice model is that the transmitter unit has HDMI, dual USB-C, and dual USB-A inputs, so you can wirelessly transmit signals from HDMI sources, computers, and USB peripherals. If you need that extra functionality, this system is worth a look.

This article was edited by Grant Clauser.