I have three HDMI connections on my TV, and they're used by the Shield TV Pro, the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar (which has eARC), and the PS5. Now, I used to connect my gaming machine to my TV in the past, and I just used a 50ft HDMI cable to do so. It was a bit of a hassle as my gaming machine sat in my office while the TV was in the living room, but the long HDMI cable was just about adequate.
But we moved to a new house last year, and I realized I wasn't able to use the cable any longer. That's where Nyrius comes in; the Aries Pro+ is a wireless HDMI dongle, and it admirably solved the problem of connecting devices in different rooms. It is costly at $249, but if you're in a similar situation where dragging an extra-long HDMI cable just isn't feasible, it is a solid alternative.
The Aries Pro+ has two parts: a transmitter and receiver. The receiver plugs into the TV, and the transmitter to the source device. The transmitter uses HDMI as well, so you'll need to connect it to something with HDMI out. Once you do so, you can easily stream 1080p video at a low latency, and that's something the Aries Pro+ does incredibly well.
While Nyrius advertises a range of 165ft, that's based on line-of-sight, and the actual range is around 70ft when you account for walls in between the source and target device. That said, the HDMI dongle is able to deliver clean 1080p video without any issues as long as it's in range, and the system is easy to set up and use.
In fact, a big use case of the Aries Pro+ is travel, where you can just mirror content from your notebook to a hotel TV. I did this with a minimum of effort, and while there was some artifacting — which is mostly noticeable while gaming — the 1080p footage looked good for the most part.
The transmitter itself is roughly the size of a standard TV dongle like the Google TV Streamer, and while the receiver is a little bigger — it's a smidgen shorter than the Shield TV Pro — it is easy enough to use the bundled HDMI cable to connect it to any TV. Other than that, the system is plug-and-play; once you have both the transmitter and receiver connected, you just need to choose the right HDMI mode on the TV to get started.
If anything, the only quibble I have with the Aries Pro+ is that it uses USB Mini-B to power both the transmitter and receiver. Nyrius bundles the requisite USB Mini-B to USB-A cables in the box, and considering the product debuted nearly a decade ago, I'm not going to too harsh about the omission of USB-C. But a newer model with USB-C to power it would be a much better option.
Outside of that, I didn't run into any issues with the Aries Pro+ in the time I used it. While the pricing is on the higher side and it's showing its age, the product continues to be a good choice if you need a wireless HDMI dongle. If you don't need as much range, the Pro model is a much better choice at $179 — it uses a similar system but goes up to 100ft.
