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Robin Winslow
Asked: 2013-09-06 12:22:08 +0800 CST

Using Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) in Ubuntu

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My Thinkpad X1 Carbon apparently supports Intel WiDi. I believe this should, in theory, allow me to share my screen with my Sony Bravia TV which supports Miracast.

Is it possible to make use of Wireless Display in Ubuntu to share my display with my TV?

Edit:

I found a thread on ubuntuforums.com about this very issue. It was started in 2010 but it appears that as of the final post (January 2013) there was still no WiDi support in Ubuntu. As the commenter mentions, Windows 7 has had support for a while.

wireless

3 Answers

  1. Intel has released "Open Source Software for Intel® Wireless Display TV Adapter Firmware" Open Source Software for Intel® Wireless Display TV Adapter Firmware That should get the computer talking to the tv via intel's WiDi.

    EDIT: Be aware that this link is for source code released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 and compiling will be required.

    EDIT2: Prerequisites:

    PC running 32-bit Linux (e.g., Ubuntu 9.10)
Linux development tools: gawk, zlib1g-dev, libncurses5-dev, patch, etc. 
    To install the tools on Ubuntu: apt-get install gawk zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev patch
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  2. WiDi and Miracast were initially two different, non compatable formats; more recent versions of WiDi also support miracast (v3.5+). I don't know if either is supported in any flavor of linux (with the exeption of miracast on android.

    The version of WiDi on my LG TV does not work with miracast either.

    More info here:

    http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1gq3qe/widi_vs_linux/ http://supportkb.intel.com/wireless/wireless-display/templates/selfservice/intelwidi/#portal/1026/article/2497

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  3. This is an old question, but this still may help someone: 2 Projects on Github:

    https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast

    Wireless Display Software For Linux OS (WDS), source on linked Github, has sample implementations of Miracast(WiDi) Sink and Source.

    WDS is a set of components used to build a display stack for Linux. It consists of:

    • libwds: Primary library that implements a Miracast-dialect of RTSP that includes the parser, negotiation logic for sink and source, and related data structures. It is not tied to any specific connection manager, media framework or main loop
      • wds/network: Supports integration with GLib main loop and GStreamer
      • wds/p2p: Supports integration with ConnMan Wifi P2P features

    Build instructions from github are cmake ; make

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