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I couldn't find anything about Ubuntu acting as a Miracast receiver or sender.

  • Can it work at all?
  • Are there hardware prerequisites?
  • Is WiFi a requirement or can it work over LAN or another kind of network connection?
  • WiFi direct seems to be a necessary requirement, is it a sufficient one? (i.e. if a system supports WiFi direct does that mean it supports Miracast?)
  • Are there differences in support between receiving/sending?
  • How is the latency? (compared to the competition, i.e. VNC, commercial Miracast devices, etc.)
  • How do I actually use it, if it's difficult?

Specifically, I plan to use it together with an Android phone (4.x Jelly Bean).

Nobody
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TiloBunt
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6 Answers6

31

OpenWFD is dead and now superceded by MiracleCast:

MiracleCast is an open-source implementation of the Miracast technology (also: Wifi-Display (WFD)). It is based on the OpenWFD research project and will supercede it. We focus on proper and tight integration into existing Linux-Desktop systems, compared to OpenWFD which was meant as playground for fast-protoyping.

Despite its name and origin, the project itself is not limited to Miracast. We can support any kind of display-streaming with just a minimal amount of additional work. However, Miracast will remain the main development target due to its level of awareness.

It's still early in its development cycle. Currently it seems like it can do the linking, but won't do the actual video streaming.

The OpenWFD demo at FOSDEM 2014 also did the streaming bit, but as I understand MiracleCast is a do it right project, whereas the code he showed at FOSDEM "will probably only work on this machine".

Eric G
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odinho - Velmont
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9

Miracast is based on WiFi Direct, which as far as I can tell requires a wireless card with hardware support for the standard.

Sender

I think Intel Wireless Display is the way to send a laptop screen to a Miracast receiver.

However, as far as I can tell Ubuntu currently has no support for Wireless Display cards.

Receiver

For receiving content from a Miracast transmitter (like your phone), you can buy Miracast receiver dongles that will output to any HDMI input: Rocketfish™ - Miracast Video Receiver

There is also Chromecast, but it only receives content sent from a Chrome browser, rather than from an entire display.

I don't know if either device has Ubuntu drivers. If anyone can confirm, or suggest another device with Ubuntu drivers, that would be great.

Community
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Robin Winslow
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5

The Google Cast extension for Chromium works in Ubuntu (to cast Chromium pages/browsing to your TV using a ChromeCast at 720p which looks just fine, though a bit lagged).
It doesn't cast the YUV (video overlay) space well though, even on 802.11n. (Testing in 12.04 LTS and 13.10, with latest Chromium) Having said that, casting YouTube from my Android 4.3 (Galaxy Nexus) phone works beautifully. (The ChromeCast dongle takes over the download+display, so it's not dependent on your phone/laptop once you've hit Play).

I've not found any Miracast sender apps (eg. EZ Air) for Ubuntu yet unfortunately (for eBay HK/China generic HDMI Miracast dongles).
So the 5 metre HDMI cable (also from eBay) is still our solution for ondemand TV at full-screen 1080p.

user221273
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1

On the receiver side (sink) the already mentioned MiracleCast seems to be the best choice. There is also work going on to support sending streams (source).

Gnome-Network-Displays (formerly Gnome-Screencast) is a new (2019) effort to support Miracast streaming (source) in GNU/Linux.

dav2dev
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Matthias Weiler
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1

You can try out the gnome-screencast project. More info in this blogpost. It appears recently and therefore lacks documentation and looks buggy and intended mostly for fedora users (the issue about installing to ubuntu). But at least it's a step in the right direction.

mr. Noobey
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1

I got inspired to hunt a little more, and indeed, there isn't much on miracast, however I did find this post from a few months ago that claims android doesn't even have it yet, thus I suspect it's still being worked on.

Because of this I'm going to take some liberty and discuss DNLA / UPnP as it is almost the same (minus the direct connection and exact screen mirroring)

Apparently, in KDE there is a media KIO-slave for kde called kio-upnp-ms that I saw announced here.

Moreover there seems to be a fair amount of other UPnP and DNLA options, such as XBMC as listed here and here

Also, searching for 'upnp' in synaptic will give you a many gnome options, for example Rygel is well integrated in Gnome and easy to use.

dav2dev
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virtualxtc
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