MiracleCast: Miracast / WiFi Displays Come To Linux

For months now David Herrmann has been working on a new project known as OpenWFD for open-source WiFi displays on Linux. OpenWFD is an open-source implementation of the WiFi Display Standard / Miracast. That work is now showing success and as part of that Herrmann has just announced Miraclecast as a component to providing open-source Miracast/WFD support on the Linux desktop.

The project is about connecting external monitors to systems via WiFi. MiracleCast provides a system daemon (miracled) for managing local links, peer-discovery, protocol encoding/parsing and other tasks for this open-source WFD/Miracast implementation. Miracast is the primary target of MiracleCast, but Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay, among other wireless display technologies/protocols could be rather trivially added.

Miraclecast also has a miraclectl command-line utility for controlling the daemon. The two MiracleCast components communicate over DBus and local system processes can register as sources or sinks with the MiracleCast daemon. Miracled right now implements a fully-working WiFi-P2P user-space solution while the actual video streaming support right now is considered "highly experimental and still hacked on."

David Herrmann added, "MiracleCast is focused on proper desktop integration instead of fast prototyping, so please bear with me if API design takes some time. I’d really appreciate help on making Wifi-P2P work with as many devices as possible before we start spending all our efforts on the upper streaming layers."

Those wanting to read more about David's very promising but still experimental work can check out his blog post today and the new FreeDesktop.org MiracleCast project Wiki, including the initial how-to guide.