Re: Mediacast to TV - MiracleCast - Open-Source Miracast - Wifi-Display on linux

[David Herrmann <dh herrmann gmail com>]

Hi

On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 10:50 AM, poma <pomidorabelisima gmail com> wrote:
> MiracleCast - Howto
> "Current State"

[snip]

> Can folks from the NetworkManager team & systemd-networkd team answer regarding the current status in this 
> matter?

As people continuously ask me about this, I'll just try to answer it
on the public ML:

To make Miracast work, we need access to a Wifi P2P API. The kernel
implements Wifi P2P and wpa_supplicant provides access to it via it's
ctrl-interface (and I think recently even gained a dbus API). In
MiracleCast I wrote a miracle-wifid daemon that wraps wpa_supplicant
and provides P2P to MircaleCast. However, this does not work well in
parallel to NetworkManager/wicd/connman/... running. You really cannot
run wpa_supplicant multiple times on the same interface. Hence,
MiracleCast development is currently stalled until the different
network-managers provide a P2P API.

Intel recently added such an API to ConnMan and provides a WFD
implementation on its own [1]. I highly recommend looking into it.
It's now up to NetworkManager to catch up. systemd-networkd doesn't do
L2 setup, so it's not really related. wicd is kinda dead [2], so I
doubt they'll come up with something.

Furthermore, P2P support is pretty "limited" right now. Officially,
almost all recent devices support it, but it's particularly annoying
to set it up, due to major bugs across all the stacks (in no way
limited to linux drivers). I mean, 3 of 4 of my connection attempts
between Android and Windows devices fails.. not even talking about my
wpa_supplicant hacks.

As I'm not really interested in hacking on network-managers, I've
decided to stop working on MiracleCast. If, some day, there's a
working P2P stack on linux, I might resurrect it. But it sounds more
likely that I'll refer to the Intel solution (WYSIWIDI) instead.
There're also gstreamer plugins for WFD now, so maybe give them a try?

Thanks
David

[1] https://github.com/01org/wysiwidi
[2] https://answers.launchpad.net/wicd/+question/227789