Which device supported by ubports is capable of using desktop-mode over wireless display?

Luksus

Hi,

I've been investigating the forum, ubports website and google (and youtube) very hard, but could not find a clear answer, except of some beta implementation for the nexus 5.

Could someone please tell me, what the state of widi-implementation for each officially supported ubports-device is?

Thank you very much.

Tonoxis

It should work in any device that supports Aethercast (I don't remember the list of devices honestly). IIRC, If your device is supported, the option for Wireless Display should be available on your device. As far as I remember, Aethercast was very much in the very early state of development, "beta" was and to my knowledge still an understatement, it wasn't supported on very many devices, even among those Canonical called their "reference" devices (like the Nexus 7 '2013').

Some additional information can be gleaned from the original ubuntu-phone mailing list over at launchpad (found here), as there will be information there that may not be all copied or moved here yet as UBports was not the original developer of the project, that was Canonical and Aethercast is likely not as high on the priority list as getting Halium up and running with Ubuntu Touch so there can be a more standardized base to run the OS on. But that's just my guess as an end-user/hobbyist developer (I'm not part of the project, I just work on a tweaked version of the Nexus 7 kernel, so I'm not entirely sure what the current priorities of the project are [I missed the Community Update Livestreams recently, so I'm very out of date on things]).

Perhaps one of the dev team members may see this and correct me if I'm wrong though, I could very well be.

An aside, the exact thing you are referring to is the Miracast specification, Not WiDi, two separate and incompatible standards. Unless you literally meant WiDi, in which case, it will NOT be supported since WiDi is a hardware-dependent thing (It's Intel's proprietary wireless display standard).

For more reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiDi

Luksus

Hi Tonoxis,

thank you for that informative answer.
I used "WiDi" only as short form for WirelessDisplay without any relation to the intel implementation.
The last communtiy updates doesn't mentioned that topic...

I own a bq e4.5 from the beginning and am very happy with it. But I would be more happy if I could try that whole convergence stuff on my phone and most happy if it would work without wired connection.
So I am thinking about buying a Fairphone 2, which is for me the only candidate, when I buy a new mobile-phone.

But I never read about a Fairphone 2 with ubports, which is able to use miracast/aethercast/wirelessDisplay.
So my real question is, if the FP2 owners out there are able to connect their phones wireless to their display/projector/whatever.

Perhaps @mariogrip has an answer?

Thanks

ThePossessor

@Luksus
Indeed this information is not well distributed. I tried to get this info too. What I got as an answer is that aethercast is too slow to use with desktop. Not really a helpful information.

From my personal experience I can tell that Meizu MX4, Nexus 5 and BQ10HD tablet do not connect to any of my widi capable TV or MS HDMI stick. (any modern android does)

Rumors say that Meizu 5 Pro already did when canonical was maintaining. Other rumors say that Mariogrip is watching cat videos on his oneplus one with widi. I am sorry I can not say if these devices really do what rumors say.

Maybe this can help you already though.

halucigenia

Well, I have been trying to get wireless display working on my Meizu Pro5 and it did not like connecting to my Amazon TV box or a cheap miracast device (a Q1 wifi display dongle) but I have now had success with a Microsoft Wireless Display V2 Adapter.
Now I just need to find out how I can change the display settings on the MS adaptor without a Windows PC running the settings application. Not that I think that it really matters as it is working but it would be nice to at least change the language from German or whatever that it came set up for (I got it second hand) and also to update the firmware if necessary.

I must say that without a Bluetooth mouse the device is quite impossible to use as a desktop PC with desktop apps. Maybe there are some secret gestures or something but they don't come naturally.

I did manage to get a cabled monitor connection and desktop apps working with my previous device - a Nexus 4 but I found that was a bit flaky so did not really use it much. I am hoping that my experience with convergence on the Pro5 and the Microsoft display adaptor will be better.

marc_aurel

Has somethinkg changed in the meanwhile? I would like to test the convergence mode. A USB-B to HDMI adapter doesn't work with FP2. I will check USB-OTG as soon I get my Superbook from Sentio.

However I would like to test this feature for a short term business demo. I think UBports requires a wireless connection. Which protocols are supported? This thread mentions two technologies:

WiDi (that is not developed and supported any longer by Intel)
Aethercast (I read this for the first time)

Which external devices or displays could I use?

Ingo

I tried convergence over WiFi with my FP2 back with 15.04 and then it was extremely unstable. It worked for 2s or 5s and then the display froze.
Since 16.04 it doesn't work at all. Due to some apparmor issue as I understood: https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/781