14 DAY TRIAL // The Wi-Fi alliance has just announced its support for the Miracast streaming technology, and it has mentioned that Intel WiDi-enabled devices are supported. As it happens, Intel has made an update of its own.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has improved its WiDi wireless display technology. The 3.5 version of the software is almost ready to reach consumers, and shipments to OEMs are already underway.
WiDi was launched a couple of years ago and relied on an Arrandale, Clarkdale, Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge CPUs to encode a stream and wirelessly send it to a receiver plugged into a TV or monitor.
The problem with WiDi was that it lacked HDCP support, had high latency and couldn't stream anything better than 720p.
The 3.5 version of the software will support the Miracast specification, meaning that Miracast receivers will work with WiDi-enabled systems just as well as special receivers.
This is just a bonus though. The truly important changes are at the level of performance and interoperability.
The overall performance of WiDi is higher, enough for Full HD media. The latency will be of 60ms on Ivy Bridge computers and 250ms on Sandy Bridge.
The WiDi receiver itself will change as well, and there will even be models with USB ports. Indeed, WiDi will stream USB signals, not just video.
Thus, by connecting keyboard, mice, game pads or other such things to the receiver, the PC will recognize and interact with them over the air. We imagine this was done for those who would like to play games on their TV.
To sum up, the advantages of Intel WiDi 3.5 are a 10x reduction in latency, Windows 8 and Touch support, USB device support, Wi-Fi Miracast compatibility and the ability to stream Full HD, HDCP2, DVD and Blu-ray quality media, with or without 5.1-channel audio.