Question P2P wireless display mirroring options

[phillipthegreat]

I'm looking into the idea of creating (mostly for fun) a wireless touch-screen display that could link to a companion pc. The details of that aren't important yet, it's kind of just a thought experiment.

Anywho, the question is: what are good, low latency options for a wireless mirroring protocol? I think it'd need to be an independent, p2p type connection, no intermediate router. I suppose an idea would be to create a localized, private network and link the two that way. That could even make it possible to use the disconnected display with other devices, provided they support whatever the protocol is. I'd want a latency under 100ms, any more and it'd be too noticeable. I figure miracast might be okay, but I can't seem to find solid figures for its latency performance, especially since it doesn't specify a maximum latency. I also saw the usb2air product which apparently uses rf signal instead of wifi, so that's interesting! Again, can't find solid figures for it, and their video claiming '0 latency' shows latency in the connection.

I realize that this is a very niche and weird idea, but it's fun to imagine being able to just carry a slab of glass with a battery around and leave the pc somewhere in my room. I mean the idea could go even further, maybe making it so that the connection can be switched to a sort of vnc connection over internet and leave the pc at home, just carrying around the display (obviously it'd need a sort of computer in it to coordinate a connection like that, but it could be minimized). Again, it's all in theory!

I haven't looked into making the touch input wireless, but I figure it's not that much data so doing that can't be too difficult. If you have any suggestions, though, hit me with them!

 

[bill001g]

So basically you want to reinvent chromecast.

There are a couple people that have similar solution using raspberry pi device to drive the screen.

Most the software to capture video screens and convert them to formats that can be streamed are pretty common. A lot of things have been done for say video game streamers but this has been done much longer for video conferencing.

It is just a matter of gluing the pieces together. Things like VNC can receive data in many formats.

Your largest issue is going to be the hardware you drive the display with. This is not a do it yourself thing unless you can design and manufacture surface mount electronics.

 

[phillipthegreat]

So basically you want to reinvent chromecast.

There are a couple people that have similar solution using raspberry pi device to drive the screen.

Most the software to capture video screens and convert them to formats that can be streamed are pretty common. A lot of things have been done for say video game streamers but this has been done much longer for video conferencing.

It is just a matter of gluing the pieces together. Things like VNC can receive data in many formats.

Your largest issue is going to be the hardware you drive the display with. This is not a do it yourself thing unless you can design and manufacture surface mount electronics.

So what you're saying is "yes, there are good options"?

You've got good points: I did skip over chromecast, but it does have an iffy latency. As for the software you mention, I'm not worried about it. I'm really looking for an hdmi-connected dongle that will transmit the video, more or less without the pc needing to do anything.

And a raspberry pi would be interesting (if it could keep the latency under like 100ms, max) especially because that could make the system usable on its own, maybe for light web browsing and such, and a pi would probably be the easiest way to make the display completely mobile, being able to connect over the internet. That would absolutely have high latency, but I feel like it could have some use cases. I'll have to check that out, but I doubt it'd de-encode the wireless signal fast enough.

As for driving the display, I'm planning on using a laptop lcd or oled screen, so I'll just use the board that goes with that. I will look into other options, as well, but I don't think it'll be much trouble to drive the display.

Tbh, I think what I'm trying to achieve is a sort of personal cloud computing system. I might check out how cloud computing is done and see if I can adapt any of that tech into what I'm doing.

Thanks for the response, I'm happy to get any input on this as it's entirely hypothetical at the moment. The real reason I'm looking into it is because I'm bored of the devices laptop manufacturers are pumping out, and none of them really suit my needs perfectly.

EDIT: I did just realize that I don't want whatever method I use to eat up much of the pc's processor power, so pretty much anything that requires it to compress the video output is out of the question : (