Nvidia Corp. said Thursday that it would support open-standard wireless display technology called Miracast on devices powered by its Tegra-series system-on-chip products. As a result, future mobile devices will be able to stream content, such as video or games, onto big screens equipped with Miracast-certified receivers.

Miracast specification is powered by Wi-Fi Direct – a specification defined for peer-to-peer, direct wireless connectivity between devices. Miracast Certified devices will be able to connect with each other directly, without the mediation of a wireless access point, by leveraging the functionality introduced by Wi-Fi Direct. When two devices connect with each other directly, one assumes the role of the source (transmitting device) and the other becomes a sink (the devices receiving and rendering the content to the user). As a result, it is possible to watch videos from a smartphone on a big screen television or share a laptop screen with the conference room projector to collaborate in real-time. Televisions, set-top boxes, notebooks, handsets and tablets with Wi-Fi modules are among the device types which will be certified.

"We are bringing Tegra’s outstanding multimedia capabilities to wireless displays. We are working hard to enable features like sharing photos and streaming HD movies onto HDTVs.  But, we will not stop there. We are actively working with our OEM partners and Miracast receiver vendors to bring this technology to market. Once the Wi-Fi Alliance ratifies the Miracast spec, we will provide more updates," said Mike Han, a senior product manager for Tegra at Nvidia.

The Tegra-optimized Miracast solution is comprised of two major components – the multimedia (video/audio) processing block and the industry compliant wireless display networking stack. The multimedia processing block takes advantage of Tegra’s multi-core graphics engine and dedicated hardware video/audio codecs to accelerate the decoding of video content, render graphics surfaces and perform the final compositing operations before encoding into a H.264 bit stream to be wirelessly transmitted.

In addition, based on the type of content that is to be transmitted, Tegra’s multimedia architecture makes intelligent decisions that result in efficient use of system resources. For example, by determining whether the content is an HD video or a 3D game early in the process, the Tegra AP can reduce the number of processing operations that keep memory accesses and format conversions to a minimum thereby reducing latency and improving quality.

This complete Miracast solution (source side) enables mobile phone/tablet OEMs to implement a Miracast certifiable product by combining the Tegra application processor (AP) and compatible Tegra Android BSP package as they do today.

The final specification of Miracast is due in August. The first products may become available within a quarter after publication of the specification. However, the adoption of Miracast will take time as few devices will initially be Miracast-certified.

Tags: Nvidia, Tegra, Wi-Fi, Miracast