TI’s OMAP processors and WiLink connectivity solutions together expected to provide rich Miracast experiences with display over Wi-Fi

The Wi-Fi Alliance’s Miracast certification program defines a standards-based solution for streaming video and audio content over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi Direct wireless network. This uniquely ensures interoperability between Miracast devices including mobile phones and tablets, HDTVs, projectors and audio receivers. TI’s offering leverages the low-power multimedia processing and M-Shield content security capabilities of the leading OMAP platform jointly with the robust WiLink connectivity product line. Together, these devices provide an optimized solution that is designed for Miracast certification, which will be available later this year.

“Social ‘sharing’ of a visual experience has become part of our daily lives, and TI is pleased to offer a solution that brings the content consumers enjoy on their mobile devices to the large screen – enabling an easy shared experience with friends and family. From the latest trending YouTube video, accessing music and photos stored on the cloud, premium HD movies, interactive Web browsing or even gaming, we believe Miracast will play an important role in enabling true seamless content sharing between mobile screens and large displays,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager, OMAP platform, TI.

Expanding on the wired HDMI external display and Wi-Fi Direct capabilities in Android, TI delivers a rich experience for the Android platform that will enable mobile device manufacturers to rapidly integrate wireless casting into products. Whether mirroring the Android device’s display or streaming full HD content, the combined architecture of the OMAP applications processor and the WiLink connectivity solution offer a low-power optimized system without sacrificing media quality. TI delivers the hardware and software resources to Android device manufacturers to fully leverage Miracast capabilities into differentiated user experiences including:

• Multitasking while streaming: With video processing offloaded to a dedicated OMAP hardware accelerator, consumers can use a mobile device to simultaneously stream music or full HD movies to a 1080p capable TV, while continuing to multitask with Web browsing or other mobile apps, checking the latest scores, managing email, texting and more. The WiLink solution delivers a Wi-Fi-enabled display connection to the TV concurrently with an Internet connection through a Wi-Fi access point, which will be one of TI’s demonstrations at Computex.
• End-to-end streaming: A user can start a YouTube application on a mobile device and mirror the application user interface to the TV. Then the user can choose a video from the YouTube video gallery and send the content in full screen mode to a big screen TV, while continuing to browse the YouTube app for other videos. This same concept applies to other free and paid online premium video services as well as online TV services, and is made possible by the WiLink connectivity solution’s ability to concurrently connect to the cloud and to the Miracast-certified display. This Miracast use case will also be demonstrated by TI at Computex.
• Protected premium content: TI’s planned Android solution for Miracast builds on the capabilities of the M-Shield secure execution environment and can process video in conjunction with any DRM scheme. This ensures that premium protected content is securely played back on the mobile device and HDCP encrypted during wireless streaming to a remote Miracast-certified display.
• Wider content choice for the playback experience: The TI solution designed for Miracast can support a wide range of video content formats from the cloud and transcode it as required thanks to its multi-standard hardware encode/decode accelerator to match the decoding capability of the Miracast-certified display.
• UI mirroring for big screen gaming: In this mode, a user can send the exact content of a small mobile device display to a much larger screen. This brings the interactive experience with a mobile device to a new level. Users can play the latest video games as well as share photo galleries, applications and other mobile content with family and friends in comfort on a big screen rather than gathering around a mobile device. The TI solution designed for Miracast, based on the OMAP processor and WiLink connectivity family, can deliver a smooth and satisfying user experience for this popular use case.

TI is actively participating in the creation of the Wi-Fi Alliance Wi-Fi Display Specification and is taking a leading role in making it the de-facto casting technology of mobile screen content to larger displays. TI expects its solution to be Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Miracast when certification is available later this year, while working with customers to rapidly introduce Miracast-certified products to the market.

This solution is available now to high-volume OEMs and ODMs. TI plans to have a solution for Miracast using the OMAP 5 processor and WiLink 8.0 solution later this year. The latest TI-based Miracast demonstrations featuring the OMAP4470 processor and WiLink 7.0 connectivity solution are on display this week, June 5 – 8, at Computex Taipei, in booth TICC 101D.