The latest version of the GNOME Network Displays app lets you stream your desktop to a wireless display using the Chromecast and Miracast over Infrastructure (MICE) protocols.
Both features had been in development for a while and were long-standing requests from many in the community. To see both land in a recent release of GNOME Network Displays 0.9 is great news, and makes working with wireless displays a lot easier.
MICE support has been tested to stream a GNOME desktop to an LG WebOS smart TV through ethernet and Wi-Fi over LAN rather than WiFi Direct. MICE works better with older wireless hardware and, as it uses existing connections, speeds up the time to stream and offers a more stable stream.
Miracast over Infrastructure is considered a replacement for regular Miracast but a way to bring the tech to people working with locked-down/enterprise networks.
Chromecast support? Well that shouldn’t need much introduction! The HDMI dongles from Google are fairly ubiquitous at this point, and the tech that powers them is now being integrated directly into TVs, monitors, and set top boxes from other OEMs.
When launching the app all available Chromecast devices are listed for connection, devices message after socket connection Open the media player app Send a second virtual connect request to the media app Send LIVE media play request Organize and gracefully handle states Start streaming muxed video and audio streams
Additionally, the app has been ported to GTK4, uses libportal to acquire screencast portals, dedupe sinks based on IP and P2P MAC instead of name, updates translations, and more.
I do recall plans to make it possible to ‘cast’ your screen from the Quick Settings menu in GNOME Shell. That work wasn’t directly tied to the GNOME Network Displays app but part of an adjacent effort to bring the capacities to GNOME Settings directly, which could still materialise in the near tufter.
If you want to try this out you need to install GNOME Network Displays v0.92 or later. You can get the latest version of the app from Flathub, or if you’re already running the latest Ubuntu 24.04 daily builds, you can get it from the repos.
The Ubuntu package in Noble has a “cherry-pick patch to allow casting a single window” which could be especially useful, depending on your setup.
