Hi Joe,
The problem with making "Miracast the standard" is that it makes our WiDi equipment instantly obsolete for completely artificial reasons. My HDTV understand WiDi. It doesn't respond at all to Miracast (it never displays a PIN).
I don't know if it was intentional for all of our stuff that used to work just fine with Widi on Windows 8 to suddenly not work (or just insufficient testing), but the way this is being handled is rather unacceptable. I just bought my laptop (Haswell) just a couple of months ago. It was advertised with wireless display. There was no indication that it wouldn't work with my existing HDTV's WiDi as soon as I upgraded to 8.1.
I installed the old version of the WiDi utility mentioned in this thread and that worked fine. If someone at Intel just said to do that, I wouldn't have spent hours trying to get Miracast to work. It is rather suspicious that the new versions have a software lock to prevent their install on 8.1, particularly when these versions probably improve performance or solve bugs. Isn't the goal to have happy customers?
In my opinion, someone at Intel or Microsoft should apologize and just give us software which works (even if it's just removing the lock on the newer versions of the WiDi utility). It should not be the responsibility of consumer electronics companies to have to update their firmware to support this new standard which didn't exist when the equipment was manufactured as recent as six months ago just because Intel and Microsoft decided to change the protocol.
Joe, I know you aren't responsible for this, and this isn't directed at you. However, if you would be willing to consider passing this along to make a case to once again support the use of regular, non Miracast, WiDi on our machines again, I would be appreciative.
-Bruce
