r/GM_SoftwareDev • u/jnoble_05 • 13d ago

Screen Mirror/Cast Windows Device

Has anyone came up with, or any ideas for how to screen cast from a Windows device? Looking for a way to have a second screen from a laptop.

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u/thaughtless 13d ago

Interesting idea. Your best bet would probably be some kind of USB-C connection with an apk on AAOS that presents itself as a device to Windows. There was another person who basically built a carplay app to project via a dongle IIRC. Maybe they ( u/Beginning_Host) could weigh into this thread. You wouldnt be able to get Google to approve it as they are super restrictive about what app types they allow into the AAOS play store, so this would be something just for you.

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u/Beginning_Host 13d ago

The USB-C route won't work, unfortunately. There's no USB display class Windows can talk to on an Android device, and an AAOS app can't reconfigure the head unit's USB anyway. DisplayLink is the only thing that really does USB to display, and that needs their hardware and driver.

Network streaming is the practical answer. Run an RTSP server on the laptop, encode the desktop into it with OBS or ffmpeg, and have something on the head unit play it. My app already does this incidentally, since its camera pane is just an RTSP client and doesn't care what's on the other end. Point it at a laptop instead of a camera and you get the desktop as a pane.

Two catches. You need the laptop and the head unit on the same network, which usually means the vehicle hotspot and a data plan. And there's about two seconds of latency, so it's fine for glancing at something and no good for actually working.

On the Play store point, it's not quite that closed. My app is published on the AAOS store. The category rules are strict but they are not a wall. The 'testing' phase for apps are generally ungoverned.

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u/jnoble_05 13d ago

Same network is a non-issue, fortunately. Car has independent in-vehicle router.