The Meta Portal and associated devices are effectively defunct, having been abandoned by the company in 2022. If you’ve still got one at home, you might be wondering what to do with it. That’s where Wormhole Display from [pgodlews] comes in handy.
The thing about the Meta Portal, and much of the rest of the related lineup, is that they were effectively just heavily branded Android tablets. The screens and speakers were good, and the basic functionality was all there — albeit locked down somewhat to prevent users from easily repurposing them at will. However, it’s possible to enable Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and turn the device to doing your own bidding.
To that end, [pgodlews] built Wormhole Display as an APK that can be dropped on to the Meta Portal to make it an extendable display for Apple devices. It shows up via AirPlay, letting you use it as a wireless display for your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You can do screen mirroring or use it as an extended display, as desired, including use of the Portal’s speakers if needed. Under the hood, it’s an Android port of UxPlay, a Unix AirPlay server which uses Android’s MediaCodec and AudioTrack in place of GStreamer to take advantage of the Meta Portal’s onboard H.264 decoder.
Extended displays can be incredibly useful, so if you’ve got an old Meta Portal laying around, consider putting it back to work. We’ve seen it done with e-readers, too. If you’ve got your own hacks to repurpose old, forgotten hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!
