Intel's and Huron River bring with them a wealth of new features, one of which includes the second coming of Wireless Display, or WiDI, for short. And we got an early hands-on.

Last year, I called , whose popularity would be bolstered by the public's cry for fewer cables. For those who need a refresher, WiDi is an Intel-brewed technology that connects your to an , wirelessly. There's no dongle hanging off of a USB port; the technology lives in your laptop, provided you had one of the latest Intel WiFi chips. With WiDi, anything on your laptop is mirrored to your HDTV, creating a wireless bridge for videos, photo slideshows, presentations, and Web pages to cross over. WiDi, like any first-generation technology, had its share of intricacies, though. For one, you needed to buy a separate Netgear Push2TV receiver that tethers to the HDTV. Mouse lag, about 2 milliseconds' worth, made Web surfing on the HDTV a frustrating endeavor. And a video stream, furthermore, is capped at 720p and prevented from playback if the content is protected.

WiDi 2 corrects some, but not all, of these problems. The first and most compelling improvement is support for a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution on the HDTV, and hence, 1080p video playback. But in order to take advantage of this, you will need to buy a new Netgear receiver (new model name is still to be announced) and a laptop based on Sandy Bridge or the next-generation Core processors. The first generation Push2TV receiver, unfortunately, won't be able to take advantage of WiDi 2's improvements. The WiDi utility, which comes preinstalled, connects the laptop to the HDTV within seconds. Once the connection is made, I proceeded to test my collection of high-definition video files. I tried a number of them, including 1080p WMV and MPEG4 files encoded at high bit ratesall of which played back beautifully on the HDTV. The audio was in sync, and the videos continued to play stutter-free even from the second floor of my house. Of course, a good wireless connection is absolutely essential.

In addition to 1080p playback, Intel minimized mouse lag to an extent. Surfing the Web was tolerable as I navigated through YouTube, Engadget, and PCMag.com, but you can tell that the laptop and HDTV weren't completely in sync. Although it's improved since the first iteration, lag is most evident when typing on the keyboard and watching the letters appear a millisecond later. Despite the improvements, WiDi 2 is not ready for mass adoption. Playing back protected content, whether it's a Blu-ray or DVD movie, is still a limitation of WiDi. It can't support HDCP, the same encryption specification that allows HDMI cables to stream protected content from your laptop to an HDTV. But Intel hopes to fix this in the near future with a service called Insider.

Think of Insider as a capability, one which Intel hopes movie studios and distributors will adopt sooner than later. In every Sandy Bridge system going forward, there is a resident security controller that allows businesses to ensure virus protection is running, for instance. This same controller can be used by movie studios and distributors (via an SDK) to encrypt a video stream, pass it to the display engine, and decrypt it outside of the operating system, at the chipset level. Having the technology in place is one thing, but Intel still has to convince movie studio and distributors to sign on. Luckily, several companies are already onboard: Warner Brothers, Image Entertainment, and CinemaNow will make full HD films available for rental on the PC, and with Intel Insider, you'll be able to stream this content to an HDTV with WiDi 2. That is, if enough content providers sign on.