Follow-up to my "Hell of Apple Video Adapters" blog post | Hacker News Reader

Follow-up to my "Hell of Apple Video Adapters" blog post

jgc.org

19 pointsjgrahamc19 comments

I use a display link adapter on my macbook pro to drive a third screen. Works just great (there was a bad patch with driver installs in one of the later leopard versions but no problems with Snow Leopard).

You can even play video on it

Good thing you're pointing that out, because I think that's a huge selling point.

I thought having two external monitors for a MBP was either not possible or pretty expensive. This dongle seems to say it's neither.

yes - really cheap. I paid about £65 I think

It doesn't seem to be widely known about - I only found out about it from comments on a forum - so I'm returning the favour :-) . Its made a big difference to my setup.

How do you drive a second screen? Or, are you counting the laptop's screen?

I do the same thing.

Screen 1: Laptop Display Screen 2: 23" Apple Cinema Display via on-board DVI Screen 3: 22" LCD or 60" Plasma (depending) via USB/DisplayLink

I guess the perfect situation would be when you plug it in it also shows up as a read-only mass storage with a copy of the driver.

Or just a link to a place where you can download the drivers, since OS software is changing all the time and there are quite a few distributions.

The Franklin CDU680 does that. It's dandy until the drivers are out of date.

I seems to have linux drivers too:

http://libdlo.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Very clever of them to mail you a sample, they'll probably make a bundle on orders from HNers ;)

Apparently you can also use this as a video output for routers with USB ports running OpenWRT: http://sven.killig.de/openwrt/slugterm_dl.html

Pretty awesome.

I ran a smallish linux distro on the 'Slug', with a USB audio port as a media player. It was a bit of a cabling mess though, but it did work (usb hub attached to the slug to give it more ports).

This is an example of brilliant marketing on the part of DisplayLink. ~$80 cost to the company and great press to show for it.

Except that they didn't know I would like it, and I would have written the follow up no matter what my experience.

Yes-in my mind that's what makes the marketing move great. Real, honest feedback from a user that had the exact problem this company's product is built to fix. The company believed in their product enough to send it to you and have you evaluate it in the public eye.

Yes, but a positive review about something useful is probably going to get a lot more attention than a negative one. (Marketing departments, take note, and send bloggers more free stuff!)

I've used one of the HP branded models and my results were not so good. The maximum resolution is 1680x1050 which is too low for some 23" and most 24" displays. The high CPU usage it demanded was too much for a 1.8Ghz MacBook Air Rev C to handle without significant lagging and beach balling. The performance was acceptable on a MBP CD2 2Ghz for the most part but spikes in CPU usage (Vmware for example) would cause some wonky things to occur on the USB display. It also introduced some sleep/wake problems which may have since been resolved with a driver update. I think USB2 is too much of a bottleneck for this type of device to offer a seamless solution. Unless you need a third display on an iMac, Mini or MacBook you're better off buying $60 worth of spare adapters IMO.

Too bad you are bound to a maximum resolution of (correct me if I am wrong) 1600x1200.

See http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.Usb%20dvi for some of these usb options

Display Link seems to be a great solution for driving multiple monitors from laptops.

I'm slightly surprised that there's no device class for video output.

I'm slightly surprised that there's no device class for video output.

Same. I remember being promised USB monitors when the first iMac came out.

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