

Follow-up to my "Hell of Apple Video Adapters" blog post - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/10/displaylink-usb-video-adapter-just.html

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junklight
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

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Timothee
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.

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junklight
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.

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icefox
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.

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jacquesm
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.

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jacquesm
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 ;)

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wooby
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.

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jacquesm
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).

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

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

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misterbwong
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.

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jsz0
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.

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jrnkntl
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

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AndrewDucker
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.

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jrockway
_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.

