Displaylink A technology I'd never heard of!

[chazzy2501]

I plugged my docking monitor in to a laptop using a USB A port to see if I could use the camera, networking and usb hub. I was going to use an HDMI cable for the picture later.... Then the desktop extended?!!? The the 2nd external monitor extended also... (that runs via dp to the docking monitor)

 

I queried the docking monitors input and it was using "usb displaylink". Well it turns out the drivers are already in Windows... I was quite excited so grabbed other laptops but not all worked.. I think this means some hardware is required but in the laptop?!

 

Anyhow this technology (that is built into Windows) could have been useful over the years.

 

I was aware you could get cruddy USB A video adapters that would use some unknown unsigned driver from a mini cd but not this. Also my Epson projectors can do this but again needed Epson software to work so it couldn't be used by anyone anytime.

[mavhc]

Display Link is a combination of software drivers on the computer to compress the video and hardware in the dock to uncompress it. Should work on any computer, used to install the drivers for XP, but Windows 7/10 will just download them it seems.

 

Originally designed for USB 2, before USB 3 added enough bandwidth to not require the same compression complexity. Obviously uses some CPU time to compress the image, and more if showing a video, but not noticable on current hardware as it was design for 2006 era CPUs