How the hell do those things work anyway? USB 2.0 does not have nearly enough continuous bandwidth to support running a display at 60 or more frames per second, and even USB 3.0 would probably struggle as well unless the display is small. Do they use some lossy compression? Are there visible compression artifacts? EDIT: I just did the math and apparently a 1366x768 display like the one linked in the article could theorically work over USB 2.0 without compression.

EDIT 2: No wait my math sucks, that sums up to about 240 megaBYTES per second. Definitely impossible under USB 2.0.

I use a Toshiba Dynadock (USB 3.0) with my laptop, two external 1080p monitors connected. No problems whatsoever (in Windows). Displaylink uses compression and unless I'm watching full screen HD video on one of the external monitors (I don't) there are no artifacts. Aside from the extra displays, the USB docking station also gives me headphone, mic, gigabit ethernet along with multiple USB 3.0 ports.

Of course, the thing has NEVER worked right in OS X. So, does the monitor attached by USB have built in decompression at it's end? I imagine you can't just do a USB->DVI (with some sort of adapter) but it actually has to be a native USB interface on the monitor, right? The monitors are connected to the docking station via HDMI and DVI, nothing special about them. There is hardware in the docking station that handles decompressing the output from Displaylink driver. I was under the impression that the *video* is being sent to this monitors by USB, which seems to be the case.

Toshiba dynadock drivers mac os x. School, office or PC system files 61645 delock sound 7. For the OS X side of things, you'll need the beta drivers, as they haven't spent as much development time on the Mac drivers as the XP and Windows side of things, though I have to say it worked much better than their Windows 7 Beta drivers that I used when running Windows 7 RC via bootcamp. In OS X, it works great, with.

If there were available HDMI and DVI connections the USB video link would not be necessary, yes? But I do believe that's exactly what is happening here.

USB video making up for a deficit in other video connectors. How the hell do those things work anyway? USB 2.0 does not have nearly enough continuous bandwidth to support running a display at 60 or more frames per second, and even USB 3.0 would probably struggle as well unless the display is small. Do they use some lossy compression? Are there visible compression artifacts? EDIT: I just did the math and apparently a 1366x768 display like the one linked in the article could theorically work over USB 2.0 without compression.

EDIT 2: No wait my math sucks, that sums up to about 240 megaBYTES per second. Definitely impossible under USB 2.0. I use a Toshiba Dynadock (USB 3.0) with my laptop, two external 1080p monitors connected.

No problems whatsoever (in Windows). Displaylink uses compression and unless I'm watching full screen HD video on one of the external monitors (I don't) there are no artifacts. Aside from the extra displays, the USB docking station also gives me headphone, mic, gigabit ethernet along with multiple USB 3.0 ports.

Of course, the thing has NEVER worked right in OS X. So, does the monitor attached by USB have built in decompression at it's end? I imagine you can't just do a USB->DVI (with some sort of adapter) but it actually has to be a native USB interface on the monitor, right? The monitors are connected to the docking station via HDMI and DVI, nothing special about them. There is hardware in the docking station that handles decompressing the output from Displaylink driver.

I was under the impression that the *video* is being sent to this monitors by USB, which seems to be the case. If there were available HDMI and DVI connections the USB video link would not be necessary, yes? But I do believe that's exactly what is happening here. USB video making up for a deficit in other video connectors. I don't know the specifics on DisplayLink's protocol, but I believe that yes, it is essentially a compressed video stream.

If the display content is generally static, required bandwidth is low. Either the monitor will have built in decompression, or (in my case) a USB-to-HDMI/DVI adapter will. I use a docking station because it does offer more video ports and it's simpler to plug/unplug one cable instead of four (DVI, HDMI, LAN, usb keyboard).

I see the draw of cheap/convenient USB external monitors, but we should all be able to agree that USB is a pretty 'hack-ish' way of doing things. Those who live by the hack die by the hack, as I say.

My employer gives them out and I am personally not a fan. We have several in the office, but I bought my own because it works so well. I'm probably the perfect scenario for these, my laptop only supports one display being output so in the office I can have 3 screens with it.

I spend 100+ days out of the office each year too. But while I can't fit a monitor, power cable and DVI cable in my laptop bag next to my laptop. I can do that with my USB monitor. I don't see it as much of a hack. You have a chip on the display end and hardware on the user end in order to maximise an image being passed over a slow bus for how a user wants to see it.

No more of a hack than doing video over ethernet or many other things that use an available pipeline in non-intended ways. Plus for me that doesn't really change much, I can't switch to a macbook pro like I was thinking about until this is fixed, so Apple loses out for a regression in their own OS. How the hell do those things work anyway? USB 2.0 does not have nearly enough continuous bandwidth to support running a display at 60 or more frames per second, and even USB 3.0 would probably struggle as well unless the display is small.

Do they use some lossy compression? Are there visible compression artifacts? EDIT: I just did the math and apparently a 1366x768 display like the one linked in the article could theorically work over USB 2.0 without compression. EDIT 2: No wait my math sucks, that sums up to about 240 megaBYTES per second.

Definitely impossible under USB 2.0. I use a Toshiba Dynadock (USB 3.0) with my laptop, two external 1080p monitors connected. No problems whatsoever (in Windows). Displaylink uses compression and unless I'm watching full screen HD video on one of the external monitors (I don't) there are no artifacts. Aside from the extra displays, the USB docking station also gives me headphone, mic, gigabit ethernet along with multiple USB 3.0 ports. Of course, the thing has NEVER worked right in OS X. So, does the monitor attached by USB have built in decompression at it's end?

I imagine you can't just do a USB->DVI (with some sort of adapter) but it actually has to be a native USB interface on the monitor, right? The monitors are connected to the docking station via HDMI and DVI, nothing special about them. There is hardware in the docking station that handles decompressing the output from Displaylink driver.

I was under the impression that the *video* is being sent to this monitors by USB, which seems to be the case. If there were available HDMI and DVI connections the USB video link would not be necessary, yes? But I do believe that's exactly what is happening here. USB video making up for a deficit in other video connectors. I don't know the specifics on DisplayLink's protocol, but I believe that yes, it is essentially a compressed video stream.

If the display content is generally static, required bandwidth is low. Either the monitor will have built in decompression, or (in my case) a USB-to-HDMI/DVI adapter will. I use a docking station because it does offer more video ports and it's simpler to plug/unplug one cable instead of four (DVI, HDMI, LAN, usb keyboard) Interesting. Considering that Apple is touting 'Multiple Displays' as a category that Mavericks improves upon, they should strongly considering not laying this issue on the back burner as they have in the past. Or perhaps they will just continue to encourage users to empty their bank accounts on a chain of thunderbolt displays?

Well, to be fair, in day-to-day life, almost everyone I see using multi-monitor support under MacOS is using a laptop connected to an external monitor. That's not exotic and not expensive. Less common: some systems have both a thunderbolt port and an HDMI port. Again, not exotic and not expensive to get multi-monitor. AirPlay can even be used to get working multi-monitor support with Maverick. Slightly more exotic, but still not too expensive. I'd say that by comparison, USB displays are somewhat exotic.

I've seen many people use AirPlay mirroring, and have not yet seen someone use a USB display. (I'm sure many folks have had the reverse experience, but I do think it's a minuscule percentage of users.).

You know, Apple has actually now laid some groundwork for their own USB display adapters. The lightning display adapters for iOS work by sending a video stream hardware-compressed in realtime to an adapter that decodes them for display. AirPlay mirroring (and now AirPlay additional display support) in MacOS also works by sending a video stream hardware-compressed in realtime to an adapter that decodes them for display. It seems like there's perhaps a new layer that these gadgets could hook into to improve support, or at least performance. Another company that makes drivers, Plugable, identified similar problems and advised users of multiple monitors to hold off on upgrading to Mavericks. That is biased bullshit from a company that has had their bottom line impacted by a single bug. In my opinion there are two big features* in 10.9: * faster performance and lower ram consumption * better support for multiple monitors I've been using it as my primary OS since dub dub (so I can make sure my own apps work properly on it) and multiple monitor support is better than any pervious version of Mac OS that I have ever used, going back to MacOS 7.5.

It's functionally better, with the menubar on both monitors, and has less bugs (I had bugs on 10.7 and 10.8 that went away with 10.9). Anybody with multiple monitors who is doing it _properly_ via Display Port or DVI should rush out and upgrade, it's a huge improvement. * if I had a mac with a battery, I would include 'better battery life' on the list, but I don't have such a mac. Considering that Apple is touting 'Multiple Displays' as a category that Mavericks improves upon, they should strongly considering not laying this issue on the back burner as they have in the past.

Or perhaps they will just continue to encourage users to empty their bank accounts on a chain of thunderbolt displays? Well, to be fair, in day-to-day life, almost everyone I see using multi-monitor support under MacOS is using a laptop connected to an external monitor. That's not exotic and not expensive. Less common: some systems have both a thunderbolt port and an HDMI port. Again, not exotic and not expensive to get multi-monitor.

AirPlay can even be used to get working multi-monitor support with Maverick. Blur Download Pc Crack. Slightly more exotic, but still not too expensive. I'd say that by comparison, USB displays are somewhat exotic. I've seen many people use AirPlay mirroring, and have not yet seen someone use a USB display. (I'm sure many folks have had the reverse experience, but I do think it's a minuscule percentage of users.) My day-to-day life is developing software on a notebook w/ two external monitors.

I do this through a DisplayLink based USB 3.0 docking station. Luckily it's a Windows notebook that fully supports the docking station and it suits my needs perfectly. The monitors themselves use standard connections (not USB).

Now, if you were replace my notebook with a macbook (I have an Air, it doesn't get used in this configuration), then I'd immediately lose ability to connect both monitors. The only solution is replace them with thunderbolt monitors (expensive) Aside, USB monitors have piqued my interest (maybe others' too) because they are compact enough to be toted around w/ a notebook. If I were to invest any any quantity of these, they would be rendered useless for ANY mac running Mavericks-- so long as the bug exists. Of course though, my situation may not be typical. I don't understand the hate people on this thread are showing towards USB display adapters. Have any of you actually ever *used* them?

Sure, they aren't perfect, but they really aren't *that* bad on USB2 (a few compression artifacts are visible on heavily animated content), and they are actually pretty good using USB3 (not many compression artifacts at all). For those of us with slightly older Macbooks that don't have Thunderbolt connectors, these USB video adapters are the only real way to go if we need multiple external displays. Even with a Thunderbolt-capable machine, not many people can afford multiple Thunderbolt displays to chain together. I would assume it would be possible to create a Thunderbolt-to-multiple-Displayport adapter to bypass the need for these USB display adapters, but I'm not aware of anyone making such a thing right now. So until then, it really only seems like there are two options for folks needing multiple external displays on a Macbook: - Multiple Thunderbolt displays chained together (expensive, and requires Thunderbolt-equipped Macs) - USB display adapters using cheap monitors (much less expensive, works with any USB2/3 machine). The real problem with DisplayLink and OS X is that they can't use hardware acceleration like they do on Windows. (I presume that hasn't changed?) I gave up using it to run a third monitor from my MacBook Pro because it's just too laggy for even casual use.

Some of that might be the anemic integrated graphics in my mid-2009 2.53GHz MBP, but I'm not sure. The freaky part? I originally used DisplayLink to connect that monitor directly to a Windows XP virtual machine — running on the same damned MBP — and its performance was perfectly acceptable, even inside a virtual machine. But later versions of VMware don't allow that anymore. Meanwhile, the adapters work just fine with actual Windows PCs.

For office use, no one notices the difference. Honest question: If you're on a mac and running VMWare Fusion or Parallels, and have a VM running Windows, and you plug in one of these USB display adapters, and tell your virtualization product to connect the USB device to the guest instead of the host, what happens?

Assuming Windows currently supports these things better than MacOS does, do you get any benefit from doing that? Edit: oops, I would post the question at exactly the time someone was discussing this. But are you sure current versions of VMware still don't allow it?

Mine lets me connect arbitrary USB devices to either guest or host, not sure why DisplayLink would change things. I see the draw of cheap/convenient USB external monitors, but we should all be able to agree that USB is a pretty 'hack-ish' way of doing things. Those who live by the hack die by the hack, as I say. My employer gives them out and I am personally not a fan. Aside from the retina line, the only viable option for 2 or more external displays on a Mac laptop is USB adapters or daisy chained thunderbolt monitors at $1k a pop. Dell have a 27' monitor with display port out allowing you to daisy chain the monitors together (these are under $1000) I'm not sure if the mac line has the required version of display port to support this though.

Honest question: If you're on a mac and running VMWare Fusion or Parallels, and have a VM running Windows, and you plug in one of these USB display adapters, and tell your virtualization product to connect the USB device to the guest instead of the host, what happens? Assuming Windows currently supports these things better than MacOS does, do you get any benefit from doing that? Edit: oops, I would post the question at exactly the time someone was discussing this. But are you sure current versions of VMware still don't allow it?

Mine lets me connect arbitrary USB devices to either guest or host, not sure why DisplayLink would change things. I had to go back to my posts at the VMware forums to remember all the details. I first used this with Fusion 1.0 because it didn't support multiple monitors at all.

(The tricky part was telling VMware about the extra monitor, but adding a line to the vmx config file fixed that.) Fusion 2.0 added native multi-monitor support, so I hoped to add a third display using the DisplayLink adapter. The screen showed up but the mouse couldn't access it unless I chained the mouse to the VM. Now I'm wondering if I ever tried this with 4.0 after they changed the fullscreen behavior to match Lion. Jon Brodkin and others, I am reluctant to step into this vigorous debate, but if you have an iPhone or iPad, you can use DisplayPad to extend your Mac's screen onto the iPhone / iPad.

I'm using it right now, and it is odd but pleasing to see a window half on my laptop and half on my iPhone. Useful for parking small windows out of the way. Works via wifi. Sends touch input back to the laptop. I played a little Flash game (hah!) in full screen on my iPhone upstairs while leaving my laptop downstairs and while the picture was a little bit grainy, for static content it is fine.

For iPhone: For iPad: AirDisplay seems to do the same for Windows ->iOS but it costs a little bit more. I have a mid 2010 mac mini server running Mountain Lion. I have 3 27' monitors connected running at 1920x1080.

I use the onboard HDMI and mini display port interfaces for two of them. I have a USB to DVI display link device connected to the third monitor. According to System Settings all three monitors run at a 60Hz refresh rate. I am constantly amazed at how fast the third monitor's screen refreshes. Dragging windows show a little bit of lag, but over all It's almost as fast as the other two.

I am a software developer so I normally have apps that do not require fast fast screen updates. For the most part I cannot tell that third monitor uses a USB interface. Thanks for this article.

I will wait to upgrade to Mavericks until I am sure that there will be no problems with my third monitor. I don't think that there is anything particular compelling about Mavericks that will make my life significantly better so now great loss. USB monitors sound like a cheap-ass way of doing things. Did people forget they can buy a DVI mini-DisplayPort adapter and use any monitor with DVI plugged into a mini-DisplayPort or Thunderbolt port?

No one has forgotten that. USB display adapters are for people who need *more* than one external monitor but have a computer which has doesn't have the necessary connectors for it. I know many developers, for example, which very much like to have 2, 3, or 4 external monitors.

At this time, USB display adapters are the most cost efficient way to handle it. And like I mentioned earlier, folks should actually *try* a USB display adapter before saying what a bad idea they are.

2d Psp Games Download. They work quite well (current Mavericks bug aside). Well, to be fair, in day-to-day life, almost everyone I see using multi-monitor support under MacOS is using a laptop connected to an external monitor. That's not exotic and not expensive. Less common: some systems have both a thunderbolt port and an HDMI port. Again, not exotic and not expensive to get multi-monitor. AirPlay can even be used to get working multi-monitor support with Maverick. Slightly more exotic, but still not too expensive.

I'd say that by comparison, USB displays are somewhat exotic. I've seen many people use AirPlay mirroring, and have not yet seen someone use a USB display. (I'm sure many folks have had the reverse experience, but I do think it's a minuscule percentage of users.) So you see no problem with using an Apple TV to receive streamed compressed video to an external display over Wi-fi-n (max throughput 600Mbps), but having a DisplayLink adaptor receive video over USB 3.0 (max throughput 5Gbps) makes no sense to you? Even a USB 2.0 DisplayLink adaptor is still in the same bandwidth region as AirPlay over Wi-Fi. The facts are: DisplayLink worked OK before Mavericks, and continues to work fine on Windows. Using USB to send video isn't an optimal solution, but if your notebook doesn't have an HDMI/VGA/DVI port, and/or you don't want to get a Thunderbolt display, and/or you already have an HDMI and 2 Thunderbolt displays attached to you rMBP and want to add another, it is (was) a viable option. And its certainly no worse than using VNC/RDP tunneled through a VPN over Ethernet/Wireless and Fiber/ADSL/3G/LTE, which admins do every day but is 'exotic' to most consumers.

OT but speaking of VPN, my experience and the numerous threads at Apple support indicate that Server 3.0 has broken the VPN component. I've been running a second 21' Samsung display (pivoted vertically), via a cheap Diamond USB 2.0 to DVI display adapter (DisplayLink chips inside it) on my Macbook Pro 17' at the office for a while now. I keep the machine docked in a Henge Dock, so the built in LCD isn't even being used at this point. I have a 27' Viewsonic monitor as the primary display, running off the Displayport jack on the notebook. There's no other way to run 2 external displays simultaneously on the 2010 era Macbook Pro 17'. With OS X 10.8.5 and the DisplayLink 2.0 release driver, it worked amazingly well.

Adding a display in OS X via USB video adapter like this has always imposed several limitations. One of the main ones? 'Quartz Extreme' is never supported with them. Attempting to open an app that relies on Quartz Extreme will simply give you an error dialog box that it's unsupported unless you make sure the app only opens on the display that's not running from the USB adapter. Still, that's not much of a deal-breaker for my purposes. The USB video solution is excellent for such things as leaving the IM chat toolbar up on it, so it doesn't waste screen space on the primary display. Same goes for the 'control panel' bar for our office's VoIP phone system.

I also tend to drag documents over to the second screen temporarily, when I need to do a lot of copy/pasting of data from them to something I'm working on, on the other display (sometimes an email, or some documentation I'm writing up). The Diamond adapter only cost me about $25 on sale at the local Micro Center too, so you can't argue with the price.

I see the draw of cheap/convenient USB external monitors, but we should all be able to agree that USB is a pretty 'hack-ish' way of doing things. Those who live by the hack die by the hack, as I say.

My employer gives them out and I am personally not a fan. I would love to know what hardware your employer is using, and what issues you have. I'm deploying some DisplayLink 2.0 products from Targus as docking stations in focus rooms at work. This is to mitigate our 2/3 split of Dell and HP hardware (1 year left of HP lifecycle!). In my testing the hardware has worked fine for temporary use, and pretty damn well on Macs and Surface Pros for a docking station that's cheap and effective.

As always, driver management is the problem with this sort of thing. Yeah it's totally Apple's fault that a 3rd party driver is broken.

It's not like they had access to pre-releases of the new OS prior to release to test them. No wait THEY DID. If the details are correct, then the third party driver broke because of buggy behavior that regressed in the frameworks and kernel that the driver depends upon. This is utterly different than the sort of driver problems that come because a developer chooses to ignore the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit kernels, for example. (I hate those guys.) If that's the truth, then it absolutely is Apple's fault, at least on some level. (If the driver developers did not report the bugs to Apple in sufficient detail to work on the bug, then I do not have much sympathy for them.

But there may still be absolutely nothing they can do by themselves to fix it for their customers. Anyone have a code fragment that illustrates the exact purported bug?). So you see no problem with using an Apple TV to receive streamed compressed video to an external display over Wi-fi-n (max throughput 600Mbps), but having a DisplayLink adaptor receive video over USB 3.0 (max throughput 5Gbps) makes no sense to you? Have you confused 'by comparison somewhat exotic' with 'makes no sense to me'?

Both uses make sense to me! It's just been my experience that, for Macintosh users, AirPlay streaming is considerably more common than USB displays. (I am not sure I have ever seen a USB-driven display in person.) (And you even quoted me as saying 'I'm sure many folks have had the reverse experience', so I'm really not sure where 'makes no sense' could have come from.). I would assume it would be possible to create a Thunderbolt-to-multiple-Displayport adapter to bypass the need for these USB display adapters, but I'm not aware of anyone making such a thing right now.

I think it might not be possible. Monitors are an exception to thunderbolt's daisy chaining feature.

It is the only thing you can't daisy chain with thunderbolt. I think if you did it, it would have the same bugs and mediocre performance as USB. Thunderbolt monitors daisy chain just fine. You just can't use the daisy-chain port on the Thunderbolt monitor to plug in a DVI monitor, as the TB->DVI functionality is already busy driving the internal monitor. I see the draw of cheap/convenient USB external monitors, but we should all be able to agree that USB is a pretty 'hack-ish' way of doing things.

Those who live by the hack die by the hack, as I say. My employer gives them out and I am personally not a fan.

I would love to know what hardware your employer is using, and what issues you have. I'm deploying some DisplayLink 2.0 products from Targus as docking stations in focus rooms at work. This is to mitigate our 2/3 split of Dell and HP hardware (1 year left of HP lifecycle!). In my testing the hardware has worked fine for temporary use, and pretty damn well on Macs and Surface Pros for a docking station that's cheap and effective. As always, driver management is the problem with this sort of thing. I'm in big 4 public accounting, the firm seems us out to client sites in small teams and we work from conference rooms or broom closets (depending on much the client hates us). We have 14 inch laptops and recently were given HP display link USB monitors.

We have local admin on the laptops and the drivers automatically instant on windows 7. Overall they work, they are hard to fit in our work areas, and the display is laggy or off color from time to time.

Just installed Mavericks on my wife's computer (2012 non-retina MBP). She has an external Dell display connected over mDP to DVI. When it's connected it gets this crazy artifact thingy. Anyone seen this? The craziest thing is it does it over airplay with our Apple TV.

Suggestion: get 'gfxCardStatus' and, at the very least, use it to figure out which video chipsets are being used under which circumstances. I've got a recent non-retina MBP (the last 15' model), and I do not get artifacts like that when I use AirPlay, no matter whether it's set to 'mirroring' or 'extend the desktop'. (I tested both.) However, I almost always use 'gfxCardStatus' to disable the NVidia chipset, only permitting the integrated Intel chipset to work. (Some graphics performance goes down a little, but heat generation goes down dramatically, and battery life improves. I'll make that trade-off.) Actual external monitors physically connected to the device won't work this way, but it does not interfere with remote desktop and it does not interfere with AirPlay.

Tonight, I'll restart without 'gfxCardStatus' loaded and re-run some of my experiments.