Mac Driver For USB DVI External Video Card Out, and Tested In-House
At long last, Display Link has officially come out with their Mac
driver for the Usb
External Video Card.
One of the very few drawbacks of owning certain Macs is that it is
nearly impossible to add extra monitors. For machines that you can’t
open or install new cards in, like the Mac Mini or the iMac, you were
pretty much doomed to the prison cell of a few inches. With the advent
of the USB to DVI, thousands of users of these machines will be turned
loose to be able to use more than one monitor. And since the DVI signal
is a DVI-I, you can put a DVI-VGA adapter on it (which comes included)
for use with a VGA monitor. If you look at the Mac demographic, it is
accepted that many of them are designers, video editors, music
producers, etc. These are all fields where having more real estate is
key. What if you spent that extra bit of money and got a MacBook Pro
for the extra DVI port, but still wanted more monitors? Now you can
with the new release of the USB to DVI mac driver.
Display Link had a working version of the Mac driver back in January
that they showed us at CES. In the last couple months they’ve worked
out the kinks and bugs and have officially released their product which
is now fit for mass use. We tested it today in-house on a Macbook Air
and it worked beautifully. When you open the system preferences menu to
change resolution, a resolution menu conveniently pops up on both
screens simultaneously clearing up any confusion of which monitor’s
resolution you’re changing. One thing we noticed is that dragging
windows around on the extra monitor with the mac driver is slightly
choppier than its PC counter-part. Display Link says they are working
on it and hope to have updated drivers in the future that will fix it.
I’m all for the release of this current version for Mac use now as
opposed to waiting longer for them to tweak and improve it.
Another thing we noticed about this driver is that it wouldn’t work
with the older USB to DVI version with the old chip set. The easiest
way to know if your USB to DVI works with the new Mac driver is by
looking at the logo on the unit. If the logo says ‘Sewell’, you can
rest assured that it is the newer chip set and so will work with the
Mac version. If you bought your unit from us and it is more generic,
it’s the older chip set and probably won’t work with this driver
(although trying it out won’t cost you anything if you’ve already got
the adapter).
Mac
OSX BETA drivers (These drivers are still in a
beta form and are not guaranteed to work in all cases)
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