Macbook: Add Triple Monitor Support

So I recently acquired myself a Macbook Pro for school and work. At work, However I had kind of ran into a problem with my new computer, see I normally work with 3 screens at once. As in I have 3 monitors hooked up to my desktop computer with them all set to extend the desktop so I can work from all of them at once. This is amazing while doing Photoshop editing, research, spreadsheet creation, or just about anything really. However I found that my new laptop only has one display out, and as I continued to use my laptop I began to miss my other monitor. You just dont know how good it is until you've had it and its gone. However I was able to find a sweet work around that enables me to return to my luxurious setup, its quite possible to extend your desktop via a USB port. There a variety to choose from such as USB to HDMI, USB to DVI, and USB to VGA. Pretty sure there are Display Port ones as well.

When I first heard about USB to HDMI, I was kind of confused because, USB isnt for video, or so I thought. What most of these converters are, are essentially external video cards driven by USB. They use the built in video card in your computer to piggy back off of and with its built in memory (usually around 64mb) sends the information to the monitor. This built in memory in the converters makes it so you arnt using massive amounts of your own system resources and dramatically reduces lag.

Almost all of the USB external video card units are driven by Displaylink's driver and tooling which is updated quite regularly. Recently for the windows drivers they have a updated driver that enables DirectX Support which enables you to play games and watch movies on it. (You can watch movies on the OS X Driver but not yet games.)

With these kind of converters you can easily get resolutions up to 1920x1080 (1080p) which looks sweet especially for less then a hundred bucks normally. However if your on a Mac then the DisplayLink Drivers dont support video playback and things like that so you can only really do "normal" computer work on them.

By normal I refer to surfing the internet, watching small YouTube videos, doing research, chatin' with babes, and those types of things. However when you want to do something such as watch a full 1080p movie through one of these, it doesn't quite work so well. In Windows the driver will allows you to watch movies and all that fun stuff, however in OSX, we kind of get the short end of the stick so thats not quite available yet (most likely in the future I would guess). When you try to watch a movie its choppy in full screen, if you watch a small preview like a YouTube it works fine, just don't put it in full screen or its going to be laggy. But over all it works for most standard uses, especially for an office.

Also if you have one of the new i5 or i7 processors, its not quite supported as well. The reason being is that those Macs have some weird graphics acceleration stuff in them. When you try to install the drivers and use the USB devices it kills your computer and you have to boot in safe mode.

But if those things don't matter to you then these things are quite amazing, I use it all day at work and never have problems with it (unless I want to slack off... then I just have to open my games and things on the monitor that isnt going through the USB to HDMI unit). It is also possible to plug a USB Hub and hook up to 6 of these converters allowing you the ultimate setup.

If you dont have a Mac with a a Mini-Display port, you most likely have a VGA port on your computer. In the event that you still want to hook it up to like an HDMI TV you can get a converter that does VGA to HDMI as well. Also there are VGA to Component converters as well for High Def goodness.