USB 3 Video Adapter

Question

Is this supported on recent versions of Ubuntu? The description says Windows-only, and that it doesn't work on Mac, but makes no mention of Linux. There's also not any mention of a manufacturer. I'm hoping someone here will recognise it and know whether it works...

Solution

It depends on the converter chip and your operating system.

Most USB/HDMI converters sold today contain hardware from either DisplayLink or FrescoLogic.

Short answer:

You will probably get best results using a DisplayLink device and Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04.

Long answer:

FrescoLogic

There is an official open source driver available at github for the fl2000 chip, but as the readme says:

This driver is tested on Ubuntu 14 LTS as well as some Android platforms with kernel version 3.10.x. This driver source might not compile on newer kernels (eg. 4.0 or above) because of the fast-moving API changes in the mainstream kernel. You might need to adapt it for your own use.

This issue indicates that there is no support for newer kernels right now. So if you aren't using Ubuntu 14.04 anymore, you'd have to wait for someone to port it (or do it yourself). There is also a reddit where a user claims he got it to work on Ubuntu 18.04 Alpha 2, but didn't provide any further information.

DisplayLink

They officially provide drivers for Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 17.04, 17.10 and 18.04. The latest driver version is available for 16.04 and 18.04. According to the release notes, they support the following:

G. Supported Features & Hardware

================================

This driver will support up to 2 displays connected to DisplayLink devices. More than 2 DisplayLink displays may work, but not supported or tested by DisplayLink.

Resolutions up to 4K are supported on the appropriate DisplayLink hardware.

Device families supported:

• DL-6xxx
• DL-5xxx
• DL-41xx
• DL-3xxx

DL-1x5 and DL-1x0 devices use the open source udl driver, which is not developed or maintained by DisplayLink.

The driver is not compatible with closed source graphics drivers. If in doubt, take a look at the known issues page.

What you can expect from it

From my own experience, it works well for office use or browsing the internet. In general, everything where the display output is mostly static. You can watch videos, but you'll notice visible artifacts because of the high compression that is needed to be able to transfer the images over (relatively slow) USB3.0. You can't really play 3D games.

You cannot disable the built-in display of laptops (see github issue).

How to tell which hardware is used

The device you linked to uses FrescoLogic hardware. Although most sellers won't include that information in the description, they often provide links to drivers. In your case, they linked to a file called FL2000-2.1.33788.0.exe which indicates it uses a FrescoLogic FL2000 chip.

Comments

[mcr]

Is the provided DisplayLink software kernel patches? Binaries? Xorg modules?

[danzel]

IIRC, it's a DKMS module.

[Marcel Waldvogel]

Despite the unhelfulness of FL, there is a repository with a new repository with a full driver. It should work up to Kernel 5.10, but does not work on 5.11 (yet): github.com/klogg/fl2000_drm

[Marcel Waldvogel]

Also, a USB-C hub with an integrated FL2000 works out of the box for me with Ubuntu 21.04, without any FL2000 drivers (ID 1d5c:7102 Fresco Logic Generic Billboard Device shows up in lsusb). (It does not work every time when plugging in the hub, but it reliably uses the HDMI port on boot and frequently when hotplugging.)

[Vass]

I used the instructions from DisplayLink for Focal and it worked just fine