usb to vga with screenmonkey

[trussmonkee]

hi all,

 

I think this is a kind of two part post/question

 

firstly, has any body ever tried a usb to vga adapter and if so what was it like quality and ease wise?

 

here is and example of what I'm talking about

 

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search.aspx?criter...p;MaxPrice=9999

 

secondly

 

has any one played with screenmonkey or anything similar using multiple vga outs particularly more than two

 

I have posted a question two olie direct but wondered what the forum had to say.

 

ps this is for use in a theatre enviroment

 

cheers jim

[david.elsbury]

Don't hold your breath on using that (or any) USB to VGA converter. They are not suitable for anything more than low res, low colour depth text.

You'd be better off with a Matrox triple head to go, or a dual head to go. This takes one high res image (2580x900) and splits into two (1280x900) screens. Requires a grunty graphics card though

[peternewman]

A lot of those boxes do a lot of processing on the PC, so other loading of it will affect their performance a lot. I had a noticeable increase after I'd rebooted my machine when playing with one; it had been running continually for a few days beforehand. As David has alluded to, if you can turn the colour depth/resolution down, the performance will improve. If its a desktop you are using, then things like sticking the control windows on the USB output and the main graphics on the in built one will help, although adding another graphics card would be better. I've got one at home, but it may be a few weeks before I'd have a chance to test it unfortunately.

 

When I needed multiple outputs I ran two machines and I think linked the cuelists in the end with Screenmonkey. We had some issues, but that was a combination of hardware/other software and a few issues as the feature was very new in Screenmonkey.