How Does It Work?

The secret to DisplayLink's popularity is a codec that offers crisp text and graphics with very low (sub-frame) latency. This is crucial in desktop productivity uses where natural interaction with a mouse or touchscreen is required. Because the codec is link-aware it naturally fits a range of different data transports such as USB2, USB3, or Wifi. DisplayLink powers graphics in both 802.11ac and 802.11ad wireless docking.

Because DisplayLink uses a driver-based host solution it is simple to support Display link across a range of OSes with no added host cost. Currently we support:

Windows 7, 8, and 10
macOS
Android
Chrome OS
Ubuntu/Linux

Why is DisplayLink unique?

The secret to DisplayLink's popularity is providing the codec that offers crisp text and graphics with very low (sub-frame) latency.

This is crucial in desktop productivity uses where natural interaction with a mouse or touchscreen is required.

Here's how it works:

DisplayLink software installs and acts like a normal display on the host. It detects monitors connected through a DisplayLink device and presents them to the operating system (for example Windows) as if they were normally attached monitors.
The OS then creates frame buffers for each display and the OS puts the display content there.
The DisplayLink driver then picks up the pixels in the frame-buffer, encodes them and send them to the DisplayLink device.
The DisplayLink device then decodes these frame buffers and presents them to standard video interfaces like VGA, HDMI or DisplayPort. An on-board frame buffer means the DisplayLink driver only needs to send changes to the screen content. It can also adapt the compression so that the link is shared equitably with other services while maintaining high quality.