[Android] DisplayLink adopter worth for screen mirroring? CPU overhead? Latency?

[rkk]

So I finally got my device and tested it out a bit, and I have to say I'm very positively surprised how well the device is performing most of the time. The image quality is super crisp, no way near to the blurry and blocky Chromecast quality.

Although my first impression didn't go too smooth at first, as I had the DisplayLink Presenter and DisplayLink Desktop (Demo) installed at the same time, and eider these two or some other app I had installed on my phone clashed with the system when I connected the DisplayLink device, leaving all my 8 CPU cores maxed out at full speed during the whole time, draining huge amount of battery (It used up more than 50% in 10 to 20 minutes) and heating up the phone tremendously. But things changed quite drastically when I removed the DisplayLink Desktop (Demo) app and restarted my phone.

Once the conflict got solved, it was a huge surprise to see how efficiently the DisplayLink software was working. The CPU usage drops to near zero when nothing is changing on the Display, but even when you play a Video or a Game, I haven't seen any performance drops so far.

Going a bit more into details, the Motorola Moto G 5 Plus has the littleBIG architecture, which basically has two quad core CPUs inside, one low energy one that goes from 0,6GHz to 1,6GHz, and another one which is high performant but is less energy efficient one and goes up to 2GHz. These CPUs are enabled and disabled depending on the system need, so if the system needs a lot of processing power it would wake up the fast CPU.

So I played a 1080p movie with VLC (Hardware decoded), and it didn't even wake up the high performance CPU!! Even better, it was using the energy efficient CPU at only 1.4Ghz most of the time, which is nearly the same as it was without using the DisplayLink device. And the image quality was just super sharp like with a regular Blue Ray player.

Also for the sake of completeness, I wanted to see how much of a performance hit the DisplayLink device would have during Gaming and graphical intensive tasks. And I sincerely could barely see any performance hit. I tried with emulators like N64 and PSX, each of them rendering at native 1080p, and it was just smooth as butter during most of the time. I even tried GTA San Andreas which is pretty much a GPU monster, with the same settings I was using without DisplayLink and it was running as smooth as without the device. In the worst cases there would be some minor artifacts or glitches or some sporadic frame drops, which anyway just happen pretty rarely and only when the CPU gets maxed out.

It seems like DisplayLink priorizes the running application over itself, resulting in small graphical glitches and artifacts or sometimes even frame drops when the CPU is maxed out, but the app that is running doesn't seems to perform any slower. I think that's a really neat way of working.

So all in one, I'm really happy with the device, and surprised how efficiently it works. It works perfectly for what I need it to, from simple browsing and document editing, to movie watching and even quite intensive gaming.


The only device that didn't work so well was my tablet device with the 2K screen, which I guess uses a lot of CPU for downscaling the image, or something else is going on, because I only get the screen with a lot of artifacts and cracking sound. But sincerely I barely tried it out during 5 minutes, so maybe there was also something conflicting. But I will look into that later on.

Once again, thank you @AlbanRampon for all the help. The device was a total hit for me. I just hope that some day there will be a mobile targeted DisplayLink device that would allow to charge the mobile device while using the DisplayLink screen, altough I guess that the DL docking station is as close to that as it can get by now.

[afif1808]

Will the Displaylink chipset DL-165 support Android OnePlus 3T to mirror on a screen using this adapter?

Plugable UGA-165 USB 2.0 to VGA/DVI/HDMI Graphics Adapter for Windows Multiple Monitors up to 1920x1080 / 1600x1200 Each (DisplayLink DL-165 Chipset)
https://www.amazon.in/dp/B004AIJE9G/..._C5FbBb93XM15R

[AlbanRampon]

Originally Posted by afif1808

Will the Displaylink chipset DL-165 support Android OnePlus 3T to mirror on a screen using this adapter?

Plugable UGA-165 USB 2.0 to VGA/DVI/HDMI Graphics Adapter for Windows Multiple Monitors up to 1920x1080 / 1600x1200 Each (DisplayLink DL-165 Chipset)
https://www.amazon.in/dp/B004AIJE9G/..._C5FbBb93XM15R

Yes, it does work the same way.

[lanosalf]

Originally Posted by rkk

Also for the sake of completeness, I wanted to see how much of a performance hit the DisplayLink device would have during Gaming and graphical intensive tasks. And I sincerely could barely see any performance hit. I tried with emulators like N64 and PSX, each of them rendering at native 1080p, and it was just smooth as butter during most of the time. I even tried GTA San Andreas which is pretty much a GPU monster, with the same settings I was using without DisplayLink and it was running as smooth as without the device. In the worst cases there would be some minor artifacts or glitches or some sporadic frame drops, which anyway just happen pretty rarely and only when the CPU gets maxed out.

what about lag during gaming?

thanks in advance

[rkk]

Originally Posted by lanosalf

what about lag during gaming?

thanks in advance

I don't perceive any lag (if there is any it is barely noticeable for me). The only thing I see is that it is unable to send all 60fps to the device, while on the phone screen graphics are smooth at 60fps on my TV it seems like it's 30 - 45 fps (perceived), but that might be due to my phone's limited processing power (Moto G 5 Plus).

[ISHOULI]

Originally Posted by rkk

Amazing!! Cannot thank you enough Alban for testing this out!

I'm pretty sure this thread will be also helpful for other people searching for a Chromecast replacement.

I'll buy myself the device with a DL-3900 chipset and report back once I get my hands on it and test it out.

Greetings and thank you again!

J'ai entendu dire que DisplayLink fonctionne avec certains appareils Android. J'utilisais des appareils DisplayLink par le passé (il y a 3 ou 4 ans), mais je l'utilisais avec des PC. Je viens de remarquer que le processeur aimait faire des pics lorsque de nombreuses choses se passaient à l'écran, ce qui me suggère que l'image envoyée au périphérique DisplayLink est en cours de rendu ou de traitement sur le processeur.

[hacker1024]

Originally Posted by AlbanRampon

Hello RKK,

As far as I am aware, Android natively only does one device in clone at a max resolution of 1080p.
There's a presenter mode on some applications like PowerPoint to display something different without user interaction possible on that external display as there's no way with stock Android to handle mouse across displays or select which screen the app should be launched on.
We've done it to show it's possible, creating a specific ROM for that. The OS can be modified to do extended desktop with mouse support.

The Android device needs to support being a USB host (USB On The Go).
DisplayLink DL-1x5, DL-3000, DL-5000 and DL-6900 series all work.

No pixel comes from of any kind of computation.
Computation load and latency depends on content type, bandwidth available both on the computation and communication link.
It doesn't have the latency of casting as it would make it pretty useless for our core use case which is productivity. That's a different use case than screen casting.

I, every now and again, use my personal OnePlus 3T on my dock (with external mouse and keyboard) or on my miniRay pico projector to share presentations/photos
Today, you wouldn't be able to do protected video playback.

Kind regards,
Alban

Where can I find the OS changes necessary to support multiple screens? I build my own ROM for my phone, and I'd like to include this feature.

[Ziz]

Originally Posted by AlbanRampon

When using VLC for video, the application seems to recognise our solution as, instead of displaying on both screens, VLC shows an icon on the native display and the video on the external display.
No video pause, no video tearing. To me, it plays smoothly like on the mobile phone.

This hint really helped me a lot! I have the problem that my phone has a 2:1 (resp. 16:8) screen ratio instead of standard fullHD 16:9. So I get 1/18 black bars top and bottom. This is not too annoying while surfing or writing on my phone but for videos it is. Especially when I watch a 16:9 video "fullscreen" on my phone as it adds black bars on the left and right side. So when streaming directly from the web browser on the phone a video "fullscreen", I am getting black bars all around the video.

BUT as you mentioned VLC is able to directly access the displaylink hardware. With the Firefox extension "External Video Player" I can easily play my video with VLC instead of Firefox itself and voila: I am getting fullHD streaming without any black bars from my phone to my external monitor. Awesome!