HDMI port broken. What about USB to HDMI adapter?

[barth90]

I'm running Mint Cinnamon 18.3 on a Dell Inspiron 17 5000 laptop. I have an external Samsung monitor connected to it via a HDMI cable. This setup has worked well for a year. Lately The HDMI port has started to malfunction. I was losing the monitor and by touching the cable near the connector the monitor whould reappear. I know it is the port because when I plug the cable and monitor on another PC it works OK.
My question is the following. I see on Amazon USB to HDMI adapter. You plug the adapter in a USB port and plug your HDMI cable into it and it will power the monitor.
But will that work with Linux Mint?

Thank you

[gm10]

Not all will work, make sure there are working drivers for it for Linux, ideally Ubuntu 16.04 (which your Mint 18.3 is based on). I never used one so I cannot give recommendations.

[AlbertP]

It's most likely a DisplayLink device. Just search on the forum for DisplayLink and you'll see a fair number of users reporting trouble, so I'd advise against it unless you have no other option. VGA to HDMI or DisplayPort to HDMI converters are generally better & don't need any drivers.

A notable exception are USB-C devices, these work fine as they don't contain a DisplayLink chip but use the video signal provided by USB-C (if it is internally wired to your GPU, which is usually the case in laptops.)

[rbmorse]

+1 on VGA > HDMI adapter over USB > HDMI.

[BG405]

A notable exception are USB-C devices, these work fine as they don't contain a DisplayLink chip but use the video signal provided by USB-C

That's interesting, I hadn't heard of those. Would I be correct in thinking that you'd still be limited by the number of available pipes? i.e. I can physically connect up to four displays to my Dell Inspiron 1525, however it has only 2 pipes; therefore I can only use two displays at once.

[AlbertP]

I don't know what pipes are in this case, but yes, many GPUs are physically limited to 2 or 3 screens (3 on modern Intel hardware, 2 in the past. Some AMD hardware can drive up to 6.)

EDIT: GPU engineers seem to call this 'pipe' a CRTC and you can see which of them can drive which ports using:

Code: Select all

xrandr --verbose

[gm10]

USB interfaces have a limited number of endpoints, connections to those are called pipes, I'm assuming the references was to that.