VGA output just happened
July 29, 2010
Posted by: gruso
A question that’s been asked a thousand times, finally answered. Intrepid plugger-in of things Raman has managed to squeeze a VGA signal out through his Pandora’s USB port, courtesy of a Startech USB2VGAPRO adapter (pictured above). His second display is rocking a modest 800×600 “not very sharp” 1280×1024 for the time being, and is functioning as an extended desktop – so he can run different apps on each screen. As always, hit the source link for the dirty bits.
HMMMMMMmmmMMmmm I wouldn’t fork out £100 for one of these, even though they do appear to contain 6.4 grams of leprechaun magic.
Good god, that is great… I simply can’t wait any longer for my Pandora…
There’s a mention that it looks ‘a bit soft’ – is it just 800×480 scaled up to the desired res by the adapter itself?
What impact has it on overall performance?
No mention of performance hits in Raman’s thread that I saw. But I did a bit of homework on these things just before posting, it seems that on desktop systems they generally add a small CPU load with the occasional spike. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes with some more demanding stuff on the Pandora.
Hold your horses… It’s a mere *extra* 2D vga card with a USB connector instead of a pci(-e) connector.
So you won’t be able to do any nice 3D stuff, or use it as a VGA-out for your screen.
That said: it can come in very handy
That’s what I was thinking, it’s not going to be the miracle route to HD video output for media or games.
There are plenty of this, for most it’s just a question if we can get arm-linux drivers.
HDMI/DVI with full-hd res:
http://www.win-star.com/eshop/goods.php?id=103
Woo-hoo! This is really cool that the startech adapter works on the Pandora. Now….if I only had that Pandora I ordered back in September 2008 it’d be even neater-peachy-keener!
I bet if I ordered the startech adapter next week it’d arrive before my pandora
People speaking of 3D or HDMI… remember this is a USB port, it doesn’t tones of through put. Some of the high resolution USB video adapters use compression to get better video through such a slow connection. This means CPU load. As discussed in the forums a lot, it is unlikely the Pandora could handle the load while doing anything else at the same time.
As for Raman having a Pandora, that’s pretty nice for only having been a member since Feb 2010.
I am planning on running projectm visualizer off my pandora when it arrives on a secondary output (to my projector). Would this vga adapter handle such an output or are we best sticking to tv out via component?
This has always been a possibility, hasn’t it? The problem is it’s not a real video card. It’s limited to USB bandwidth and will suck CPU power. Is it worth it?
Yep, it’s always been possible. Someone just needed to do it.
As others have said though, the uses are limited.
How does the official tv out adapter work in comparison to this?
The official AV cable gives you s-video at best. That means it’s standard PAL/NTSC resolution, and interlaced. Like an analogue TV signal basically. VGA output however, gives you crisp, higher resolutions suited to a PC monitor.
In this scenario though, performance is limited. Big screen gaming is still best handled by the standard AV out cable. (When they finally arrive!)
Any word one when OpenPandora will buy the TV-Out cables?
As has been suggested–about the only real use I can see for this is traveling presentations where you’re serving a static image and maaaybe some small lowish-res video. But to be honest, that’s still a pretty good use, as the pandora is already “more portable than portable”.
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Slideshows with static images should be possible at pretty much any resolution via DVI, right? I had already been hoping to do my SIGGRAPH 2010 talk from a Pandora, but, ah well…
I would like to exchange links with your site pandorapress.net
Is this possible?