Question Insert hdmi or other video signal into usbc?

[PingSpike]

If I had a hub like this: https://www.amazon.com/TOTU-Ethernet-Delivery-Portable-Laptops

How would I get the hdmi signal from my primary graphics card to go through the usbc cable to this hub?

What I want to do is couple regular usb (just for a keyboard and mouse), hdmi and preferably power into one cable with one plug to easy unplugging and replugging.

 

[Paperdoc]

After viewing a review of a similar product, I see that the only connection from a phone or compter to the Hub is a USB3 connection. So all of the Hub's I/O is via that USB3 connection. To me this means there must be a device driver for that Hub installed in the host computer, but I could not find a manual for the Hub to find details. If that is how it works, then that driver would need to have a way to specify or to auto-detect how the host comuter generates video output, and re-direct a copy of that into to the Hub for its use.

 

[PingSpike]

Yeah, I'm thinking most of these must have an internal displaylink chipset or something.

There's an alternative mode for usbc that can send displayport. But near as I can tell you need a special video device that has a usbc output first, which I've never seen. I cannot even think of what the point of that is, save laying the groundwork to extend the usbc one cable for everything fetish into even more territory.

 

[Paperdoc]

Right. The central point is that what needs to be displayed in a screen has to be created by some hardware and software, and the standard CPU and O/S cannot do any of that. Instead any application generating video display uses a standard set of codes for those visual elements (be they text in a particular font, or lines, or bit-mapped graphics images) that the OS merely sends to the video display hardware. That commonly is a video chip system and its associated software installed on the mobo and in its BIOS, or an added graphics card with its own software loaded into Windows, or even a graphics "chip" that is integrated into the CPU chip. Anyway, the actual signals to be sent to the display are generated NOT by the OS, but by a dedicated separate system. Then those signals need to be sent out to the display device, and there are standard cable and signal formats used for that. USB of any form is NOT among those standard cable systems, but it should be possible to design a system that generates those display data streams as just another stream of digital data packets that could be sent along a USB line. Considering the data rate required, that better be USB3 or USBC. But of course the data stream formats would not be common for USB, and the other end of the cable for this would need a connector that meets the standard for a common digital input system such as HDMI. So the output, the cable, and associated software used by the video card all would need to be custom stuff, and you could NOT do this through any "standard" USBx port

As I indicated above, I expect that the system used by these enhanced USB Hubs involves a driver for the Hub that does the job of relaying the video data to the Hub instead of to a video card, and then that Hub contains its own video chip to generate the display signals and send them out of a standard video port.Similarly the driver and Hub combine to process any associated audio data and generates the audio signals for output, too.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Then those signals need to be sent out to the display device, and there are standard cable and signal formats used for that. USB of any form is NOT among those standard cable systems

You've never heard of multi-stream DisplayPort over USB-C connectors? Check out modern NV Turing GPUs, they have USB-C ports for a reason, yes, a video card.

 

[Paperdoc]

All I meant was that the standard cable and data transmission formats used for video signals - e.g., HDMI, DVI, analog VGA, etc - don't work using the lines of a USB cable and data transfer system, so you cannot just plan to send those signals from a video card "standard" output on a USB cable. Instead, they need to be re-structured slightly to travel over a single pair of differential data transfer lines, so some software tool in a device driver is involved. And of course they will be digital, so IF your video card has only analog (e.g., VGA) outputs there also is that conversion, too.