Applications¶
DisplayLink Direct is a lightweight, driver-free way to drive one or many displays over USB — without a host GPU, graphics driver, or compositor. That makes it a good fit for a wide range of applications, from embedded products to large multi-display installations.
Digital signage¶
Deliver content to information boards, menu displays, and advertising screens. DisplayLink Direct can run on small, GPU-less hosts and drive multiple screens from a single device, keeping hardware and power requirements low.
Video walls¶
Span a single image or video across a grid of displays. The SDK lets you address each display by a stable hardware identifier, submit the right region of the frame to each output, and synchronize presentation across displays for a seamless wall. See the Video Wall sample.
Embedded and industrial systems¶
Add display output to embedded products, HMIs, and industrial controllers. Embedded mode performs no dynamic memory allocation at runtime, giving predictable, deterministic resource usage suitable for constrained and long-running deployments.
Headless and GPU-less hosts¶
Because frames are encoded on the CPU and decoded by the DisplayLink device, DisplayLink Direct needs no host GPU. It can run on headless servers, single-board computers, and minimal systems that have no graphics accelerator at all.
Kiosks and point-of-sale¶
Power customer-facing and operator displays for kiosks, ticketing machines, and point-of-sale terminals — often driving a primary and secondary screen from one compact host.
Multi-monitor productivity¶
Extend a workstation beyond the number of displays its native video outputs support, driving additional monitors over standard USB connections.
Remotely controlled displays¶
Drive displays from a headless or remotely managed host, where the machine generating the content is administered over the network rather than operated locally. Because DisplayLink Direct submits frames programmatically and needs no local GPU or graphics session, it suits remote and centrally managed deployments — updating signage, dashboards, or status screens from a remote controller.
Custom rendering pipelines¶
Applications that generate frames themselves — dashboards, media players, test and measurement tools — can submit frame buffers directly to displays in a range of pixel formats, with full application-level control over what appears on each output.