i,m looking to find away to connect a usb flash drive to a monitor with a vga connection.(blue) is this even possible. i,ve looked on the net for any sort af adapter. no luck. thanks for any help anybody can give.
usb to vga
- Thread starter shadowdandy
- Start date
no i don,t have a spare pc. i was hoping to use some sort of adapter, plug and play. i,ll find a tv with usb. thanks for your reply.
That wouldn't work anyway, which is probably why you can't find an adapter.
A monitor is a dumb device. The VGA connection is there to allow the monitor to be driven by a graphics card. The card supplies information about how to drive the pixels of the screen; so what colour combinations, brightness shades, refresh timing and all that sort of thing. The monitor doesn't have any processing power of its own, and even if it did, there's no ability for that sort of data exchange via a VGA connection. It's just not designed for this task.
The TV with a USB input is a different scenario. For a start, USB is designed as a way to move data and commands between two connected devices. Second, it's the TV itself with what amounts to a small computer inside that reads the data and then displays the results.
If you want to make use of your VGA monitor with a USB drive, then you'll need an extra piece of hardware in between the two devices to (a) read the USB drive, and (b) to decode the data with the appropriate CODECs so that it can then generate a video display for stills or moving images and/or sound. Something along the lines of little Android box would do the trick. You could either use the inbuilt Android apps or run the free-to-use media player software called Kodi.
These Android boxes have HDMI outputs for picture and sound. There's also generally an AV out (3.5mm 4-pole AV jack to 3x RCA phono - yellow (video), red and a white for stereo audio which can be used to drive an active speaker if the monitor doesn't have its own speaker built in.
Since HDMI isn't directly compatible with a VGA monitor, you would need a HDMI-to-VGA adapter to take care of converting digital video from HDMI in to analogue video suitable for a VGA connection. The adapter needs power to drive the conversion circuits, so this isn't just a case of wiring one set of connector pins to another as you might with a simple gender changer. HDMI connections carry power, but it was never really designed to drive anything more than the HDMI receiver chip in a display when that display isn't switched on. For this reason, it's good insurance to make sure any HDMI to VGA convertor also has the option for an external power source. Here's one such convertor. It also has a breakout connection for audio out to drive an active speaker or the separate audio in of a VGA monitor if it is fitted with a speaker. (VGA is picture only. It has no provision for an audio signal in the pin connections.)
Speaking of power, USB sockets come in differing power levels too. This means it's not safe to presume that just because there's a USB socket that it will happily power some or other USB device.
Nearly all USB sockets supply 5V, but the current output can be 150mA (0.75W), or 500mA (2.5W), or 900mA (4.5W). Something like a solid state flash drive might need as much as 1W of power for peak demand even though it has no moving parts. A mechanical hard drive in a USB caddy might offer significantly more capacity but require the higher power output of a 900mA USB socket to drive it correctly. This information applies equally to TVs and to Android boxes.