I make a pretty big deal about how awesome our merch is and In fairness it
is lttstore.com but even I can't help
but feel a little bit of small PP energy when I see other YouTuber merch that is
this freaking cool in front of me are
four gaming computers and a special
black box that allows me to effortlessly seamlessly and nearly instantly switch
between them with the exact same monitor keyboard and mouse setup I'm sorry what
here watch I'll do it again Boop that is so freaking cool and
of course it would come courtesy of Wendell from level one text I just have
a few questions Wendell hey what exactly is this thing why did you create it and
what makes it so flipping special I mean what is the difference between YouTuber
merch and just an actual tech product at this point I don't know maybe I can get
the answer from our sponsor Mexico their
new Aurora Pro 4K projector features three HDMI 2.1 inputs a maximum screen
size of 150 inches and support for Dolby
Vision next It Go learn more at the link down below everything about
this product is just delightfully Wendell from the Plain
White Packing box with the simple not
even glossy adhesive backed laser
printed label on it to the unimaginative yet amply descriptive name I mean what
is it if not 8K DisplayPort 1.4 KVM
switch with USB 3.2 gen 1. that's what
it is right and this is everything it
does which when you dig into it is not
padded that is a freaking lot but first
what exactly is a KVM switch
goodness gracious this thing is huge oh I see we've got the chungus one all
right well included is a little manual
a basic power adapter with oh okay yeah
it's got the modular thing on it but you only get a North American one sorry
everyone else oh and that's pretty much
it which is fine because this this is
what you need for the uninitiated what
you guys are looking at here is a KVM or keyboard video Mouse which okay it's not
much of a keyboard and it certainly isn't a mouse or a video is actually a
switcher for those three devices and the idea here is that if you have multiple
computers say for example your gaming machine is a PC and your work machine is
a Mac or a Linux box you have the ability to switch your peripherals and
the device that your monitor is accepting an input from all with the
Press of a button or actually with a good KVM and this is a good KVM with a
hotkey that you press on your keyboard of course none of that is what makes
this special kvms in their various forms have existed basically since the dawns
of keyboards mice and video devices what's cool about this one is how much
video it can handle this is a DisplayPort 1.4 KVM and this one doesn't
just switch which machine or machines are taking input from your mouse and
keyboard and outputting to your monitor it actually can handle up to two
monitors across four separate systems not only
that friends but each of these ports is DisplayPort 1.4 which means this thing
is capable of up to 8K 60fps with chroma
sub sampling or 4K 120 hertz 444 and
it's packed with all kinds of other gaming Centric features like support for
HDR support for freesync that's right variable refresh rate meaning it might
not have RGB or flashy packaging or even
an impressive sounding name but this is
no ordinary piece of office equipment this is the gaming KVM I gotta say this
thing reminds me more of an AV receiver than anything else here is where each PC
can input up to two monitors here's the
USB Uplink here's the audio Uplink for each one and then things get a little
bit confusing because if you want to plug in a peripheral well okay your
human interface devices so your keyboards and mice they all go here your
headphones that you actually to use go here okay these are upstream and then if
you have a USB device that you want to plug in all right to these PCS that high
speed Port is right there and then you've also got another human interface
device one and another high speed one on the front super convenient the buttons on the
front are to switch which computer you want but of course there's an easier way
to do that which I showed you guys already and there's more there's a version that supports USB 3 5 gig but
also one that supports USB 310 gig meaning you could have a storage device
connected through your KVM and transfer files at up to 10 gigabit per second
from you know this computer to that one not that you would ever do that with
your KVM because let's face it you know level one text and you can afford one of
these so you probably just have a 10 gig Network already which brings us to kind
of an uncomfortable point it's 700 for
the version I have in front of me that isn't even the top of the line and it
doesn't even come with cables because while Wendell does stock cables on the
level one tech store he figured hey look if you can get them affordably somewhere
else and he doesn't have to QC them so much the better so with that pricing
in mind you're probably wondering how could anybody justify this
well why don't we see it in action and I'll show you I really hope you guys
don't like cable management because this is about to get really ugly really fast
come on around back here with me
boom you are now pc4 something to be aware of
is that while it's super convenient to have the KVM up close to the user and
the computer is far away from the user you're just going to want to make sure that you've used extremely high quality
cables in a case like that because you're going to have to account for all
the loss from the cable itself as well
as the loss from the interface here I talked to Wendell about this when I was
actually using one of these to switch between a lan PC in the land room and my
own PC and he was like yeah it's just really important to use
high quality cables in a nutshell
oh how did I manage to get these so hopelessly mixed up this one's still not
plugged in what just happened you see this yeah yeah which one oh that's the
first that's what I was trying to tell you I hope these are all good cables I
hope so too oh this one is infinite cable so this one's going to work great
can you show for them slightly harder you think um well that one's not so it's probably
not going to work because it's not from Infinity it's probably going to be fine
it just depends monitor because one of them is 1440p and that one's 4K this is
awful and we don't even have any audio
devices plugged in yet you have a suggestion for a better way to do it yes
everything should be wireless Bluetooth oh wonderful this is great the weight of
the cables pulling the feet up you need
some lead weights in there Wendell that's my free consultation for you for
your product design or you could use the upcoming LTT Cable Management things oh
yeah actually that's true that's a better show sorry Wendell do you want any other things
um like an Xbox controller or some high-speed storage controller would be
cool how about this high speed storage high speed storage yeah oh my goodness
this is I got some more things for you here
here's a mic why not right uh I mean I guess so here's a hub you can plug in
there why are you why are you determined to push this to the Limit why not I mean
I guess so I got a capture card if you want Jake I like how you're using the
Xbox controller as your hid device is it not a human interface device well
you won't be able to use the hotkeys oh no there's all there are four hid ports
oh really yeah oh cool no this thing is freaking awesome oh sick yeah did you
mention you can rack mount it that would kind of solve these problems no I hadn't mentioned that yet it's cheap I think
it's like 20 bucks for the rack mount kit yeah okay
okay hey look at the plug and freaking play g-sync
compatible display connected you don't understand how remarkable it is that
that just worked the pleb way to switch to another
computer and you can see the light goes from green to green plus red is to press
the button there and there it is look satechi d Drive
and the other USB drive oh man I never even thought about like sharing a webcam
for example yeah where's the webcam I thought we got a webcam yeah let's get a
webcam we've got the mic the webcam is actually like a uniquely kind of awesome
use case because that's really difficult to do through I mean realistically any
kind of Hub I always recommend plugging a webcam directly into a USB 3 port and
the other thing is that it's really uncommon for these KVM switches to have
USB 3 ports at all usually it's keyboard
video Mouse not keyboard video Mouse webcam microphone USB drive I mean then
it would be a KVM now a point of clarification is that
Wendell doesn't actually recommend using it for mass storage devices probably
because you're not going to be on top of it and you're not going to safely remove
them not because it can't do it so your mileage may vary with that but he does
support a lot of other Enthusiast specific use cases like it's
been tested with high-end RGB keyboards from the likes of Coursera cougar brands
that don't start with c and it's validated for hdcp pass-through so I
mean we can test that real quick uh what's a what's an hdcp protected
something I mean Netflix is flex I think
do we have Network running to any of these nope and one of them probably has
Wi-Fi I imagine one of them definitely is oh god oh geez everything is going
bad all right you know what we can test is HDR hello hey well that immediately
worked freaking awesome is there like hdcp test
website you know like is that a thing is there a simple tool to determine if my
hdcp is working oh wow this looks like a wonderful app download advisor
bruh how about no okay the NVIDIA control
panel can apparently do it also a fantastic app very recently updated
definitely not fresh out of 2006. yes all good
so we weren't going to be able to run into anything that was not going to work
because it's fine great that was our problem good job Wendell why is our
webcam not working are you sure it's not working I mean it's like red and looks
sad oh you probably need this hey literal actual poser okay fine fine I
will take that I'll take a picture there you happy you gotta shave make yourself
look younger I don't think it'll help remember when Luke shaved it's true but
Luke's also younger than me you know what really makes you look younger being
younger Line This is just going through his Obama phase that eight years when
you just age 25 years wait you haven't even like switched between computers
that much oh right right right let's show the cool way to do it
what really that's so cool scroll
squirrel fort what else can you do I am now using that
computer and look there's my storage which definitely totally works but
definitely probably causes problems like Wendell said see this is what oh you
should always listen to Wendell just always listen to Wendell and then your
life will be good oh the webcam seems not happy uh I'll figure it out I'll
figure it out give it a sec and once the drivers are already Arnold
yeah of course it immediately Works what
freaking love it and it's completely seamless with the keyboard and mouse
because oh did I even mention this not all of his products are just kvms so
he's got a wide wide range of different devices depending on how much you want
to spend you don't have to get the 700 Cadillac version there's just dual PC
ones like this single monitor two PC uh
here's one that's single monitor two PC with a 10 gig Uplink that's why it's
USBC and he even has one that doesn't support a display at all oh yeah it just
supports Mouse roaming between the machines in Hardware so we've done that
before in software but in software in Hardware yeah you do need a fully hid
compatible Mouse so some fancy gaming mice might break it sure but like a
normie Dell Mouse of this one will probably work fine yep that's kind of
nuts and the other really cool one is the USB power delivery one oh yeah so
it'll charge the connected devices if you want to switch between your laptop
and your iPad yeah and have mouse keyboard input for both of them I mean
he even makes one with four monitor support you can do four computer four
monitor which is that's like the 1200 one how big is it large it's tall it's
in charge basically any setup you can imagine I think that one is built to
order because there's no photos of it and it's just like if you want this
please email Wendell at what no internet
yeah this one's not plugged in I just I just switched computers again you just
didn't even notice me doing it because I was like boom boom boom boom boom
computer switch let's go anyway the one that I'm playing games on is this one so
this is the use case for this right if you've got a render or code compile
running on something else or maybe one of your machines is just a server that
you have a GUI on for some reason because you're weak like me and you just
want to be able to check on it once in a while I really want this because I have like
my little router box I'm going to build and my Nas and I have them sitting side by side I want to be able to switch
between them so let's just check all that switching around I just want to see
is HDR still working can I enable it
here enable HDR in my game yes that
definitely worked this is so cool I mean
it's the kind of thing where realistically if you don't need it
that's fine you can just spend the rest of your life pretending that these
things don't exist that kvn means kernel virtual machine I mean you're not wrong
but if you're a Discerning multi-box user and you don't happen to have
um the world's largest desk to hold all two of your monitors for every one of
your four systems this is an absolutely incredible solution and level one tax
has a sick product portfolio that covers basically all the bases now and they're
even working on DisplayPort 2.0 and Thunderbolt in the future Thunderbolt
KVM I actually didn't even know well he was saying that the Intel Thunderbolt
chipset is kind of a piece of crap in that it will be very difficult oh okay
so maybe yeah I guess my only question at this point is why did it take a
YouTuber to create this product I mean there's literally hundreds of KVM
switches on the market uh well it's actually very simple in the beginning it
was this is the situation I have I have a lot of computers and I want to switch
between multiple sets of displays and computers easily why is this so hard I
mean it turned out that there were actually a lot of good reasons why it was hard that I didn't understand I had
to do a lot of homework to understand USB and DisplayPort and new USB and
other USB look I tried eight or nine different kvms over the years and I
couldn't find a single one that did everything well so my first thought was
to modify an existing product all right and only build my uh my own matter of
Last Resort because ain't nobody wants to do that so for both USB and display
switching you really need purpose-built integrated circuits or ICS to do that
I'm not going to Fab my own ICS obviously and those are different chips
companies like Texas Instruments and nxp make what are called reference designs
for things like display switching you know USB spec literally has a section in
it to dynamically map USB devices between different host computers for a
KVM type use case so why don't we just Implement that in the spec well
yeah that's that's actually what doesn't work if you exactly rigidly follow the
spec and it's actually the same just same story when we're talking about
DisplayPort DisplayPort switching it's a
little problematic that's why the design philosophy of the KVM has shifted from
trying to emulate a monitor and you know
do all that stuff to just Plumbing different connections to the displays
the KVM tries to be invisible now and operate purely as a switcher as a matter
of design philosophy one of the biggest hurdles with fast and reliable display
switching in a KVM top context is actually copyright copyright yeah it's
actually a huge annoying mess copyright expansion maximalists require encryption
hdcp between your GPU and your display because you're a filthy pirate and you
might steal those ones and zeros those interests in copyright have inserted
themselves into display standards committees to the extent that this kind
of a KVM type use case is not even considered and even given a KVM that
works you're going to have to juggle multiple sets of encryption Keys between different computer often that's not done
well it is an awful lot of unnecessary human suffering that ultimately doesn't
do anything to stop media piracy when I
started this I never would have guessed that so many problems with this stem
from this hdcp mechanism
fortunately I was able to learn a lot about that and a lot how about you know
USB works or it doesn't work and all the edge cases with USB and I built an
amazing relationship with an ace team in Taiwan that helped me understand that
taught me a lot and we worked together on stuff so the hardware design of the
KVM it's already modular there's multiple boards inside this KVM and each
board only does one thing it's a separation of concerns we in software
like that so if you want three DisplayPort you've got three DisplayPort
boards plus a USB board in the bottom and if I have to go off script and do my
own thing I can do my own thing and so as I put in the work and learned
everything way back in the DisplayPort 1.2 days testing a whole bunch of
devices I learned that there was a lot that was really to do with you know the
specific functionality around the USB spec I mean a lot of the USB devices
themselves don't follow spec remember how I mentioned USB has a thing in it
for dynamically mapping devices to host computers well virtually no USB
peripheral maker even tests for that take for example the Logitech unifying
receiver this thing is common as rocks and sticks and it actually supports an 8
byte USB protocol and a 20 Baht USB protocol the 20 USB protocol is better
in every way you can do cooler stuff but for old Legacy compatibility you need
that 8 byte protocol so if you've got a KVM and you're switching between a host
that's doing 8 byte and another host that's doing 20 byte you're gonna have
to handle that and that's complicated so how do you handle that well very
carefully it turns out so through my collaboration and software because it
turns out I'm decent at that we can do something a little bit more pragmatic
rather than actually follow spec to the letter buggy Logitech wireless receivers
and universal audio video Codec that means driverless even Corsair K65
keyboards and whatever kind of crazy USB peripherals you've got can work I
actually have two different kinds of USB ports on the KVM the USB 3 ports are
hard switch and the the USB head ports are more of that Dynamic device mapping
thing uh sometimes we can't fix it in the KVM this behind me here that's the
Samsung G9 Neo it loves to not work it
works reasonably okay with the KVM we sell only because I found bugs in
Samsung's DisplayPort firmware and I opened a ticket with Samsung and I
relentlessly harassed them for about three months yeah three months to get a
new firmware and finally they sent me one 1008 and newer which now largely
works with the KVM the main reason that I've become known for kvms is that I'm
willing to chase things down like that to try to understand to try to go down a
rabbit hole of pain and human suffering and try to figure out someone else's
bugs bugs that if we strictly stick to the spec they would never get fixed I
still read every single trouble ticket that comes in and internalize it up here
that's the secret of the success someone that's willing to put all that in their
brain buying a KVM for me means that I'm gonna put the money back into more and
better products and to try to understand the problems and
fix it and through that I found some amazing connections
our customers include game development companies Fortune 500s nuclear Labs even
hospitals for radiology displays hospitals need kvms too yeah it turns
out that if you've got a fancy Radiology display you don't want to buy a bunch of
those you want to just switch between devices and hey we can do it and all of
that is why I love these things so darn much Wendell is one of the only other
people that I've ever met whose product creation process basically goes yeah
this exists but it's not quite perfect enough for me and cost be damned I
really do think that I could make it a little bit better the only question this
all raises then is why is it so darn expensive look this level of debugging
and Engineering it takes a lot of time and effort from a surprisingly large
team even just buying quality 10 gigabit
USB chipsets that actually work is a huge pain not to mention we are compared
to basically every other KVM vendor operating at a very tiny scale although
these things are almost hand crafted which means the costs are way higher
even with higher costs customer expectations are sometimes impossible to
meet you'd be surprised how many people expect to plug in a single Thunderbolt 4
cable to their gaming laptop and be able to run three 4K 144hz monitors on the
other side of that I'm sorry the math is that just not on your side 40 gigabit
Thunderbolt 4 is pitiful in a world with 144hz monitors it can barely do one
maybe not even and that's why even pedestrian USBC docs
from the likes of Dell and HP like what you get with a business class machine they now have dual USBC connections and
that's why the only way I can deal with that in the KVM is by having two or
three separate connections so I could do something like this this
is an upcoming model this one does 120 watt USBC power delivery but also has
two extra monitor inputs that are full fat DisplayPort 1.4 as far as I know
this is a globally unique product but even with all of that effort you know
it's not perfect there are going to be edge cases there's going to be stuff that I run into but hey you're willing
to work with me and spend some money I'll do what I can to try to figure it
out or connect the dots or put it together because that's just how we roll
level one it all I mean it leads to KVM adjacent products things like the Edie
ID feeder this is the 8K version of that that we've been working on for a while
uh LTT reached out unwittingly because
they needed an eight-way HDMI thing and it's like well uh it's going to take
some customization in order to be able to do that but we can do that and this
was used at LTX because it's not exactly a KVM it's KVM adjacent but that's just
because the cool stuff I love solving
problems okay fair enough but I could think of one thing you don't have an
answer for Mr Wendell smartypants I know I know it's our sponsor right
Corsair building PCS is really fun but
it's easy to finish up and realize you've somehow created a spaghetti
inspired cable art piece I mean your mom would be super proud but you might want
to also consider Corsair's IQ link ecosystem it helps reduce clutter inside
your PC with one standardized cable connecting everything you can even chain
devices together using that same simple connector all leading to a single IQ
link system Hub that can be magnetically attached to your PC case each of the
hub's two ports can handle up to seven connected devices which helps reduce
cabling complexity and with a range of products in the ecosystem like fans
coolers and power supplies building a fully connected PC is a breeze oh and of
course you can customize the RGB lighting of all your Corsair devices
with their IQ software check out Corsair's IQ link smart ecosystem at the
link pun intended down below if you guys
enjoyed this video you might enjoy seeing a potential use case for these
things where I have a Central Computer in one place and then fiber optic
running to different kind of stations where I can sit and use it throughout my
house is that really a cost-saving measure by the time you buy one of these and a
bunch of fiber optic whatever I would say if you wanted to buy a bunch of
baller monitors this could actually save me money yeah yeah yeah but mostly it's
just really cool and awesome