I came across something quite nice while looking for a winusb skeleton today ,

It's called usb-over-network , and that made me think .. why doesn't multiplicity take this ting one level lower , and avoid all the hassle of incompatibility , game problems , etc etc etc and do the same..

Use multiplicity 's screen edge hacks for switching , but instead of sending keyboard information through the network , transfer the entire  usb device.

It would make porting this to Linux , mac ETC ETC a whole lot easier , and would improve the flexibility and durability of multiplicity by enormous amounts. (not only keyboard and mouse , but also game devices like game pads , flight controllers and joysticks could be supported.

Also incompatibility with certain games would effectively be eliminated.

this tool is not intended to be used for keyboards and mice , but using keyboards and mice works fine , once you share your keyboard tho , you can't type on it anymore until you connect to it with the client (either local or remote) , there is absolutely no functionality to do those things automatically , making it useless as a KM - switch. Still once the keyboard or mouse is shared and connected to another machine it works like it would have been connected locally..

http://www.usb-over-network.com/usb-over-network.html

It would be really cool if multiplicity gave the option to use the same concept for sharing the keyboard and mouse over the network , not just transmit the pressed keys..

BUT BUT BUT ..

Connecting and disconnecting usb devices , (being physical or logical) , takes an insane amount of time , (i'm taking seconds here, 2 or 3 or more) , which would make it tedious to use if you switch screens for playing WOW or need to be able to switch very fast.

So for serious users , this approach could be the robust solution , but would kill it for gamers....

What do you all think about this ?



Kind regards

Tournicoti