DVI

(pronounced as separate letters) (1) Short for Digital Visual Interface, a digital interface standard created by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG) to convert analog signals into digital signals to accommodate both analog and digital monitors. Data is transmitted using the transition minimized differential signaling (TMDS) protocol, providing a digital signal from the PC's graphics subsystem to the display. The standard specifies a single plug and connector that encompass both the new digital and legacy VGA interfaces, as well as a digital-only plug connector. DVI handles bandwidths in excess of 160 MHz and thus supports UXGA and HDTV with a single set of links. Higher resolutions can be supported with a dual set of links.

(2) Short for Digital Video Interactive, a now-defunct technology developed by General Electric that enables a computer to store and display moving video images like those on television. The most difficult aspect of displaying TV-like images on a computer is overcoming the fact that each frame requires an immense amount of storage. A single frame can require up to 2MB (megabytes) of storage. Televisions display 30 frames per second, which can quickly exhaust a computer's mass storage resources. It is also difficult to transfer so much data to a display screen at a rate of 30 frames per second.

DVI overcomes these problems by using specialized processors to compress and decompress the data. DVI is a hardware -only codec (compression/decompression) technology. A competing hardware codec, which has become much more popular, is MPEG. Intel has developed a software version of the DVI algorithms, which it markets under the name Indeo.

(3) Short for Device Independent, a file format used by the TeX typography system.

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