Digital Video Interactive
Encyclopedia
Digital Video Interactive (DVI) was the first multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...

 desktop video standard for IBM-compatible personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s, developed around 1984 by Section 17 of The David Sarnoff Research Center Labs (DSRC) then a division of RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...

. When General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

 purchased RCA in 1986, GE considered the DSRC redundant with its own labs, and sought a buyer. In 1988, GE sold the DSRC to SRI International
SRI International
SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...

, but sold the DVI technology separately to Intel.

DVI technology allowed full-screen, full motion video, as well as stereo
Stereophonic sound
The term Stereophonic, commonly called stereo, sound refers to any method of sound reproduction in which an attempt is made to create an illusion of directionality and audible perspective...

 audio, still images, and graphics to be presented on a DOS-based desktop computer. DVI content was usually distributed on CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

 discs, which in turn was decoded and displayed via specialized hardware installed in the computer. Audio and video files for DVI were among the first to use data compression
Data compression
In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....

, with audio content using ADPCM. DVI was the first technology of its kind for the desktop PC, and ushered in the multimedia revolution for PCs.

DVI was announced at the second annual Microsoft CD-ROM conference in Seattle to a standing ovation in 1987. The excitement at the time stemmed from the fact that a CD-ROM of the era had a maximum data playback rate of ~1.2 Mbit/s, thought to be insufficient for good quality motion video. However, the DSRC team was able to extract motion video, stereo audio and still images from this relatively low data rate with good quality.

The first implementation of DVI developed in the mid-80s relied on three 16-bit ISA
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...

 cards installed inside the computer, one for audio processing, another for video, and the last as an interface to a Sony CDU-100 CD-ROM drive. The DVI video card used a custom chipset (later known as the i80750 or i750 chipset) for decompression, known as the pixel processor & display called the VDP (video display processor).

Later DVI implementations only used one card, such as Intel's ActionMedia series (omitting the CD-ROM interface). The ActionMedia (and the later ActionMedia II) were available in both ISA and MCA
Micro Channel architecture
Micro Channel Architecture was a proprietary 16- or 32-bit parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers through the mid 1990s.- Background :...

-bus cards, the latter for use in MCA-bus PCs like IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's PS/2
IBM Personal System/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM's third generation of personal computers. The PS/2 line, released to the public in 1987, was created by IBM in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing an advanced proprietary architecture...

 series.

The original video compression scheme, called Presentation Level Video (PLV for short), was asymmetric in that a Digital
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 VAX-11/750
VAX-11
The VAX-11 was a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture . The VAX-11/780 was the first VAX computer.- VAX-11/780 :...

 minicomputer was used to compress the video in non-real time to 30 frames per second with a resolution of 320 × 240. Video compression involved coding both still frames and motion-compensated residuals using Vector Quantization
Vector quantization
Vector quantization is a classical quantization technique from signal processing which allows the modeling of probability density functions by the distribution of prototype vectors. It was originally used for data compression. It works by dividing a large set of points into groups having...

 (VQ) in dimensions 1, 2, and 4. The resulting file (in the .AVS format) was displayed in realtime on an IBM PC-AT (i286) with the add-in boards providing decompression and display functions at NTSC (30 frame/s) resolutions. The IBM PC-AT equipped with the DVI add-in boards hence had 2 monitors, the original monochrome control monitor, and a second Sony CDP1302 monitor for the color video. Stereo audio at near FM quality was also available from the system.

Intel evaluated DVI and acquired the technology from General Electric, and Intel then utilized the i750
technology in driving creation of the MMX instruction set. This instruction set was added to the Pentium (r)
processors. Intel now owns the DVI standard as of 2007.

The original team from DSRC (David Sarnoff Research Center) set up NJ1 as the Princeton Operation. Andy Grove was a great supporter of the Princeton Team during its term of operation. In 1992 Ken Fine (the Vice President of Intel) decided to shutter the operation and transfer those employees willing to move to other Intel sites in Arizona and Oregon. Final site closure occurred almost a year later in August or September 1993.

External links

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