A multimedia system marketed by Intel.

DVI is not just an image-compression scheme, but includes everything that is necessary to implement a multimedia playback station including chips, boards, and software. DVI technology brings television to the microcomputer.

DVI’s concept is simple: information is digitized and stored on a random- access device such as a hard disk or a CD-ROM, and is accessed by a computer. DVI requires extensive compression and real-time decompression of images. Until recently this capability was missing. DVI enables new applications. For example, a DVI CD-ROM disk on twentieth-century artists might consist of 20 minutes of motion video; 1,000 high-res still images, each with a minute of audio; and 50,000 pages of text. DVI uses the YUV system, which is also used by the European PAL color television system.

The Y channel encodes luminance and the U and V channels encode chrominance. For DVI, we subsample 4-to-1 both vertically and horizontally in U and V, so that each of these components requires only 1/16 the information of the Y component. This provides a compression from the 24-bit RGB space of the original to 9-bit YUV space. The DVI concept originated in 1983 in the inventive environment of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, then also known as RCA Laboratories. The ongoing research and development of television since the early days of the Laboratories was extending into the digital domain, with work on digital tuners, and digital image processing algorithms that could be reduced to cost-effective hardware for mass-market consumer television.