DVI connections died out on personal computers in favour of HDMI and then DVI, but have remained well used in the professional large format display industry. In these applications, long cable runs are often used together with the need to sometimes manipulate what a computer’s graphics card “sees” is connected to it.

IBEX developed this product for one of the world’s big entertainment display companies. The key challenge to solve was that whilst digital DVI video signals can be carried over long cable connections between video source and display, the EDID data connection that allows a video source to learn what is connected to it can’t be.  This solution solved the problem by designing a module that would learn a display’s configuration when connected to it via a short cable, and then pretend to be the display to the DVI video source when the display was connected over a long cable run.

With that capability in place, it was also then possible to provide an API over a serial interface to allow the video configuration to be altered if desired. This can be a really useful trick to deal with funny incompatibilities between displays, graphics cards and drivers.

IBEX provided the complete solution, including designing this PCB to handle the very fast video signals and the splitting of the input DVI signal into both DVI and HDMI buffered video outputs.