Community-Driven DVI Mixing Hardware: Toby Answers Questions

Finally, “mixing” doesn’t have to be synonymous with “S-Video/composite”: DVI-grade mixing at affordable-by-human prices is coming. We were already thrilled by Toby *Spark’s effort to lead a community-driven DVI hardware mixer effort. But tantalizing as the teaser was, it led to still more questions.

Toby has followed up with an extensive Q&A on his site. (Expect more details via CDM soon, as well.)

dvi mixer q&a

Among the highlights:

• Additive blend is planned(!)
• Tap buttons are coming
• DVI-D and VGA both will work
• V2.0 features may include goodies like Ethernet/OSC/MIDI and multiple processors

There’s also a good note here about resolution. Dual-link and higher resolutions are out — for now. But, really, is anyone complaining at this price? This is a huge leap from the current state of things.

Higher resolutions: The hardware can only go so high. There is a bandwidth limit and a line length limit, so while it can do 1920×1200, it can’t do 2400×600 which is actually fewer pixels. I’d love it to be otherwise, I have a major project that really needs that Triplehead at 800×600, let alone the requests for 3072 x 768 I’ve had! Still, triple 640×480, dual 1024×768 and straight 1920×1080 are such a leap from 720×576. Addressing this seems the obvious next step for a version two of the processor.

What’s remarkable to me is that the basis for all of this is existing, off-the-shelf hardware. Be sure to review the full text of Toby’s Q&A, plus our original story. This could be the start of something big.