HDMI was introduced purposefully by the industry for home entertainment systems, which are used in private. More and more digital components are used for entertainment systems ( like DVD) and HDMI is developed to avoid the degradation during transforming analogous to digital or digital to analogous output. The film industry wanted to avoid the distribution of video data digitally, because of piracy reasons. Therefore High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection will be integrated in nearly every HDMI compatible system. The cable quality from the HDMI compatible system to the display is of most importance to achieve a fault free data transfer. HDMI 1.2 and DVI cables achieve a data transfer rate of 5 Gbits/second.

DVI cables or digital visual interface is an interface for video data transmission and has become a common standard for the connection of high-quality TFT displays to the graphics card, in the computer area. There are some televisions in the home entertainment system world, which process over a DVI entrance and can receive digital video data from DVD players and personal computers. Because of the full digital transmission, DVI has much more advantages in opposite of VGA and SCART cables (analogue transmission).

There are several types of DVI :

DVI-I (integrated, that means it can transfer analogue and digital data)

DVI-D (digital, only digital data transfer)

DVI-A (analogue, only analogue data transfer)

The quality of the video output is dependent of the quality of all components of the system (DVD-player/PC, cable length/quality, television/monitor).

DVI can transmit video data with a resolution of up to 2560 x 1600.