Hi,

I have a Hitachi 60vx500 and a dish 921 sat receiver. I have a 50' run from the stack to the tv, with component video all works fine. I picked up a 50' dvi cable from my local HT shop and now I get a lot of snow or interference. I just hooked up the cable along the floor to test so it is not near any source of noise. Is this an indication of a poor quality cable or something else? Unfortunately I do not have other components to substitute as a test. Thanks for any advice!

I have used 50ft. DVI cables with no problem, even in a noisy environment. Maybe the cable is not of sufficient quality or it is defective. Could it have been made by Monster?

I have even used two or three DVI cables in series with each other and it worked fine.
You know that doesn't help matters when there are additional connections.

I would be interested to find out what the solution to the problem will be, once you figure it out. Keep us posted.

Liberty makes a cool universal cable that you just order the specific ends to terminate. In your case, you could order the DVI ends and the 50ft of universal cable you need. Just an option.

Liberty's cable is DVI-A only NOT DVI-D

Well technically DVI has like a 16' foot max with out some sort of inline repeater/amp.

Check out [Link: btx.com] they have some cables that have transmit a DVI-D Single Link signal up to 49 feet without a repeater and can do 375' with repeaters but not usuing fiber or anything like that!

Hope this helps

Dave

I had this situation with a 65' run. We are using the JVC Pro HD2K and I was told by those engineers, that the only DVI cable that they guarantee would work at that length was a fiber optic DVI cable. Liberty made it for us and we install next week. The cost was just under $800.00. That sounds like a lot, but with the picture quality of a $30,000.00 projector on the line, that is not a gamble I was willing to take.

Hope this helps

Thanks for all the replies, I talked with the store today and they suspect a defective cable so they will replace it. I let you know how the new one works out.

Update:

I received my replacement cable last night and hooked it up. (all equipment cold) Same problems, I left it on and walked away to go and do something and when I came back 5-10 minutes later the problem was considerably better, not gone but much less than before. It seems that on some channels it's worse than others. I again tried it this morning, terrible for the first few minutes but gets much better as things warm up. I don't know if certain programing or colors on the program bring out the problem or is is something else. I tried changing settings, on 480i/P there is no problem, 720P/1080i I get the problem. Does anyone have any idea's?

If you are not having problems with 480 i/p, but are having issues with anything above that, than you are past the limit of what your source component can drive over DVI. DVI is technically only designed for short runs(under 15 feet or so). We have run 30 feet and had it both work and not work. The difference was the source component. We ran an HDLeeza over a 30 foot DVI cable and started getting snow at any resolution over 800x600, 1280x720 was come completely gone. In talking to the vendor, we found that the DVI port was not outputting enough signal to drive that distance. We ran the same model of 30 foot DVI cable from a Faroudja DVP-1000 and had no issues at any resolution up to 1280x720(PJ native, we didn't try higher than that). You can try a higher grade DVI cable and see if that helps(the inductance/capacitance/resistance of the cable can make this problem worse, some cables have slightly different specs over longer runs and therefore may work when others wont.) or you can use DVI to optical/optical to DVI convertor. For most people in this situation, the 5% gain from the DVI port isn't worth the money.(give or take, it all depends on where the best D/A convertor in your system is. It may look better letting the DSS convert the signal to analog versus the TV). Try setting the DSS on top of the TV and running a short DVI cable. Then you can A/B the two signals and see which looks best.

Jason

Thanks Jason,

I talked with another vendor on this matter, he thinks that the cable I have is 28ga which he says won't go over 30ft. He is sending me a 24ga 50' to try, I should have it by friday, I'll report back.

There is also the possibility that the DVI output from the sat receiver is not good, had similar problem with a 25ft DVI from a sat box to a JVC D-ILA, found problem in the sat box.

Sirroundsound,

Do you mean defective sat box or just that that model/brand had this problem?

You are beyond the distance that DVI supports (HDMI supports longer distances) and what you are reporting is EXACTLY what usually happens. You may find an another cable that will work, if not I recommend a fiber cable. A 20M DTrovision cable is $499 and supports up to 1080P. I recently used one of these and it worked flawlessly.

[Link: digitalconnection.com]

p.s. Be ware, you may find another cable that will work but better will still exhibit less severe sparklies.

Why is no one recommending the Gefen dual Cat 5 solution? I understand it works pretty good but have never tried it first hand.

Had success with the Key Digital Cable at 50 Feet. But I was either using the Geffen Switch or the DVDO iScan HD. Both of witch amp the signal.

Proflex DVI was dirt cheap by comparison and all we got was snow and Barney colored images.