Video Interface Port

[Veland]

On all my video cards i have something called a Video Interface Port. The naming is slightly differnt, but as far as I can tell, it's all the same thing. The cards in question is an old Asus Geforce256, an older ATI All-in-wonder PRO and a brand new, extremely cheap SiS thing that I bough just to experiment with dual display.

No my question is what this connector (normally a row of pins on the card) can be used for! My Geforce got video in, can I use this connector to display this on the SiS card? Or du you need cards matched to a chipset/producer? Anyone have any info?

 

[Dark Illusion]

I think you get a cable when you 1st bought the card. It's for video-in, stereo-in and mayb s video-in too. Things you need for Video Capture.

My AIW Radeon has one too. At first I thought it was s video-in but later found out the pins were placed differently.

 

[SP]

Right off hand I can't give you all the details about the VIP ports but basically it's a port to connect video overlay devices. That is a device that produces a video signal that can be overlayed by your video card onto the screen. That would include devices like Mpeg or DVD decoder cards. Anyway, it's not for video capture (as in recording video) and you can't use it for that. For that your video card needs somekind of video encoder chip on it. Actually to be honest about it I don't know if there were ever really any devices that used this port. I think it's more one of those things that never really caught on. Furthermore I think they changed the spec at some point and there was a later VIP 2.0 specification that somehow differed from the original. So, basically if you ever run across any device that makes use of it you'll know it and it will likely tell you in the manual to connect it to this port.