Does DVI carry audio?

Question

Does DVI carry audio? My monitor has 4 HDMI inputs and I am going from a device that only has DVI output will the audio follow on the DVI to HDMI adapter?

Answer 1

No, DVI sources are video only.

DVI to HDMI adapters are for video only. If converting HDMI to DVI, you will loose any audio sent from a HDMI source.

If the source was DVI and you are converting to HDMI, there would be no audio there anyway.

Also as a note, HDMI to DVI and DVI to HDMI are just adapters, the two sockets are electrically pin compatible and nothing "smart" happens.

Answer 2

Some video cards with DVI ports do allow audio over HDMI with the supplied adaptor (my NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ by Asus for instance). In my case, I also had to connect the digital audio out (S/PDIF connector) from my motherboard to my video card, and even then, it only works on one of the two DVI ports. However, in general, do not expect this behaviour. If your device came with a DVI to HDMI adaptor, you may be in luck, but expect nothing (other than video) with third party adaptors.

Answer 3

I have the DVI-out from a PC plugged into an HDMI port on a TV and the sound travels via the regular 3.5mm plug stereo jack cable, with the TV having a setup page that tells it to use that audio input source when a specific HDMI input is selected so it may be worth checking whether your kit can do this.

Answer 4

If you have digital audio output, this device Digital-Optical-Toslink-Audio-Converter will merge it with the DVI video to generate a HDMI video/audio combination. If you only have analog audio, there are also converters (such as this one) to convert it to digital.