modern TVs and composite video

[Dave Plowman (News]

I've tried a couple of those analogue to HDMI convertors. Neither worked. So make sure you can get a refund if this is the case for you.

HDMI can be very fussy.

[Fredxx]

SCART also provides a connection for Y/C video, RGB video, 2-way audio and data. Hence the number of pins. If it was just for composite video

19 out of the 21 pins would be redundant.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Not so. Officially SCART was composite or RGB. Although some were bodged for S-Video.

Components was really a pro broadcast tape thingie - as you can use lower bandwidth signals for the colour signals. But plenty TVs used it too - as SCART wasn't a US standard.

[Mark Carver]

As the video is encoded in component (Y, R-Y, B-Y) form in DVDs and digital telly (DVB-*), rather than R,G,B  it actually makes more sense to use the former for interface to the telly, rather than de-matrix to RGB (though that has to eventually happen inside the telly anyway).

[Dave Plowman (News]

or even analogue ;-)

[Fredxx]

I can assure you that colour CRT tubes are driven with RGB signals. The idea of using an additional and unnecessary stage of converting to colour difference signals is utterly pointless.

[Mark Carver]

Well yes, of course the CRT is fed RGB , but the output of the PAL decoding is Y, R-Y, B-Y, so there's dematrixing to RGB happening in the telly anyway ?

[Martin Brown]

It was still inferior to the separates and almost as clunky.

>

[Fredxx]

Yes, it does in a TV.

It is just that the native signals are RGB and different signals Y, B-Y and R-Y are artificial constructs to reduce bandwidth. Every time signals are matrixed and de-matrixed, in general, fidelity is lost.

[Mark Carver]

Yes, though that fidelity is largely lost at the encoding end anyway. For PAL, DVB formats, and DVD everything starts life as Y, R-Y, B-Y before being encoded or A-D'd etc.

Within the broadcast chain, the signals become '4:2:2 component' (and therefore the chroma is bandwidth restricted) within the camera base station (although 4:4:4 is normally available for feeding to mixers for chromakey use).

Having the set top box or DVD player outputting in Component doesn't necessarily need to add to the number of conversion iterations, it just moves them into the telly.

[The Natural Philosopher]

be surprised how much mechanical items like sockets cost.

[Andrew]

You mean 'used to provide' surely. Since they overhauled their website in favour of the phablet brigade, there is far less useful data compared with about 4+ years ago.

Their current incarnation is awful. When you select next page (on a PC) is shows the next page of data fairly quickly then it blanks out a large area of the screen, downloads advertising stuff that was already flashing about 1/3 down the page and then redisplays all the data that was already there. It makes me quite seasick after a few minutes.

[Andrew]

No such thing as a digital terrestrial tuner. The signal from the transmitter is analogue and the TV tuner accepts this analogue signal and then creates the digital signal inside the set. Ditto an STB for 'digital'.

[Andrew]

I got a wonderful Sony S760 bluray player in the local BHF charity shop for £30. Not a mark on it, almost like new and the back panel has just about every type of connector you could wish for, and they are all gold-plated too. I think the original new cost was £330

[Andrew]

But not SACD discs :-(. Sony players used too, as did the PS3? up until about 6 years ago. Now that format seems to have died a death, probably because of streaming.

[Fredxx]

No, composite video has nothing like bandwidth you might expect with

4:2:2 video which is normally associated with digital sources such as MPEG-2 as used in DVDs.

Which is undesirable. An example is the variable bandwidth of chroma, and the subsequent delay of luma to suit. While broadcast standards are well defined, other sources may not, and a very good example is a DVD source. In fact the data from the DVD could be easily digitally matrixed directly into RGB after decoding with minimal error.

[Mark Carver]

I agree, but I didn't think we were discussing anything to do with composite video interfacing here ? (Other than component and RGB interfaces are superior)

[Adrian Caspersz]

I think you mean, replaced with HDMI.

Fibre, all-though it sounds whizzy and new-age, doesn't have the bandwidth to use uncompressed movie audio streams. The TosLink standard never got an upgrade.

It'll do for Dolby Digital/DTS (and of course plain old PCM), but decent multichannel home cinema has gone beyond that now.

[Tim Streater]

What the telly picks up is Shirley a digital stream modulated onto a carrier, the latter being at 700 or 80MHz or so or wherever they broadcast these days. When demodulated I'd then expect that to produce a bitsream at about 24Mbps, which can contain several channels, depending on how the 24Mbps is allocated. How else do you get several TV channels on one DVB channel?

[Dave Plowman (News]

Going back a bit, but think my first colour set, a Philips G6, used colour difference drive?