The problem with RCA cables wasn’t the colors, it was the fact that the back of the tv was huge and you really wanted to not have to get back there. HDMI you can install by feel
You can? I can't. They have to be perfectly aligned, and I can't get HDMI or DP cables to connect without visually seeing the outlet and plug.
It’s a pain in the ass and I usually fail, but sometimes it works. Though far more importantly, it’s easier to get behind a flat screen with a swivel base than a big crt. RCA cables were on their way out when bigger tvs stopped weighing so damn much and taking up so much depth
It's tricky but it is doable, unlike with RCA where you have to plug in 3 identical connectors with the only identifier being the color.
Also some devices would have like 5 sets of these connectors. You'd be playing around with the remote and plugging and unplugging stuff until you found the right one.
I miss the silver plastic era of AV equipment. Like in the mid-to-late 2000s when every TV was made of silver plastic, and it had that set of composite jacks under a flap on the front, so you could temporarily plug things in, like when your buddy brought his PS2 over. There was a button near the channel and volume buttons that switched between inputs, and it didn't take a digital act of congress to figure out which setting would get it to display on the TV.
Now everything is a black rectangle with bullshit software and almost two HDMI ports in the back, except one has the sound bar plugged into it, and the labels are stamped into the black plastic and not painted on, and with the shadows behind the television you can't read them. And it doesn't work when plugged in anyway. Its easier to just not have friends so that you never have to plug other electronics in. Stare at your phones alone.
I agree with all of this, except I'd say good riddance to the silver plastic. 😅
And it doesn't work when plugged in anyway.
What shit ass displays are you using?
So just don’t use the built in software. I don’t have any of my TVs connected to the internet or use their built in OS. I have a couple of Apple TVs plugged in and run everything off that. Never even set the things up beyond plugging them in and switching to HDMI 1.
There’s also the Chromecast TV if you use Android.
If you use a separate smart tv device like those, then the only thing you need to care about on the TV itself is resolution, refresh, and number of ports. Or if you want to spend a chunk of change then you can look into things like OLED. But the separate devices make the TV OS irrelevant.
And that flap broke on every tv you had, so they all had the connectors exposed and hella ugly
My plastic flap is still intact. Probably because I only ever had it open since I couldnt be bothered to use the rear ports.
When I was 8 or so I watched three old ladies one of whom was my great aunt try to figure out how to connect a DVD player to a tv and just couldnt. I even told them to stick to the same row for all the cables but noooo I was a kid and they knew better, I was sent to my room. Twenty minutes later they figured it out, im 24 and still fucking annoyed at that shit.
This is why I treat kids with respect and understanding. Everyone I meet may know something I've never even considered, and it's worth the time to at least hear them out. It also means that kids tend to trust and respect me without me needing to try to assert any authority, so that's good.
I'm envious! They at least try. My mom usually buys something new, continues to use the old one till it breaks or not at all (if I don't intervene). Because attaching a hdmi cable and power cord is too much hassle to even start thinking about. I've only last week connected her old cd player and amplifier that was still standing there after she moved 3 years ago. I would do it sooner but she even hates it when I start doing. Oh and not like she's actually going to use the audio equipment.. Radio on the TV sounds just as good, obviously.. Ah when she was moving I discovered she had a whole new stereo set still in boxes that she never bothered to even unpack! You know, in case the one she wasn't already using died or something..
Boomers.
Nope, silent generation.
Parents being dicks to kids because "ow, my pride!" Is SUCH a pet peeve. Sorry you had to deal with that, broski
I mean to be fair, usually these were tucked away in the back of a heavy, wooden TV cabinet where it was dark and difficult to reach into to match the colours, even with a torch; and you couldn’t just feel your way around the back to plugging them in because they all felt the same.
The best part was the color coding. You'd crawl back there and hook it up and your grandparents would look at you like you were a wizard
Username checks out
They were faking it. When I was 12, I was pretty smart with tech, but I was not allowed to touch my grandpa's projector. (It's because if you didn't turn it off properly, the bulb would burn out).
He also did some work with ibm back in the 80s, and he didn't really like kids, so that might have something to do with it.
Europeans: is this something I'm too SCART to understand?
What? We have these in the European countries (Not "Europe")
Anything during the 90s to early 00s sold in Europe came with a SCART connector as the main AV connector. If it wasn't a direct-from-the-unit SCART cable, there would have been an adapter block to turn the RCA into SCART.
It wasn't uncommon for cheap TVs to only have RF and SCART.
Also "is this something I'm too X to understand" is a meme format, I'm aware of other connectors.
If I may interject here, but in actuality the system users are using is not, in fact, “Linux” but is actually GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux
Component, composite, s-video and stereo sound in one cable. Although it did mean that you'd have to be careful because a cable to something like a PS2 might only implement the lowest quality of them.
The struggle was, when the power was already attached and not easily reached without moving furniture and you had to switch something, thus trying to this without seeing.
Idk about everyone else but these were heavy-ass blocks of metal and plastic that were placed on these tiny-ass desks that felt like they'd tip over if I turned them around enough. I literally had to put my head against the wall to be able to see between the little gap I had to work with. lol
They're often too tight or too loose, and you have to reach behind closets so you can't see the color to match, and you have to put them in at weird angles.
I haven't used a single TV/receiver back in the day that worked first try. You'd have to twist that one port, pull the other one out slightly, or constantly try to push it upwards to get a good signal. Kids really don't know how good they have it with HDMI.
I completely forgot about that but youre right. I remember plugging these cables in at my aunts house and needing to balance a vhs tape on them to apply down pressure so the signal on the tv wasnt black and white.
The struggle was to get the wires and to plug different devices, with differents standards, between them.
Today just go amazon, eBay, I don't know what else, and you get directly the good line, with the good input/output.
Today the standardization is also well done.
Its just plug n play literraly.I came into things right when they were well established. Composite and component were so reliable right before HDMI replaced it
Just do it in alphabetical order. (R)ed, (W)hite, (Y)ellow. If it doesn't work, do it reverse because it's upside down. Two tries max.
That would be great it that was standard, too many times i came across a tv that had the audio channels reversed.
Damn that's smart
Oh, there's the problem... this TV has 3 inputs aligned vertically so I've plugged each cable into the video spot of 3 different inputs...
Time to power clean 100lbs of CRT back into a dedicated piece of furniture!
Imagine not being part of the SCART masterrace
Kinda sounds like an accident you make in your pants.
Brings back memories trying to plug in a SCART on the back of a TV and it never being the right way around
SCART never caught on in the US. I still haven't seen one in person.
This has nothing on component. Bring me that dual red connectors while trying to figure out which one was video or audio.
Nah uh parrallel and serial ports were worse because you have to screw the little feet in
I remember trying to plug them in and feeling like I'm screwing it in, and letting pressure off and it just flops out. Break time.
And some asshole tightened those with screwdriver and you'd kill your fingers trying to open it
And then you get the people who rip the connector out because they don't understand screws
Those are the best connectors. The only challenge is when the audio is black instead of white and red.
Good thing this person doesn't seem to remember component cables. There was FIVE separate connectors! The horror. 😨
And two of them were red.
🤣 How did I forget that!
Look at Mr Richie Rich here with his component cables, we had RF boxes and liked it.
💪
⚡
SCART
Something you USonians etc. may have had to go without lol.
i can't decide if i'm more jealous of SCART connectors or real healthcare
😆
I worked at Best Buy and you'll be amazed at how many people couldn't figure that out. I was also a genius for showing my in-laws how to select input to display their dvd player.
Wait, you can select it?
I've scrolled past this meme countless times, but somehow I didn't think of this before now: What does an composite video signal sound like?Anyone have the hardware to test it out and record the sound for me?
I've opened serial terminals to serial mice, and I've abused /dev/dsp with random binaries I've fancied at the moment, but it never dawned on me to plug the red or white RCA jack into the yellow port in the mame of science, and now I only have audio RCA..
EDIT: Composite video, not s-video
S-video was a mini DIN connector which wouldn't have fit into one of these RCA jacks.
If you'd put composite video (the yellow RCA cable in this setup) into one of the audio jacks, pretty much all TVs would not do anything with it as an incompatible signal. If they actually tried to turn it into something, it wouldn't be audible. Composite video generates a signal at something like 5-10Mhz, human hearing tops out around 20Khz (250-500x lower)
You can always drag out the signal to frequency shift it or something similar. It's done all the time in astronomy as an example to create visualizations.
Waveform example here;
https://www.ques10.com/p/26463/sketch-composite-video-signal-waveform-for-at-leas/
http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs150/sp99/sp99/project/compvideo.htm
In the worse quality TV, putting the composite video into an audio line would make the speakers do a short distorted buzz, then cutoff. The higher quality TVs won't even flinch. Their internal processing was fast enough to detect the wrong thing was connected, that the signal modulation never even made it to the amplifier. But to our ears it was probably just a bunch of electronic farts.
If I remember correctly it does not make ant sound. Another commenter says its due to advanced audio processing.
I do t m ow what it sounds da like but i know what it looks like. It’s basically modulating for every line of your TV high is bright and low is black with a marker for each line.
I can't comment on how it sounds but I can recommend video feedback synthesis!
Unless you only had component connections then you had to plug the Yellow into the Green port.
Yes, seriously: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3008/~/unable-to-locate-a-yellow-video-input-on-the-tv
Also, don't pick the wrong red.
If you get the hang of this, quantum chromodynamics are going to be like a walk in the park.
Lol love this
Back when radio shack was there to help you figure out how to connect the thing to the other thing. The usual problem was you had the one multi-colored thing, and the thing it was supposed to connect to did not have matching colors or matching anything at all.
The only one that was hard was RGB. Any only because it had 2 reds and some cables didn't distinguish which red was which.
You have to do it without looking tho. That said, I actually found them easier than hdmi. With hdmi, even if I have it the right way I sometimes think it's the wrong way because it isn't aligned properly.
wasnt about getting the colors right (which was a challenged trying to get cables connected in tight confines..) it was about how fucking tight those sockets were, and the closer the plugs were, the tighter they were by some bizarre happenstance, so ones super tight up against eachother like that would be near impossible to shove in, especially in cramped confines that you typically had to work in.
Lol
I had two pieces of equipment to connect and when I matched the colors it wouldn't work. I had to swap two of the colors. I think they misprinted the colors on the unit.
Fr real. Also, am I old now? I'm not even eligible for jail yet.
The real struggle was explaining the input button to your parents afterwards, and how your video games did not break the TV.
I'm sure the struggle the meme referred to was the inferior quality of composite video.
#betacamgang
Downvoted by #svhsgang no doubt. You know your format was never pro.
The real struggle (for me) was mixing up VGA and Serial
