• radostin04@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    Inaccurate meme - the white and red RCAs in composite typically don’t actually carry the left and right channels - usually, the white one is L+R, meaning both the left and right channels combined into one, and the red one is L-R, the difference between the right and left channels.

    This is done so that a mono television, which will only have a yellow and white port, will still be able to hear both audio channels, as opposed to having to completely miss out on one of them

      • TheRealLinga@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It’s so funny, I had the same reaction! Never quite understood it, just switched plugs until it worked. Then it got phased out and… decades later a meme brings light to my confusing childhood!

    • heftig@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Do you have a source for this? AFAICT this is untrue. Mono audio using just the white connector exists, but this depends on configuration and does not make the red connector a difference signal.

      • radostin04@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        I swear that I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere, but you are entirely right that I can’t find a source. Maybe it was some weird device I used a long time ago? Regardless, sorry for not doing my research before posting

        • orsetto@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The signal in fm radio works like you described. Poor fm, declassified to just some weird device :(

    • chinpokomon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The video cable does a similar trick with how it supports color. This is why S-Video was superior to composite video until component came along. S-Video split the intensity and color into two signals and then component split the color further into a blue difference and a red difference. If you only wanted black and white, you didn’t need to use the color signals and the image would degrade to a monochrome representation.

      The composite video, with only one video signal wire, was similar to what was received over the antenna, with the broadcast signal separated from the carrier signal and the audio sub bands removed. It was the video signal with the color signal still combined. The progression from Antenna -> Composite -> S-Video -> Component -> DVI-I -> DVI-D -> HDMI -> Display Port has been an interesting one. The changes in the digital realm have been less about the image quality, the digital signal can either be read or not, and more about the bandwidth and how much data can be sent, aka resolution and framerate. Those first four transitions in particular had significant impact on the image quality.

    • rektifier@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      This must be BS or a regional thing. All the RCA ports I’ve seen in North America are labeled L and R, not L+R and L-R.

      • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I use those on my speakers and I can flip left/right stereo if I flip the cables. I think that confirms that they don’t have both in one I think.

      • radostin04@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s possible that it might only be a thing in PAL regions - I’d try, but I don’t have anything that uses composite to try now.

        • OADINC@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          I can confirm that everything that uses component and L/R that I have used in my life (born in 2001 in the Netherlands, so PAL) has separate L and R channels. I have confirmed this with my multimeter before.

    • hDGGgrLpg8nEucjxWnJz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I appreciate you starting this comment with ‘Inaccurate meme’. I think it should become a thing. Really helps me know to buckle in for something good

  • BudgetBandit@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    laughs in european

    I present to you: the Scart.

    Our gaming consoles came with it.

    We were clueless the first time we hooked up our N64 at gran-gran, since the old TV did not have a Scart connector, but we figured out that the Scart’s colored cables go in there.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Scart was amazing. RGB, composite, component, audio. All in one cable. Granted that cable and connector were enormous, but one cable nonetheless.

      • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        SCART was terrible.

        Theoretically it had all that in one cable, in practice it never did. You’d usually have 3-4 SCART ports on a TV, but not all ports accepted our output the same signals. There was no way to tell from the outside what the output or input from a SCART port so you either had to try different port combinations or look it up in the manual (if you had one). Most TV’s had one port that accepted s-video, on that accepted RGB and they usually accepted composite on all ports.

        Worse, not all cables had all 21 connections. If you were lucky you could tell because not all pins on the connector would be there (but this wasn’t necessary the case).

        Usually there was also one port on a TV that output the video from the tuner. This was used for analog pay TV decoders. You would hook it up to that SCART port and it would get the scrambled video from the TV and return the descrambled video over the same port.

        Also, due to the size and design of the connector it was almost impossible to insert it blindly. Inserting one into the back of one of those enormous CRT television was always a challenge.

  • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    VGA was so much better.

    The composite video output commonly seen on 1980s microcomputers couldn’t display high-resolution text without severe distortion making the text unreadable. This could be seen on the IBM PCjr, for example, where the digital RGB display it came with could display 80×25 text mode just fine, but if you connected a composite video display (i.e. a TV) instead, 80×25 text was a blurry, illegible mess. The digital video output was severely limited in color depth, however; it could display only a fixed palette of 16 colors, whereas the distortion in the composite video could be used to create many more colors, albeit at very low resolution.

    Then along came the VGA video signal format. This was a bit of a peculiarity: analog RGB video. Unlike digital RGB of the time, it was not limited in color depth, and could represent an image with 24-bit color, no problem. Unlike composite video, it had separate signal lines for each primary color, so any color within the gamut was equally representable, and it had enough bandwidth on each of those lines to cleanly transmit a 640×480 image at 60Hz with pretty much perfect fidelity.

    However, someone at IBM was apparently a bit of a perfectionist, as a VGA cable is capable of carrying an image of up to 2048×1536 resolution at 85Hz, or at lower resolutions, refresh rates of 100Hz or more, all with 24-bit color depth—far beyond what the original VGA graphics chips and associated IBM 85xx-series displays could handle.

    Also, the VGA cable system bundled every signal line into a single cable and connector, so no more figuring out which cable plugs in where, and it being so future-proof meant that, for pretty much the entire '90s, you could buy any old computer display and plug it into any old computer and it would just work.

    Pretty impressive for an analog video signal/cable/connector designed in 1987.

        • sdoorex@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          A good way to remember is that RGB on the same wire is a Composite signal whereas when they have their own cables they are sent as individual Components.

          • Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
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            1 year ago

            Composite is Red, White(Sometimes black) and Yellow.

            The best way to remember is Composite rhymes with shit.

    • ElHexo [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      RCA is just the connector, composite video is all the video signal chucked into one cable - component video splits it out into the colour components (getting the signal to that early HD level)