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submitted 11 months ago by 3FingersOfMilk@lemm.ee to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[-] radostin04@pawb.social 173 points 11 months 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

[-] Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 11 months ago

Wow, Til I guess. Never ever thought that this is what actually it is for.

[-] normalmighty@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

That makes so much sense! I never understood it, and it became irrelevant before I worked it out.

[-] TheRealLinga@sh.itjust.works 9 points 11 months 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 12 points 11 months 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 10 points 11 months 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

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[-] chinpokomon@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months 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.

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[-] ChapolinColoradoNZ@lemmy.world 85 points 11 months ago

Transcription:
Audio Right + Composite Video
Composite Video
Audio Right + Audio Left

[-] Mothra@mander.xyz 24 points 11 months ago

Thank you. Guess I must be a HDMI kid, who would have known.

[-] danc4498@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

Audio Right + Composite Video

Is that the guy that cut his ear off?

[-] LuckyLu@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

Vincent van Gogh, yes.

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[-] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 45 points 11 months ago

Pretty sure Van Gogh wasn't deaf in that ear though.

[-] Son_of_dad@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

Things probably sounded weird there though. Lots of whooshing.

[-] FarFarAway@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

Definitely. A piercing in my conch, was enough to give me some mildly annoying tinnitus for years.

Can't imagine if my ear was just...gone.

[-] Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Weird that your vagina would do that

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 6 points 11 months ago

His GF could whisper in his ear all the way from across town.

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[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 38 points 11 months ago

gamerz like me:

Red, Blue and Green Component cables

[-] BudgetBandit@sh.itjust.works 37 points 11 months 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 12 points 11 months 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 14 points 11 months 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.

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[-] Kratos@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 11 months ago

This is actually a pretty helpful diagram for when I inevitably forget which color does what

[-] Chais@sh.itjust.works 28 points 11 months ago

Not even the SCART kids get it.

[-] JJhonson@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago
[-] zebibit@sopuli.xyz 27 points 11 months ago

Ahh SCART, the beafiest connector. Feels like you're plugging/unplugging a nuclear power plant.

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[-] dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 11 months ago
[-] dunestorm@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Americans and their NTSC!

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[-] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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.

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[-] fury@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago
[-] bighatchester@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

I remember Christmas day getting a ps1 pulling out the cables and realizing that my tv didn't have the right ports and had to wait a couple of days to play it since the stores where closed and I couldn't buy one of those cables that connected to where the cable tv goes . Then getting stuck at the first section of tomb raider 2 for the next couple of days ...

[-] darvocet@infosec.pub 13 points 11 months ago

This is RCA. Wasn’t composite early HD with RBG-RW?

[-] Davel23@kbin.social 21 points 11 months ago

You're thinking of component. The two are (or were) frequently mixed up.

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[-] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 11 points 11 months ago

Channel 03 gang represent!

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[-] SirBwennan@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago
[-] Contend6248@feddit.de 13 points 11 months ago

Yellow is video, red and white are left and right audio

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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
1799 points (96.5% liked)

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