Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. It's time for a classic episode. This episode originally published on February third, two thousand and fifteen. It is titled tech Stuff looks at TV Connectors. Then the title pretty much says it all. It's all about the various connectors to television's. Uh, there have been a ton of different ones over the years, and um, a lot of them are are essentially obsolete now. So you're gonna be hearing about some stuff that you know, you just don't need to worry about unless you happen to have a vintage TV on your hands. But let's go back and listen to this classic episode. I did have a topic suggestion for you all that came to my mind when I was hooking up the TV I got for Christmas. I'd like to think I'm tech savvy, but my head spins when I'm asked what's the difference between different connectors like H D, M, I, R C, A V G, a USB, A V slash, F, etcetera. Like most consumers, I don't really know the difference outside of being told one device requires another connector. It would be informative if tech stuff covers the most common connectors, trying to explain the differences and why certain ones were adopted and later discarded. It it'd certainly helped my understanding of the issue. Well, Daniel, that's what this episode is all about. Guys. We're gonna look at TV connectors and kind of demystify things, explain what all the different ones are, at least the ones that you're most commonly going to encounter with televisions these days. I'm even looking a little bit beyond the United States with a couple of these. So there's gonna be some connectors I'm going to mention that people, depending upon what region they're and may never have seen and may never encounter. But I thought it would be fun to kind of go through them all. Now, I'm going to begin with analog connections. Now, analo connectors transmit video signals through continuously varying the voltage across that connection. That's how they generate the images you see. And you've got different elements that make up an image, the brightness of the screen and the color. Those are the two main ones, but they're synchronization issues as well. There's a lot of stuff that has to come through for you to get video, and of course audio is another component. Some of these connectors also carry audio. Some of them carry video only, and you have to use a separate connector to get audio into your television or from your television to some other component like an amplifier. So let's begin with one of the most common, the radio frequency connectors are f connectors. That's the oldest way to transmit video signals to your television using radio frequency power. And these are coaxial cables. Now you might wonder what does coaxial cable mean. We've seen coaxial cable, you probably are able to imagine one off the top of your head, but what does that actually mean. So the term coaxial actually means that you have a a form linear form in this case, because it's a cable that has uh multiple substances that are all aligned along the same axis. Ultimately, this means that you've got kind of a concentric circles. So you have a core and then an outer layer, and then a layer even further out from that and then whatever you know, it can keep going as many times as you need, depending upon what you're doing. With co axial RF cable, you're talking about essentially three main layers and then a coating. So you have a wire conductor as the core of the cable. Around that is the dielectric, which is an insulating medium, and around that is the outer conductor. Then on the very outside you've got the protective layer that coats the cable and make sure that it doesn't get damaged. It doesn't end up causing interference with other cables, it doesn't get interference from other things. It's insulated somewhat. Uh So, the physical dimensions and the material you use to make those different layers is what determines the impotence and the attenuation of the cable at different frequencies. What does that mean. Impotence is the effective resistance of an electric circuit or component to alternating current. That's dependent upon the combined effects of ohmic resistance and reactants. And I could go into more detail, but really that could be its own episode to go into the basic terms of uh of electricity and voltage that sort of thing. If you guys think that that would be a really fun or interesting podcast right to me and let me know. I'll be glad to go through that and kind of explain what all those terms mean, because they can be pretty confusing if you're not familiar with them. Attenuation, on the other hand, that refers to loss, in this case signal loss frequency laws. So in an ideal situation, if you have a cable and you're putting a signal into the cable, you know you're putting a certain amount of energy into one end. Ideally you would get the same amount out on the other end. But that's not the way the world works. We actually lose some of that power that goes into the cable, and the longer the cable, the more loss you tend to encounter. Other factors also play a role, including the materials you use. So this is where a lot of those high end cable manufacturers really try and and sell their products. They say that the materials they use are much higher quality and you're going to suffer much less loss as a result. While that might be true over great distances, in general, for the average consumer, the length of cables that we typically need somewhere in the three to nine ft range. It's really negligible. It's it's not really detectable unless you're talking about super cheap cables that don't have very good shielding, in which case you could get a lot of interference. So in the US we use the F connector, which is standard in many parts of the world, although there are other types of connectors as well, and a lot of the old peripherals that you would connect to televisions, like older video game consoles, connect through an OURF connector. It's also used for terrestrial antenna and cable connections. And uh, you know it's called our radio frequency connectors because it's actually using radio frequency power. Um, that's that's the key to that. It's pushing those radio frequencies through a cable as opposed to through it through the air. Now, next, the next most common that I would say you you'd encounter on the back of an average television is composite video also known as r c A connectors. Now, this is a video connector. Typically it's yellow. Will also find it usually next to red and white r c A connectors. The red and white, however, are for audio. The red is for the right channel and the white is for the left channel. Sometimes it's black, not white, but it's still the left channel. The yellow connector is just video. Composite video is an analog video transmission cable. It can carry video at standard definition resolution, but not higher. So you're not going to get high definition or beyond using this kind of these kind of cables. UM, and all the video information is encoded on a single channel. Uh. That means that the quality of that picture, it's probably not gonna be as high as using alternate means of delivering a signal to your TV. UM. That's where a lot of the other connectors that came up have kind of gotten the advantage, at least in the marketing world by being said to be greater quality, like S video or separated video. Now, that's a connector that carries two encoded video signals. One is for the brightness or essentially black and white, and the other is for the color of the image. Uh. The cable also transmits in standard definition, but it's better video quality than composite, it's just not at high definition levels of resolution. So a lot of people got confused about that when S video first came out, including myself. I was not familiar with S video and this was when really your three options were composite video, S video, and component video. Those were the three main ones, and uh S video look like it was pretty easy because it was one cable, although it only carries video, not audio. Um so you'd have to use separate cables to get audio to and from your television. Uh So, if you were hooking up a VCR, for example, you would need to have audio uh our c A connectors to get that to your TV. Well S video like it was easy because it was a single video cable, and it was supposed to be higher quality than composite, but it wasn't really explained well at least not to me, that it wasn't high definition. It was still standard definition. So yes, it was technically a better picture, but it wasn't a higher resolution. We'll be back with more about TV connectors in just a moment, but first let's take this quick break. Moving on with more analog choices. We've got v g A or video graphics array. Now this is not common on a lot of TVs, but there are some televisions that have it. Cables that are v g A cables have three rows of pins. There are fifteen pins total on the connectors. It's meant to connect a PC and a display together, so not necessarily a television, but some form of video display like a monitor. But some TVs do have them, and they allow for the transmission of analog display resolutions to a television, and it could carry high definition resolutions to the display. So this one could actually do a higher resolution and say s video or composite, then we've got component video. These are the red, green, and blue connectors that you might see on the back of some televisions. And you might think that those different colors indicate that each cable carries only one color to the TV, because if you are familiar with the way television's work, you know that there pixels and TVs are made up of subpixels of red, green, and blue, and that it's the combination of red, green, and blue in different ways that creates the various images we see on television and the different colors we see on television. So surely component video that's red, green, and blue carries those colors, right, Not exactly. The green connector is actually in charge of carrying the video image in black and white, so the brightness as well as the synchronization data, the other two connectors carry the color information, but essentially green is left up to the brightness as well. It's not their analog video cable, but this one can carry singles of up to ten a DP or higher. So this is truly able to give a high definition video feed to your TV. And honestly, it's the kind that I prefer over all others. And I'll explain why in a little bit. But I need to talk about one other analog connection that is not found here in the United States. This is one that if you are in the U s you probably have not seen one of these, but if you live in Europe you probably have, and that is SCART S C A R T. So unless your TV is an old set from Europe, you're not gonna see this. It was another analog transmission cable. It has twenty one pens and carries both video and audio and originated in France, which is why its full name. And please forgive me because I'm going to butcher. This is the Sindicat de Constructors Dapa real Radio. I should roll my art on that one radio receptor de Tevisier. And for all of my French speaking friends out there, um Monsieur mid Dame Jan Papa. All right, so those are your analog connections. Those are the ones that are going to create the video through varying that voltage. Then we have digital connections now. These deliver video as a bit stream, so essentially zeros and ones. Right, this is not a variable voltage delivery system. It's purely digital. Now, there's a common misconception that digital these days is better than analog are Some people go the other way, saying analog is always better than digital. The digital is better than analog argument goes something like this. It says, since televisions these days are digital devices, they're not analog TVs. We have digital TVs now. If you're buying a new one anyway, and since a lot, if not most, if not all, of the main ways we get content these days is also digital, then you want to have digital connectors and digital cables so that you never have to convert from digital to analog and back to digital again. So in other words, if I'm watching a Blu Ray and I want to connect the Blu Ray player to my TV, I should use a digital cable because that's a digital form factor or digital format rather. Uh. And then it'll go through a digital cable to my digital TV and never have to convert to analog where I might have some signal loss or artifacts or some other problem. That's the common misconception. Uh. The reason I call it a misconception is not because of the conversion issue. That really is a thing, but conversion issues are a thing with pure digital as well, because every form of digital uh, information that will go to your TV is encoded in a different way, and these different encodings mean that they have to be decoded. You actually do have digital to digital conversions. Uh. It's it's not like every television can show every digital format and its native resolution. In fact, it's trying to show any type of data to the TV's native resolution, which often means it has to upraise something. In other words, it has to add an extra information to make up for the fact that the resolution of the incoming stream is not the same or is lower than the native resolution of the TV. That with that in mind, sometimes we get bad digital to digital conversions. There's digital error correction that's supposed to mediate this, but occasionally you get a set or a series of components that don't work so well together and it's it's a disappointing experience. So, in other words, just because we're moving to more digital formats and more digital set it doesn't necessarily mean digital cables are automatically better than analog. On the other side of this is the idea that analog is always better because digital is a series of zeros and one, so it's always going to be a step letter type thing. It's always going to have these these sharp drop offs at some point, no matter how large a uh bandwidth you're talking about. At some point it is either a zero or a one, whereas an analog system is a continuous signal, and therefore it is much more natural and free flowing, and you're going to get a much more warm or or satisfying experience from it, which maybe in the very earliest days of digital was true when we weren't really good at encoding, or we weren't using very good samples bit samples, But these days it's it's pretty much a bogus argument. I mean, there's we've reached a point where it's beyond the ability for a human to perceive the difference, assuming that you're using well calibrated equipment. Obviously, if you were to take one system and not calibrated very well, and you took another system and calibrated it extremely well, you're gonna notice the difference. But assuming a level playing field, you aren't really going to notice that difference. So really comes down to personal preference. So why did I say I like those, uh, those component cables so much as opposed to digital ones. Well, here's another thing that separates analog from digital. It's the potential for dr M measures such as high bandwidth Digital Content Protection or h d c P. Now, this is a form of copy protection that was created by Intel, and it's meant to prevent the copying of digital audio or video content across various devices. So, for example, but let's say that I have a Blu Ray player again, and let's say I've got a device that can burn to Blu ray, and I am a dirty, nasty pirate, and I decided I want to steal in a movie and distribute it on my own, or make copies, real cheap copies and sell them on the street. So I go out and I buy a copy of my favorite Blue Ray, which is of course Bio Dome with Polly Shore, and I put it into the system and I start making copies of well, I could just end up ruining the market obviously, and then Paul Shore would never experience that great career comeback that we're all hoping he has in the very near future. Uh. So, HDCP is meant to counteract that. It's supposed to prevent people from either sending hd CP content to unauthorized devices or two devices that have been hacked to allow for copying materials. So, in other words, if I've got my lew ray player and it's h d CP compliant, and I've hooked it up using something like an hd MY cable to another another peripheral, another system in order to try and copy the material that's being shown on that Blu ray player or being played by that Blu ray player. But because of that HDCP protection, it won't go to my hacked system or my unauthorized system, and I won't be able to make those copies. I'm prevented from doing it. Uh However, it's not entirely true. There's a hacked master key to h d CP that was leaked way back in two thousand ten, So technically you could end up with a computer that has this on it and you could end up recording stuff from other devices, and and you're using this master key. It fools the whole system into believing that you're using an authorized device, so there's no problem. However, this would essentially just record whatever was playing at that time on the Blu ray player or whatever other media device you happen to be talking about. It would not get the entire experience. So if I were copying that that Blu Ray, I would get the movie, but I wouldn't get the menus. I wouldn't get the added material. It would just be whatever was playing at that time. So there are other ways to actually hack or decrypt the protection on disks. Then that's pretty much what pirates concentrate on rather than just making a direct copy, because most people want the full experience as opposed to just the film. Although I don't know why, I mean biodom by itself obviously a work of art, uh at any rate, it's this DRM that has had a lot of people who prefer to have unfettered kind of control of their electronics up in arms. They disagree with it. They want to have a device where they can do whatever they want with it, especially if it means something like burning a copy of a a movie you own, or a music disc you own, whatever it may be, in order for you to have a backup for your own purposes. We have in the United States established that personal backups are not a copyright violation. You can do that. However, this is the sort of technology that prevents people from doing it. So while it's not illegal for you to make a backup copy, it is it can be illegal for you to circumvent the technology that prevents you from doing that, which is kind of crazy. And that's why a lot of home theater enthusiasts prefer the analog set up where you don't have this DRM issue. Then with things like hd M I, which i'll talk about in a second. That being said, we're seeing that a lot of a lot of systems, a lot of peripherals, a lot of television sets don't necessarily support these methods anymore, and you have to use things like hd M I. So we're kind of being pushed into that world whether we want it or not. And then go figure. We've got a bit more to say about TV connectors before we wrap up, But first let's take another quick break, all right, So there are other things that can limit your ability to use your devices. If you're using something like a connector that has hd c P on it sub sort of HDCP protection associated with it, for example, a limit on how many devices you might be able to hook up two, or how many displays you might be able to hook up to a single device. And this might not sound like it's a big deal, and for most consumers it probably isn't. But imagine that you own a sports bar and as part of the sports bar experience, you want to have televisions up all around the bar that are tuned to different channels to show the various sporting events that are going on at any given time, and you have them all connected to a satellite receiver. Well, if you're using something that has HDCP protection on it, which is sort of like saying a t M machine, uh, you are limited to how many of those devices you might be able to hook up to that satellite box. For example, a lot of the really popular ones have a limit of sixteen displays, which is a lot. I mean, if you were a regular consumer, that would be probably more than enough. I don't know anyone personally who owns more than sixteen televisions, but if you have a large restaurant, that might not be enough. And there are plenty of people who have said you could be doing everything legally. You know, you could be following all the rules, but the technology itself has artificial limitations put into place to protect against copyright violations, and it's affecting people who aren't even committing any sort of copyright violation. Okay, so that was a long preamble to get into the digital side, but it was important. And I should also say that while I prefer analog for those purposes, my own home system uses h d M I because I've got everything running to a centralized receiver to control things, and h d M I was just easier than having all these other analog cables that could get tangled up with each other. So maybe I'm a hypocrite, maybe I'm lazy. I'm probably both. Let's look at digital connectors and cables. First. There's display port, which is gonna sound weird to anyone who is pretty familiar with televisions because there are very few TVs that actually have a display port connector. In fact, the only one I am personally aware of is the Panasonic t C L six five W T six hundred and yes I did read that off because I can't just rattle it off from the top of my head. There may be others out there, but that's the only one I'm familiar with anyway. DisplayPort connectors are usually meant to connect various components to computer monitors, not to televisions. The display board cable can carry audio as well as video, which means it is useful for TVs. Your typical computer monitor doesn't have audio associated with it. Some do, but the typical ones don't. It also has the optional implementation of h d c P and includes dp CP also known as display Port Content Protection, which was designed by Phillips, so it has a greater bandwidth than hd M I could actually move more data in the same amount of time as an hd um I cable could or HDMI connector could, and it's also royalty free, which is unlike hd M I. There is a hefty fee in using h d m I. If you're a manufacturer and you want to incorporate it, you've got to pay the price in order to do it, whereas display port you don't. Strangely enough, though, DisplayPort is not the common connector that you find on televisions. That could change in the future, but hd m I has such a strong presence in the market right now it would really surprise me if that did happen. Next, you have d v I or Digital Visual Interface. Now, this is our hybrid entry. Technically, depending upon the connector and the cable, it can carry both analog and digital signals. It doesn't carry audio typically, although I've heard there are variations on this. It's a common standard in computer displays, but it can also be found on many televisions, and it can carry uncompressed digital video. HDCP integration is optional on d v I. Finally, we've got h d m I High Definition Multimedia Interface. UH. This also can transmit uncompressed video data, but it has the ability to include compressed or uncompressed digital audio as well. Hd M I can carry signals electrically identical to d v I, so you can have an adapter to switch from d v I to h d M I without loss and signal quality, which is useful if your television doesn't have a d v I input, but you're using equipment has a d v I output but no h d M I. So let's say I've got a DVD player and there's a d v I output that's an option, but I don't have an h d M I output. My television, however, only has hd MY inputs but no dv I input. I could use an adapter and it because the they're running on electrically identical signals, I could use this without any worry about signal loss or any conversion issues. Hd MY two point oh is capable of transmitting up to four K video at six D frames per second. And one cool thing. If you have hd MY cables that are high speed, that's that is they're called Category two cables. Your future proof for u h D. You don't have to purchase four K hd MY cables. Category two cables will be completely capable of carrying that signal. I'm sure there will be companies that market for k hd MY cable saying you want to have the best experience possible, don't buy into that. Category two will suit you just fine. Hd CP is mandatory and official hd MY technology. And finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about other audio ports that you might see on the back of a television. So there are two typical digital audio ports that you can find on TVs. One is the digital audio r c A port, which is typically orange. Now the it's gonna look a lot like those other r c A connectors. I was talking about the UH, the yellow, red, and white ones that you would associate with composite video. And then the two audio channels. In this case, it's a single channel, or not a single channel, but a single connector, and it's digital audio, so it would be a higher quality. You probably want to use that if you have the option. UH. But there are also are another type of audio port that's digital that you can use, and that would be the optical digital audio port. So that requires a special optic fiber cable that sends audio signals through pulses of light. The exact same information is being sent with either type of cable. It's just in one it's electrical impulses and the other it's UH it's photons. It's essentially, you know, light pulses, but it's the same information, it's just transmitted in a different way. Optical cables have some advantages over the UH, the the r c A connectors type being that you don't have to worry about outside interference radio interference, although again unless you're talking about a super long cable that has really poor shielding. You're probably not going to suffer any signal loss with your digital audio. Uh So it's not like it's a measurable advantage with optical fiber unless again, and you're talking about huge distances, because optic fiber doesn't have any loss over distance. However, if you do bend an optic fiber cable, you can end up damaging it and that could cause some issues. But uh, you know, I I wouldn't necessarily say one has advantages over the other. I would say it all depends on what your equipment can use. So if all of your equipment just has optical ports and no digital co exports for your audio, then obviously you need to go optical. You don't have any choice in the matter. So that's that's the range of the various types of connectors you're going to find on your typical televisions. There are some others that can pop up now and again. There are some things that you might find like a USB port, which I think Daniel mentioned at in his email. USB obviously is the universal serial bus. That's the the one that we're all familiar with. It's on all our computer RS. It's on lots of various mobile devices, though we tend to use different connectors for that, like micro or mini USB. But that's something that can carry both power and and data U two. So it's a useful system, but it's not one that I think most people associate with televisions. It can be if you have images on a thumb drive, you might be able to display it on your television. There are a couple of thumb drive like devices that can plug into USB ports on a television that give it extra capabilities, like Roku. They have a stick that you can plug in through the USB port that gives your television roku uh capabilities. It's pretty cool, but I don't often think of that as a connector, and that might just be my bias and play because I don't tend to use it. I use hd m I almost exclusively because it's the easiest. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff looking at TV connectors. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. It's time for a classic episode. This episode originally published on February third, two thousand and fifteen. It is titled tech Stuff looks at TV Connectors. Then the title pretty much says it all. It's all about the various connectors to television's. Uh, there have been a ton of different ones over the years, and um, a lot of them are are essentially obsolete now. So you're gonna be hearing about some stuff that you know, you just don't need to worry about unless you happen to have a vintage TV on your hands. But let's go back and listen to this classic episode. I did have a topic suggestion for you all that came to my mind when I was hooking up the TV I got for Christmas. I'd like to think I'm tech savvy, but my head spins when I'm asked what's the difference between different connectors like H D, M, I, R C, A V G, a USB, A V slash, F, etcetera. Like most consumers, I don't really know the difference outside of being told one device requires another connector. It would be informative if tech stuff covers the most common connectors, trying to explain the differences and why certain ones were adopted and later discarded. It it'd certainly helped my understanding of the issue. Well, Daniel, that's what this episode is all about. Guys. We're gonna look at TV connectors and kind of demystify things, explain what all the different ones are, at least the ones that you're most commonly going to encounter with televisions these days. I'm even looking a little bit beyond the United States with a couple of these. So there's gonna be some connectors I'm going to mention that people, depending upon what region they're and may never have seen and may never encounter. But I thought it would be fun to kind of go through them all. Now, I'm going to begin with analog connections. Now, analo connectors transmit video signals through continuously varying the voltage across that connection. That's how they generate the images you see. And you've got different elements that make up an image, the brightness of the screen and the color. Those are the two main ones, but they're synchronization issues as well. There's a lot of stuff that has to come through for you to get video, and of course audio is another component. Some of these connectors also carry audio. Some of them carry video only, and you have to use a separate connector to get audio into your television or from your television to some other component like an amplifier. So let's begin with one of the most common, the radio frequency connectors are f connectors. That's the oldest way to transmit video signals to your television using radio frequency power. And these are coaxial cables. Now you might wonder what does coaxial cable mean. We've seen coaxial cable, you probably are able to imagine one off the top of your head, but what does that actually mean. So the term coaxial actually means that you have a a form linear form in this case, because it's a cable that has uh multiple substances that are all aligned along the same axis. Ultimately, this means that you've got kind of a concentric circles. So you have a core and then an outer layer, and then a layer even further out from that and then whatever you know, it can keep going as many times as you need, depending upon what you're doing. With co axial RF cable, you're talking about essentially three main layers and then a coating. So you have a wire conductor as the core of the cable. Around that is the dielectric, which is an insulating medium, and around that is the outer conductor. Then on the very outside you've got the protective layer that coats the cable and make sure that it doesn't get damaged. It doesn't end up causing interference with other cables, it doesn't get interference from other things. It's insulated somewhat. Uh So, the physical dimensions and the material you use to make those different layers is what determines the impotence and the attenuation of the cable at different frequencies. What does that mean. Impotence is the effective resistance of an electric circuit or component to alternating current. That's dependent upon the combined effects of ohmic resistance and reactants. And I could go into more detail, but really that could be its own episode to go into the basic terms of uh of electricity and voltage that sort of thing. If you guys think that that would be a really fun or interesting podcast right to me and let me know. I'll be glad to go through that and kind of explain what all those terms mean, because they can be pretty confusing if you're not familiar with them. Attenuation, on the other hand, that refers to loss, in this case signal loss frequency laws. So in an ideal situation, if you have a cable and you're putting a signal into the cable, you know you're putting a certain amount of energy into one end. Ideally you would get the same amount out on the other end. But that's not the way the world works. We actually lose some of that power that goes into the cable, and the longer the cable, the more loss you tend to encounter. Other factors also play a role, including the materials you use. So this is where a lot of those high end cable manufacturers really try and and sell their products. They say that the materials they use are much higher quality and you're going to suffer much less loss as a result. While that might be true over great distances, in general, for the average consumer, the length of cables that we typically need somewhere in the three to nine ft range. It's really negligible. It's it's not really detectable unless you're talking about super cheap cables that don't have very good shielding, in which case you could get a lot of interference. So in the US we use the F connector, which is standard in many parts of the world, although there are other types of connectors as well, and a lot of the old peripherals that you would connect to televisions, like older video game consoles, connect through an OURF connector. It's also used for terrestrial antenna and cable connections. And uh, you know it's called our radio frequency connectors because it's actually using radio frequency power. Um, that's that's the key to that. It's pushing those radio frequencies through a cable as opposed to through it through the air. Now, next, the next most common that I would say you you'd encounter on the back of an average television is composite video also known as r c A connectors. Now, this is a video connector. Typically it's yellow. Will also find it usually next to red and white r c A connectors. The red and white, however, are for audio. The red is for the right channel and the white is for the left channel. Sometimes it's black, not white, but it's still the left channel. The yellow connector is just video. Composite video is an analog video transmission cable. It can carry video at standard definition resolution, but not higher. So you're not going to get high definition or beyond using this kind of these kind of cables. UM, and all the video information is encoded on a single channel. Uh. That means that the quality of that picture, it's probably not gonna be as high as using alternate means of delivering a signal to your TV. UM. That's where a lot of the other connectors that came up have kind of gotten the advantage, at least in the marketing world by being said to be greater quality, like S video or separated video. Now, that's a connector that carries two encoded video signals. One is for the brightness or essentially black and white, and the other is for the color of the image. Uh. The cable also transmits in standard definition, but it's better video quality than composite, it's just not at high definition levels of resolution. So a lot of people got confused about that when S video first came out, including myself. I was not familiar with S video and this was when really your three options were composite video, S video, and component video. Those were the three main ones, and uh S video look like it was pretty easy because it was one cable, although it only carries video, not audio. Um so you'd have to use separate cables to get audio to and from your television. Uh So, if you were hooking up a VCR, for example, you would need to have audio uh our c A connectors to get that to your TV. Well S video like it was easy because it was a single video cable, and it was supposed to be higher quality than composite, but it wasn't really explained well at least not to me, that it wasn't high definition. It was still standard definition. So yes, it was technically a better picture, but it wasn't a higher resolution. We'll be back with more about TV connectors in just a moment, but first let's take this quick break. Moving on with more analog choices. We've got v g A or video graphics array. Now this is not common on a lot of TVs, but there are some televisions that have it. Cables that are v g A cables have three rows of pins. There are fifteen pins total on the connectors. It's meant to connect a PC and a display together, so not necessarily a television, but some form of video display like a monitor. But some TVs do have them, and they allow for the transmission of analog display resolutions to a television, and it could carry high definition resolutions to the display. So this one could actually do a higher resolution and say s video or composite, then we've got component video. These are the red, green, and blue connectors that you might see on the back of some televisions. And you might think that those different colors indicate that each cable carries only one color to the TV, because if you are familiar with the way television's work, you know that there pixels and TVs are made up of subpixels of red, green, and blue, and that it's the combination of red, green, and blue in different ways that creates the various images we see on television and the different colors we see on television. So surely component video that's red, green, and blue carries those colors, right, Not exactly. The green connector is actually in charge of carrying the video image in black and white, so the brightness as well as the synchronization data, the other two connectors carry the color information, but essentially green is left up to the brightness as well. It's not their analog video cable, but this one can carry singles of up to ten a DP or higher. So this is truly able to give a high definition video feed to your TV. And honestly, it's the kind that I prefer over all others. And I'll explain why in a little bit. But I need to talk about one other analog connection that is not found here in the United States. This is one that if you are in the U s you probably have not seen one of these, but if you live in Europe you probably have, and that is SCART S C A R T. So unless your TV is an old set from Europe, you're not gonna see this. It was another analog transmission cable. It has twenty one pens and carries both video and audio and originated in France, which is why its full name. And please forgive me because I'm going to butcher. This is the Sindicat de Constructors Dapa real Radio. I should roll my art on that one radio receptor de Tevisier. And for all of my French speaking friends out there, um Monsieur mid Dame Jan Papa. All right, so those are your analog connections. Those are the ones that are going to create the video through varying that voltage. Then we have digital connections now. These deliver video as a bit stream, so essentially zeros and ones. Right, this is not a variable voltage delivery system. It's purely digital. Now, there's a common misconception that digital these days is better than analog are Some people go the other way, saying analog is always better than digital. The digital is better than analog argument goes something like this. It says, since televisions these days are digital devices, they're not analog TVs. We have digital TVs now. If you're buying a new one anyway, and since a lot, if not most, if not all, of the main ways we get content these days is also digital, then you want to have digital connectors and digital cables so that you never have to convert from digital to analog and back to digital again. So in other words, if I'm watching a Blu Ray and I want to connect the Blu Ray player to my TV, I should use a digital cable because that's a digital form factor or digital format rather. Uh. And then it'll go through a digital cable to my digital TV and never have to convert to analog where I might have some signal loss or artifacts or some other problem. That's the common misconception. Uh. The reason I call it a misconception is not because of the conversion issue. That really is a thing, but conversion issues are a thing with pure digital as well, because every form of digital uh, information that will go to your TV is encoded in a different way, and these different encodings mean that they have to be decoded. You actually do have digital to digital conversions. Uh. It's it's not like every television can show every digital format and its native resolution. In fact, it's trying to show any type of data to the TV's native resolution, which often means it has to upraise something. In other words, it has to add an extra information to make up for the fact that the resolution of the incoming stream is not the same or is lower than the native resolution of the TV. That with that in mind, sometimes we get bad digital to digital conversions. There's digital error correction that's supposed to mediate this, but occasionally you get a set or a series of components that don't work so well together and it's it's a disappointing experience. So, in other words, just because we're moving to more digital formats and more digital set it doesn't necessarily mean digital cables are automatically better than analog. On the other side of this is the idea that analog is always better because digital is a series of zeros and one, so it's always going to be a step letter type thing. It's always going to have these these sharp drop offs at some point, no matter how large a uh bandwidth you're talking about. At some point it is either a zero or a one, whereas an analog system is a continuous signal, and therefore it is much more natural and free flowing, and you're going to get a much more warm or or satisfying experience from it, which maybe in the very earliest days of digital was true when we weren't really good at encoding, or we weren't using very good samples bit samples, But these days it's it's pretty much a bogus argument. I mean, there's we've reached a point where it's beyond the ability for a human to perceive the difference, assuming that you're using well calibrated equipment. Obviously, if you were to take one system and not calibrated very well, and you took another system and calibrated it extremely well, you're gonna notice the difference. But assuming a level playing field, you aren't really going to notice that difference. So really comes down to personal preference. So why did I say I like those, uh, those component cables so much as opposed to digital ones. Well, here's another thing that separates analog from digital. It's the potential for dr M measures such as high bandwidth Digital Content Protection or h d c P. Now, this is a form of copy protection that was created by Intel, and it's meant to prevent the copying of digital audio or video content across various devices. So, for example, but let's say that I have a Blu Ray player again, and let's say I've got a device that can burn to Blu ray, and I am a dirty, nasty pirate, and I decided I want to steal in a movie and distribute it on my own, or make copies, real cheap copies and sell them on the street. So I go out and I buy a copy of my favorite Blue Ray, which is of course Bio Dome with Polly Shore, and I put it into the system and I start making copies of well, I could just end up ruining the market obviously, and then Paul Shore would never experience that great career comeback that we're all hoping he has in the very near future. Uh. So, HDCP is meant to counteract that. It's supposed to prevent people from either sending hd CP content to unauthorized devices or two devices that have been hacked to allow for copying materials. So, in other words, if I've got my lew ray player and it's h d CP compliant, and I've hooked it up using something like an hd MY cable to another another peripheral, another system in order to try and copy the material that's being shown on that Blu ray player or being played by that Blu ray player. But because of that HDCP protection, it won't go to my hacked system or my unauthorized system, and I won't be able to make those copies. I'm prevented from doing it. Uh However, it's not entirely true. There's a hacked master key to h d CP that was leaked way back in two thousand ten, So technically you could end up with a computer that has this on it and you could end up recording stuff from other devices, and and you're using this master key. It fools the whole system into believing that you're using an authorized device, so there's no problem. However, this would essentially just record whatever was playing at that time on the Blu ray player or whatever other media device you happen to be talking about. It would not get the entire experience. So if I were copying that that Blu Ray, I would get the movie, but I wouldn't get the menus. I wouldn't get the added material. It would just be whatever was playing at that time. So there are other ways to actually hack or decrypt the protection on disks. Then that's pretty much what pirates concentrate on rather than just making a direct copy, because most people want the full experience as opposed to just the film. Although I don't know why, I mean biodom by itself obviously a work of art, uh at any rate, it's this DRM that has had a lot of people who prefer to have unfettered kind of control of their electronics up in arms. They disagree with it. They want to have a device where they can do whatever they want with it, especially if it means something like burning a copy of a a movie you own, or a music disc you own, whatever it may be, in order for you to have a backup for your own purposes. We have in the United States established that personal backups are not a copyright violation. You can do that. However, this is the sort of technology that prevents people from doing it. So while it's not illegal for you to make a backup copy, it is it can be illegal for you to circumvent the technology that prevents you from doing that, which is kind of crazy. And that's why a lot of home theater enthusiasts prefer the analog set up where you don't have this DRM issue. Then with things like hd M I, which i'll talk about in a second. That being said, we're seeing that a lot of a lot of systems, a lot of peripherals, a lot of television sets don't necessarily support these methods anymore, and you have to use things like hd M I. So we're kind of being pushed into that world whether we want it or not. And then go figure. We've got a bit more to say about TV connectors before we wrap up, But first let's take another quick break, all right, So there are other things that can limit your ability to use your devices. If you're using something like a connector that has hd c P on it sub sort of HDCP protection associated with it, for example, a limit on how many devices you might be able to hook up two, or how many displays you might be able to hook up to a single device. And this might not sound like it's a big deal, and for most consumers it probably isn't. But imagine that you own a sports bar and as part of the sports bar experience, you want to have televisions up all around the bar that are tuned to different channels to show the various sporting events that are going on at any given time, and you have them all connected to a satellite receiver. Well, if you're using something that has HDCP protection on it, which is sort of like saying a t M machine, uh, you are limited to how many of those devices you might be able to hook up to that satellite box. For example, a lot of the really popular ones have a limit of sixteen displays, which is a lot. I mean, if you were a regular consumer, that would be probably more than enough. I don't know anyone personally who owns more than sixteen televisions, but if you have a large restaurant, that might not be enough. And there are plenty of people who have said you could be doing everything legally. You know, you could be following all the rules, but the technology itself has artificial limitations put into place to protect against copyright violations, and it's affecting people who aren't even committing any sort of copyright violation. Okay, so that was a long preamble to get into the digital side, but it was important. And I should also say that while I prefer analog for those purposes, my own home system uses h d M I because I've got everything running to a centralized receiver to control things, and h d M I was just easier than having all these other analog cables that could get tangled up with each other. So maybe I'm a hypocrite, maybe I'm lazy. I'm probably both. Let's look at digital connectors and cables. First. There's display port, which is gonna sound weird to anyone who is pretty familiar with televisions because there are very few TVs that actually have a display port connector. In fact, the only one I am personally aware of is the Panasonic t C L six five W T six hundred and yes I did read that off because I can't just rattle it off from the top of my head. There may be others out there, but that's the only one I'm familiar with anyway. DisplayPort connectors are usually meant to connect various components to computer monitors, not to televisions. The display board cable can carry audio as well as video, which means it is useful for TVs. Your typical computer monitor doesn't have audio associated with it. Some do, but the typical ones don't. It also has the optional implementation of h d c P and includes dp CP also known as display Port Content Protection, which was designed by Phillips, so it has a greater bandwidth than hd M I could actually move more data in the same amount of time as an hd um I cable could or HDMI connector could, and it's also royalty free, which is unlike hd M I. There is a hefty fee in using h d m I. If you're a manufacturer and you want to incorporate it, you've got to pay the price in order to do it, whereas display port you don't. Strangely enough, though, DisplayPort is not the common connector that you find on televisions. That could change in the future, but hd m I has such a strong presence in the market right now it would really surprise me if that did happen. Next, you have d v I or Digital Visual Interface. Now, this is our hybrid entry. Technically, depending upon the connector and the cable, it can carry both analog and digital signals. It doesn't carry audio typically, although I've heard there are variations on this. It's a common standard in computer displays, but it can also be found on many televisions, and it can carry uncompressed digital video. HDCP integration is optional on d v I. Finally, we've got h d m I High Definition Multimedia Interface. UH. This also can transmit uncompressed video data, but it has the ability to include compressed or uncompressed digital audio as well. Hd M I can carry signals electrically identical to d v I, so you can have an adapter to switch from d v I to h d M I without loss and signal quality, which is useful if your television doesn't have a d v I input, but you're using equipment has a d v I output but no h d M I. So let's say I've got a DVD player and there's a d v I output that's an option, but I don't have an h d M I output. My television, however, only has hd MY inputs but no dv I input. I could use an adapter and it because the they're running on electrically identical signals, I could use this without any worry about signal loss or any conversion issues. Hd MY two point oh is capable of transmitting up to four K video at six D frames per second. And one cool thing. If you have hd MY cables that are high speed, that's that is they're called Category two cables. Your future proof for u h D. You don't have to purchase four K hd MY cables. Category two cables will be completely capable of carrying that signal. I'm sure there will be companies that market for k hd MY cable saying you want to have the best experience possible, don't buy into that. Category two will suit you just fine. Hd CP is mandatory and official hd MY technology. And finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about other audio ports that you might see on the back of a television. So there are two typical digital audio ports that you can find on TVs. One is the digital audio r c A port, which is typically orange. Now the it's gonna look a lot like those other r c A connectors. I was talking about the UH, the yellow, red, and white ones that you would associate with composite video. And then the two audio channels. In this case, it's a single channel, or not a single channel, but a single connector, and it's digital audio, so it would be a higher quality. You probably want to use that if you have the option. UH. But there are also are another type of audio port that's digital that you can use, and that would be the optical digital audio port. So that requires a special optic fiber cable that sends audio signals through pulses of light. The exact same information is being sent with either type of cable. It's just in one it's electrical impulses and the other it's UH it's photons. It's essentially, you know, light pulses, but it's the same information, it's just transmitted in a different way. Optical cables have some advantages over the UH, the the r c A connectors type being that you don't have to worry about outside interference radio interference, although again unless you're talking about a super long cable that has really poor shielding. You're probably not going to suffer any signal loss with your digital audio. Uh So it's not like it's a measurable advantage with optical fiber unless again, and you're talking about huge distances, because optic fiber doesn't have any loss over distance. However, if you do bend an optic fiber cable, you can end up damaging it and that could cause some issues. But uh, you know, I I wouldn't necessarily say one has advantages over the other. I would say it all depends on what your equipment can use. So if all of your equipment just has optical ports and no digital co exports for your audio, then obviously you need to go optical. You don't have any choice in the matter. So that's that's the range of the various types of connectors you're going to find on your typical televisions. There are some others that can pop up now and again. There are some things that you might find like a USB port, which I think Daniel mentioned at in his email. USB obviously is the universal serial bus. That's the the one that we're all familiar with. It's on all our computer RS. It's on lots of various mobile devices, though we tend to use different connectors for that, like micro or mini USB. But that's something that can carry both power and and data U two. So it's a useful system, but it's not one that I think most people associate with televisions. It can be if you have images on a thumb drive, you might be able to display it on your television. There are a couple of thumb drive like devices that can plug into USB ports on a television that give it extra capabilities, like Roku. They have a stick that you can plug in through the USB port that gives your television roku uh capabilities. It's pretty cool, but I don't often think of that as a connector, and that might just be my bias and play because I don't tend to use it. I use hd m I almost exclusively because it's the easiest. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff looking at TV connectors. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.