Technology changes are not restricted to the interior of home theatre components, as trying to connect an older DVD player to a newish television recently reminded me.
The TV had two Scart plugs in the rear and little else, while the DVD offered just the old standard RCA outlets. There are other plug options you may encounter and it really pays to know what connections your TV has before buying a new DVD player - or vice versa. Interconnect cables can cost around $100, which will make your budget DVD seem a lot less of a bargain.
There are obviously two streams of information to consider here - video and audio. Traditionally, audio plugs and cables are RCAs: inexpensive, convenient and usually colour-coded to make connecting easy. Optical cables are little favoured although the plugs are often included on DVD players as a digital audio option.
It's on the video signal side that things become complex. The simplest way to get the picture signal from your DVD to your TV, in most home theatre systems, is a single (yellow-coded) RCA cable. Because RCAs are cheap (and so come in the box), most of us use them and happily suffer the lowest quality picture our DVDs can provide. It is called composite video because the signal for all three key colours; red, green and blue is combined in the one cable, along with information about brightness and everything else. Your DVD player will actually downgrade information from the disc in order to squeeze it all through this single analogue cable.
A very simple and low cost upgrade you should take is to replace that RCA video cable with a single S-video cable. A small round plug with four pins, S-video cables allow the DVD to pass on a much less compromised signal and for as little as $50 you will enjoy a better picture.
Next step up is component video, where three RCA jacks colour-coded red, green and blue (RGB) carry those signals separately. DVDs are encoded in component video, while VHS tapes use composite. If your DVD and TV both offer component video jacks, you should be using them.
The Scart plug is a European oddball that has 20 pins in an oblong format. A cable with a Scart plug at one end can have almost any combination of component video, S-video, RCA video and audio plugs at the other. Scart-to-scart does make connecting your system very easy, but few DVD players here have a Scart output.
DVI is a digital video connection more readily found on DVDs and in the back of new screens, particularly LCDs. It looks like a multi-pin computer monitor plug and indeed got its start in the computer world. As Digital Visual Interface is all-digital (while component video is still analogue), it will provide a much better picture with digital television signals.
But DVI may not reign long at the top because a newer connector called HDMI (high definition multi-media interface) is being touted as the future. HDMI carries both digital video and digital audio in a single cable and, importantly, was designed as a home theatre connection. The plugs look rather like a USB connection and are expected to be as universally favoured as USB has become in computing. Future-proofing is the real home entertainment challenge.
<EM>Hotwired:</EM> How to plug in to a much better picture
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