Two stereo audio (red, white) and one video(yellow). Called rca composite.
The colours one you are thinking about was called YPbPr Component connector and it split the video signal in multiple colour channels for clearer video signal.
SCART was ahead of its time. You could control connected devices with it like HDMI CEC. You could wake up devices through it. You could daisy chain devices together with it. A TV could sent its TV signal down to a SCART connected device from its tuner! No equivalent for this exists today, unless there's TV that do HDMI OUT! By the end, it could do 1080p!
Also, the TV didn't just send the currently-tuned channel 'down' the chain, it also allowed connected devices to inject their own, synced, video back into the TV, so you could be watching a show on BBC1, say, and the VCR could overlay a box in the top-right corner letting you know it had started a scheduled recording off Channel 4. Or, if you used a device like a Selectavision, if you tuned into a scrambled channel the Selectavision would notice, decode it, and send the descrambled version back up to the TV, all without the user realising it. Those clever Frenchies.
I think some old double insulated devices have power supply issues that meant that the ground/plug-shell would be energized at half mains voltage. You wouldn't notice since the rest of the TV was wood/plastic, not metal, but if you touched the metal on the back you would get shocked.
It probably had a good reason to shock you! /s.
By design, SCART carries low voltage, not enough to shock someone. The device it was connected to could have been faulty or badly grounded and leaked higher voltage into the connector though. So its plausible.
Dude, I had that but didn't need it most of the time because on saturday after midnight on the French channels you would always get softcore porn like Emanuelle or something similar. I guess growing up in Quebec had its perks after all. Lol
We just had the twin lead wire coming from the antenna on the roof, through the wall, and hooked to the back of the TV. We didn't get a color TV until I was about eight years old. My mom didn't like the color, she thought they looked wrong, so we had black and white until she saw a Sony TV. (Early 70s)
The old B&W TV looked something like this:
This was our first VCR. I think this was the first digital clock we had in the house, too:
When they got a colour TV it also coincided with getting a Commodore 64, so naturally they suggested using the old TV for the computer.
Funny thing is that the C64 colour palette was prepared for this. The 16 colours weren't just random picks on the colour wheel, they also functioned as 4 different shades when shown on b&w.
Shortly after we did get the proper monitor but it still had a switch so you could still check how the your graphics looked in b&w.
I'm old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don't really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.
It's been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn't have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.
It's been a while since I've had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be "TV" on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have "TV" plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren't built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.
A local news station use(d? they are all digital now) channel 3, with both ota and cable. I remember using both 3 and (front) rca 'input' for my games.
It's not the case. We had WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate, on channel 3 in our area. I seem to recall that one could switch between channel 2 and channel 3 on the Atari RF modulators, and later, VCRs could switch between channel 3 and channel 4. I think they used 2 and 3 because those were the first two channels, and the FCC wouldn't allow two adjacent channels in the same area, so one of the two would always be unused for everybody. (Oddly, there was no TV channel 1.)
I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.
Similar to how there is nothing "stopping" a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.
Really? Interesting. We're there other places or other channels like that? Like if you were in England or India did they do channel 3, channel 4, or something totally different?
Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?
Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.
If I'm remembering right, channel 3 was all local ads when I was a kid. I think the only times I ever watched it were when I shut off whatever was using channel 3 and left the tv on.
Introduced in the 1930s by the Radio Corporation of America, they use color-coded plugs—typically red and white/black for stereo audio, and yellow for video.
Switch over for a quick round of Alex Kidd in Miracle World at my friend's place. I found it so fascinating after manually switching cables between the antenna and Commodore 64 at home.
I had an old small tv like that in my bedroom. There was a dial for vhf and another for UHF. The two UHF channels we had were about 20 and 31, but I found if I dialed it all the way to 90 or so sometimes I could hear voices talking to each other. Usually just boring phone calls, I showed my friends once and we listened to my friends uncle on a call by chance, he recognised the voice and the people he was talking about.
Then they switched mobile phones to a digital signal.
Landline portable antenna phones had some prettybad channel bleed, esp if you live in an apt complex with a local Walmart - bunch of phones would all be the same cheapo Panasonic (or whatever) model and we'd hear someone pretty often if you stand in the right spot.
I remember being so excited when my family got a box to convert composite cables to coaxial so they would work with our old TV. I got my friend to bring over his gamecube all the time until I finally got my own after a few months.
Oh a simpler time. When nothing needed to update, billion/trillionaires didn't exist, and no one was trying to steal every normal of your data to rip you off and con you politically.
I miss riding bikes till the street lights came on.
Insecticides were hard on them in some areas.
Same reason I remeber always having a ton of squished bugs all over the windshield and radiator growing up, but cars stay much cleaner now.
Some populations are rebounding though, Saw tlmy first Monarch butterfly in 15 years the other day
This was the era of robber barons, not long after this the US actually did something about these people, including some of the best progressive tax rates the US probably ever saw.
For example in 1951 if you had an income of $400,000, every dollar you made beyond that was taxed at 91%. That doesn't necessarily mean they paid that much, but they paid a lot more than they do nowadays.
Maybe 30 years after our first trillionaire will get our s*** together again, or maybe not.
Just came across a bunch of composite cables in a bin I was going through as I'm moving. I've got way too much of this kind of stuff that I need to get rid of. I hate moving.
Only if they're mismatched from one end to the other. You can use any color cable as long as both ends go in the same color port (eg yellow cable connecting the red ports). Also, you could totally do redPort-whitePort, your Left/Right would just be reversed.
I typed the long form of this before, but I bought a projector with no sound system, and just hooked up my existing small TV to the composite audio and the display to the projector
Still in use. Cassette player is in storage, dry rotted belts that I need to replace. Need some better speakers as well, the shelf speakers I have are pretty garbage but my office space is limited.
Yeah... even older... I still have an Intelivision, which was not purchased used! It was my parents, but it was handed down to me and I kept it ever since. If I ever get my life together one day I would love to set all my old stuff back up in a dedicated area and go through what I have and clean it all up and pray most of it still works.
157 replies
Does this answer your question?
Also I don't think composite is that old tbf.
Yes
Just used one a couple days ago.
One was for video, one for audio and one for colors, no?
Two stereo audio (red, white) and one video(yellow). Called rca composite.
The colours one you are thinking about was called YPbPr Component connector and it split the video signal in multiple colour channels for clearer video signal.
No, yellow is video, red and white are audio channels. You might be thinking of component video, but that doesn't include audio in the three cables.
I'm this old - old TV, new for the time console
Channel 3
I had RF adapters for my NES...
I had to get a new TV since my old one had the two screw posts that the Atari hooked up to.
Definitely had this as well.
I've just read about Tandy.
Easily. I had two computers before I had one that was this advanced.
I must be too young, I grew up on this:
I combined those 3 plugs into this with a small plug.
SCART was ahead of its time. You could control connected devices with it like HDMI CEC. You could wake up devices through it. You could daisy chain devices together with it. A TV could sent its TV signal down to a SCART connected device from its tuner! No equivalent for this exists today, unless there's TV that do HDMI OUT! By the end, it could do 1080p!
Also, the TV didn't just send the currently-tuned channel 'down' the chain, it also allowed connected devices to inject their own, synced, video back into the TV, so you could be watching a show on BBC1, say, and the VCR could overlay a box in the top-right corner letting you know it had started a scheduled recording off Channel 4. Or, if you used a device like a Selectavision, if you tuned into a scrambled channel the Selectavision would notice, decode it, and send the descrambled version back up to the TV, all without the user realising it. Those clever Frenchies.
Was it able to shock me with one end connected or is it just a false memory.
I think some old double insulated devices have power supply issues that meant that the ground/plug-shell would be energized at half mains voltage. You wouldn't notice since the rest of the TV was wood/plastic, not metal, but if you touched the metal on the back you would get shocked.
It probably had a good reason to shock you! /s.
By design, SCART carries low voltage, not enough to shock someone. The device it was connected to could have been faulty or badly grounded and leaked higher voltage into the connector though. So its plausible.
I am this old.
Dude, I had that but didn't need it most of the time because on saturday after midnight on the French channels you would always get softcore porn like Emanuelle or something similar. I guess growing up in Quebec had its perks after all. Lol
I totally saw a boob!
Are you sure? It might have been an elbow.
I think you are watching some illegal channels
My modern ish sony Bravia TV still has these. My PS2 is currently connected to them.
wait, you could plug something to the TV ? the two wires going out of mine was electricity and antenna, and no remote.
Yes. Very yes.
I am this many years old.
What channel would you use? I always used channel three and swore channel four gave a worse signal.
Beat me to it. Life got really good when I could upgrade from the small kitchen B/W set to a color one.
My brother/sister thank you, that takes me back. Had the og Nintendo going through that
I am this old as well but there's a reason I always have a screwdriver handy
Oh ye with a weak thumbnail!
Came here to post this.
I feel simultaneously seen and called out.
This was the only thing station included up till and including the fucking Jaguar.
I have that exact model with my 2600!
crumbles into dust
I modified my 2600 to have compositie output instead. It also slightly improves the video quality
Before my time but I did run across these as a kid. Even played a few games, too.
Came here to say the same
Reminds me, I should go through my old box of DVDs and do some cleaning.
I am black and white TV, no VCR invented yet old.
We just had the twin lead wire coming from the antenna on the roof, through the wall, and hooked to the back of the TV. We didn't get a color TV until I was about eight years old. My mom didn't like the color, she thought they looked wrong, so we had black and white until she saw a Sony TV. (Early 70s)
The old B&W TV looked something like this:
This was our first VCR. I think this was the first digital clock we had in the house, too:
My parents had a b&w TV into the mid 80s.
When they got a colour TV it also coincided with getting a Commodore 64, so naturally they suggested using the old TV for the computer.
Funny thing is that the C64 colour palette was prepared for this. The 16 colours weren't just random picks on the colour wheel, they also functioned as 4 different shades when shown on b&w.
Shortly after we did get the proper monitor but it still had a switch so you could still check how the your graphics looked in b&w.
Whoa... Not flashing 12:00, check out Linus Torvalds here.
LOL. That's not a picture of our actual VCR, just one of the same model.
But, my dad was an aircraft mechanic. He knew his way around tech well enough. Our clocks were always set correctly, as it happens.
Everything back then weighed 80-100lbs.
Except tvs, they weighed even more.
I'm "turn to channel 3" old...
Yeah but I had a knock off brans
You could feel the static charge shift when changing channels
Yeah which explains my hair in those days
TVs had channels?
I'm old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don't really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.
They still do if you use an antenna.
We forget how much TV was boring AF.
It's been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn't have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.
It's been a while since I've had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be "TV" on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have "TV" plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren't built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.
A local news station use(d? they are all digital now) channel 3, with both ota and cable. I remember using both 3 and (front) rca 'input' for my games.
I remember the coax cable but did not know about channel 3 being local communication. I thought it was just convention.
Thanks for teaching me.
It's not the case. We had WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate, on channel 3 in our area. I seem to recall that one could switch between channel 2 and channel 3 on the Atari RF modulators, and later, VCRs could switch between channel 3 and channel 4. I think they used 2 and 3 because those were the first two channels, and the FCC wouldn't allow two adjacent channels in the same area, so one of the two would always be unused for everybody. (Oddly, there was no TV channel 1.)
I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.
Similar to how there is nothing "stopping" a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.
But I just got comfortable!
Just be happy you don't have to move the rabbit ears around till I get a good image
Anymore.
Unless you were in Cleveland.....then it was Channel 4.
Really? Interesting. We're there other places or other channels like that? Like if you were in England or India did they do channel 3, channel 4, or something totally different?
Canada was either channel 3 or 4 depending on the device. Probably all American made then.
Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?
Channel 2 is KDKA CBS in Pittsburgh.
Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.
If I'm remembering right, channel 3 was all local ads when I was a kid. I think the only times I ever watched it were when I shut off whatever was using channel 3 and left the tv on.
Everyone saying they are older than these, but composite video dates back to the 1950s.
1930s
Introduced in the 1930s by the Radio Corporation of America, they use color-coded plugs—typically red and white/black for stereo audio, and yellow for video.
I think RCA plugs are from the thirties but they definitely didn't have composite video back then! They were developed mid-50s.
I am SCART old
I do not miss these. The RCA wires were so frail on most consoles. At least you could repair cables with spare parts from Radio Shack back then.
dude... i hooked up my sega master system II to my TV up the Antenna port with that little switch box.
This guy olds.
This. This is how old. OP needs to get off my lawn.
Switch over for a quick round of Alex Kidd in Miracle World at my friend's place. I found it so fascinating after manually switching cables between the antenna and Commodore 64 at home.
There it is!
Same. Except Atari, and Nintendo too
Same. Except generic Pong console.
That I played by myself and got it to bounce back and forth so I could go to the bathroom. Oh mine was legit Atari Pong.
Spectravideo and NES for me.
I’m this old.
But did you have separate VHF and UHF connectors on the back?
Separate nobs for UHF and VHF as well.
I believe there was a toggle switch on set controls (no remote).
How did everyone have this exact bed‽
This is why I have chips out of my shins.
I miss my waterbed
I miss your waterbed too.
I once signed an apartment rental agreement that had a waterbed addendum, specifically banning their usage.
Weird. Me too and I was just thinking about that this morning.
Most of them banned it since they’d break and flash flood the building
Pretty sure I had that exact water bed frame
Who doesn't know RCA? That's left, right, and sub!
As a boy I had to stand up and walk to the TV to switch channel pressing buttons. No remote.
I had to get up and hit it on the side with a dead blow hammer when the screen turned green as well.
And then you pull too hard on the power button and it comes off and you get hit/yelled at by dad
I had an old small tv like that in my bedroom. There was a dial for vhf and another for UHF. The two UHF channels we had were about 20 and 31, but I found if I dialed it all the way to 90 or so sometimes I could hear voices talking to each other. Usually just boring phone calls, I showed my friends once and we listened to my friends uncle on a call by chance, he recognised the voice and the people he was talking about.
Then they switched mobile phones to a digital signal.
Landline portable antenna phones had some prettybad channel bleed, esp if you live in an apt complex with a local Walmart - bunch of phones would all be the same cheapo Panasonic (or whatever) model and we'd hear someone pretty often if you stand in the right spot.
Now that's what I call a proper television
My TV only had 4 button for 4 channels so once we got more than 4 channels we had to use a small wheel to change frequencies and look for them.
That's a new one to me. Great Britain, I assume.
Unitra was a Polish brand that existed during communism.
Yo my dad would lay on the couch after work and scream for me or my brother to come change the channel. Those were the fucking days...
I was the "go find the pliers to turn the channel, cause the knob went missing last year" kid.
Just kept the small vice grip clamped on it.
You were supposed to sit close enough to the tv to always reach it.
I remember being so excited when my family got a box to convert composite cables to coaxial so they would work with our old TV. I got my friend to bring over his gamecube all the time until I finally got my own after a few months.
I see that and raise you computer programs you got from magazines you had to type in for an hour.
Oh a simpler time. When nothing needed to update, billion/trillionaires didn't exist, and no one was trying to steal every normal of your data to rip you off and con you politically. I miss riding bikes till the street lights came on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller
Remember the warm glow of the yellow/orange street lights? There gone now too, just like the hummingbirds and the fireflies.
I saw fireflies on the 4th, I even managed to pick one up.and we've got humming birds in our backyard. Humming birds and firefly's are gone?
Insecticides were hard on them in some areas. Same reason I remeber always having a ton of squished bugs all over the windshield and radiator growing up, but cars stay much cleaner now.
Some populations are rebounding though, Saw tlmy first Monarch butterfly in 15 years the other day
Why did you have to shatter the small bit of perceived relief I had!!??
Thought you might want to know. Information is power.
100%. It is always better to know. I think that's what draws us all to this place.
At the same time, fuuuuuck man. 😔
I think capitalism is humanities terminal illness.
So much potential wasted.
This was the era of robber barons, not long after this the US actually did something about these people, including some of the best progressive tax rates the US probably ever saw.
For example in 1951 if you had an income of $400,000, every dollar you made beyond that was taxed at 91%. That doesn't necessarily mean they paid that much, but they paid a lot more than they do nowadays.
Maybe 30 years after our first trillionaire will get our s*** together again, or maybe not.
"Now I know!"
"And knowing is half the battle!"
I’m this old
SCART is newer than composite, though..
Didn't say they were the oldest, just that they are that old
I'm quite a bit older than those
You are definitely underestimating the average age of a Lemmy user
(unrelated but boops the kitty)
what do you think is the average age is of those who spend regular time in this specific group?
Yellow is video. White is left channel audio. Red is right channel audio.
Yes.
Just came across a bunch of composite cables in a bin I was going through as I'm moving. I've got way too much of this kind of stuff that I need to get rid of. I hate moving.
You know how you think it's better to keep them, just in case?
It is.
Weird obscure cable you haven’t used in 10 years?
Guaranteed to need it 7 days after getting rid of it
I'm in my 20s and regularly did this as a child.
Hehehe, mismatched color ports go bzzzzzzzzzzzz
Only if they're mismatched from one end to the other. You can use any color cable as long as both ends go in the same color port (eg yellow cable connecting the red ports). Also, you could totally do redPort-whitePort, your Left/Right would just be reversed.
Give me a second to switch my oscilloscope to XY mode.
I really loved those kitchen gadgets back then. These days, you really don't have separate lines for mustard, mayo and ketchup anymore.
I typed the long form of this before, but I bought a projector with no sound system, and just hooked up my existing small TV to the composite audio and the display to the projector
Those are modern! My audio equipment used DIN plugs. And the tv only had an antenna input.
Nice, still in use? Show the front too, these are pretty looking receivers.
Still in use. Cassette player is in storage, dry rotted belts that I need to replace. Need some better speakers as well, the shelf speakers I have are pretty garbage but my office space is limited.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81uf140GdiL._UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg
Yeah... even older... I still have an Intelivision, which was not purchased used! It was my parents, but it was handed down to me and I kept it ever since. If I ever get my life together one day I would love to set all my old stuff back up in a dedicated area and go through what I have and clean it all up and pray most of it still works.
💀💀💀💀
When I've got this ancient...? Why am I mummified?
Ones for internet, ones for tv and ones for sound. Never really understood what the white was for.. 😆
Uh... Afaik, internet data does not use rca. The yellow is video, the white is left audio, the red is right audio (together, stereo sound).
You’re absolutely correct. All i knew was that one was video and one was audio. Didn’t know audio split.. spanks!!