Intro to Video Signals
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| Video Standard | Image | Description | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radio Frequency (RF) | placeholder | A screw-terminal connector, usually seen on pre-80's TVs and consoles. | Carries both audio and video, but is very low quality. Audio is only mono, and there is a lot of color banding and mixing. |
| Composite Video | placeholder | Also called RCA, for the first company to make them, these typically come in sets of 2 or 3 | Composite video is very common, and comes on almost every consumer TV made after 1990. Much higher quality than RF. |
| S-Video | placeholder | Also called Y/C. | Usually uncommon in consoles until the mid-90s. This standard achieves better quality, because the signal is separated into y (luma, or black and white data) and C (chroma, or color data) |
| YPbPr | placeholder | Commonly known as component video. | YPbPr splits video out to 3 different connectors, making it better quality than S-Video. These are Y (luma, same as S-Video, and Sync), Pb (the difference between Luma and blue), and Pr (the difference between Luma and red.) Green is unneeded, as it can be found using the information. |
| RGB | placeholder | Uses different types of sync such as HV or Composite (not to be confused with composite sync!) | RGB is the best quality video you can get on a typical CRT, as it requires no transcoding or changing of the color space, since it is the same format that the electron gun uses to make the image displayed. RGB has many different standards for connectors that will be explained in the next table. |
| Video Connector | Image | Description |
|---|---|---|
| RF | placeholder | Screw terminal connector. |
| Composite video | placeholder | These connectors are known as RCA jacks, as that was the first company to make them. |
| S-Video over Mini-DIN | placeholder | These connectors can be very fragile, so make sure not to bend the pins. |
| Component video | placeholder | These use the same connectors as Composite video, but are not the same video format! |
| SCART | placeholder | Carries Composite, S-Video, and RGB signals, along with audio. Very common in Europe. |
| VGA | placeholder | VGA is an RGBHV standard, usually used in computers. |