Component Out: no Sound and B&W picture

[Jan Boersma]

When I connect my EX3 to a SD television,
with the mini-D component out connector,
I only get a Black and White picture with no sound,

the settings in the "VIDEO SET" menu:

YPbPr/SDI Out select: SD
YPbPr/SDI Out Display: On
Video Out Display: On

any ideas?

Greetings Jan

[Perrone Ford]

Well,

Since component video doesn't carry sound, that makes perfect sense. In terms of black and white video, component gives red, green, and blue. So even if one or two were misbehaving, you'd not get black and white. Might want to check the settings on the TV to see how it's processing component in signals.

[Ronn Kilby]

May be that your SD TV input is actually YCbCr vs YPbPr.

[Andy Tejral]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

In terms of black and white video, component gives red, green, and blue. So even if one or two were misbehaving, you'd not get black and white.

Leaving aside the fact that the stated standard is NOT RGB, they are in fact three black and white signals. However, only the Y signal will (or Green) will have sync and will result in a viewable picture. (Green plug = Y, Red plug = Br, Blue = Bb)

Edit: are you sure your TV has component in? You're not hooking the Green to Yellow, Red to Red and Blue to white or somthing like that?

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Andy Tejral

Leaving aside the fact that the stated standard is NOT RGB, they are in fact three black and white signals. However, only the Y signal will (or Green) will have sync and will result in a viewable picture. (Green plug = Y, Red plug = Br, Blue = Bb)

DOH! Thanks for the correction. I need to stop smoking crack...

[Andy Tejral]

Ya know, this gives me the opportunity to rant about Monster and other high priced cables.

"Oh, component is high def--you need expensive connectors and stuff"

Wrong! Let's take a 1080p picture. The scan rate is 67.6 kHz (I hope, I copied that and didn't do the math). Audio cable will probably do that! In fact, I really doubt the RGB cable the cable company supplied with my box is anything more than well shielded audio cable.

"Well, you need expensive cable for digital"

Hmm. No, over short distances, a digital signal is extremely forgiving to impedance mismatches. Just for giggles, I ran a SDI signal through an analog patch bay and non-digital rated RG-59 cable. I looped the ends of video snake through the patch so I had a bunch of analog rated connected. At some point, the eye pattern started looking fuzzy but it always made it to the end of the cable and produced a viewable picture.

<off soapbox>

[Bob Grant]

Originally Posted by Andy Tejral

Ya know, this gives me the opportunity to rant about Monster and other high priced cables.

"Oh, component is high def--you need expensive connectors and stuff"

Wrong! Let's take a 1080p picture. The scan rate is 67.6 kHz (I hope, I copied that and didn't do the math). Audio cable will probably do that! In fact, I really doubt the RGB cable the cable company supplied with my box is anything more than well shielded audio cable.

"Well, you need expensive cable for digital"

Hmm. No, over short distances, a digital signal is extremely forgiving to impedance mismatches. Just for giggles, I ran a SDI signal through an analog patch bay and non-digital rated RG-59 cable. I looped the ends of video snake through the patch so I had a bunch of analog rated connected. At some point, the eye pattern started looking fuzzy but it always made it to the end of the cable and produced a viewable picture.

<off soapbox>

Well Andy you've given me a chance to rant about people who don't do their maths :)

I'll trust you when you say that the scan rate is 67.6KHz. That's the frequency of the horizontal deflection. During that time 1920 pixel worth of data are carried. Do the maths of 1920 x 67.6KHz and you'll get a frequency a long way over the audio spectrum. A SD composite video signal needs roughly 6MHz bandwidth, pretty obvious that HD needs more than that.
Composite video is more demanding. Any difference in length or impedance of the 3 cables is going to cause a delay to the three components. You can guess what that does to the image.

I agree there's a lot of hubris over cables and for very short runs anything could work without too obvious signal degradation but that is not because the signals are just outside the audio spectrum. SDI over short runs is far more tolerant as it is digital, composite isn't.

[Andy Tejral]

Originally Posted by Bob Grant

I'll trust you when you say that the scan rate is 67.6KHz. That's the frequency of the horizontal deflection. During that time 1920 pixel worth of data are carried. Do the maths of 1920 x 67.6KHz and you'll get a frequency a long way over the audio spectrum. A SD composite video signal needs roughly 6MHz bandwidth, pretty obvious that HD needs more than that.

Tell you what, I'm not sure if that's right or not. I'm pretty sure that the 67.6KHz includes all the pixel information; that multipling 1920x67.6 is not relevant to this discussion.

The cable is just copper wire. It doesn't know or care what kind of signal is on it. Sure, at some point the high frequency attenuation will become too great for a particular wire and a particular signal.

Composite video is more demanding.

Yes, because it has chroma information. Component does not. In fact, that is where the SD 6Mhz comes in--the chroma information.

Any difference in length or impedance of the 3 cables is going to cause a delay to the three components. You can guess what that does to the image.

I just got out some RCA cables and barrels. I added 12' of audio certified cable to the red channel and there MIGHT have been a slight shift. I added another 12' of cable company supplied 'video' cable and there was a noticable shift in the red image. Video 'quality' was unchanged (not fond of any cable company's processing). And this is with 1080i so the frequency is halved: 36.8Khz.