So long, VGA at DVinfo.net

Heath McKnight · December 11th, 2010, 12:38 AM

Today3D: Intel and AMD sign death warrant for VGA port

That's the end of VGA, by 2015.

Heath

Chris Hurd · December 11th, 2010, 08:22 AM

Not soon enough, if you ask me...

Heath McKnight · December 11th, 2010, 09:14 AM

I'm with you there. I was looking at small projectors a couple of months ago, and I was like, "VGA, really?" I'm glad USB and Firewire/iLink came in and conquered.

Heath

Josh Bass · December 11th, 2010, 05:35 PM

You guys are obviously not teleprompter operators, for which VGA is the shizz. In my experience, you have three ways to connect your laptop to your prompter monitor - BnC, VGA, or Svideo.

BnC requires a scan converter (needs it's own power supply), which has to be connected via VGA to the laptop anyway. One more thing to go wrong and fail during a live show.

Some computers do Svideo out directly, but that is such a flimsy connection (no lock or screws)

VGA seems the sharpest, and also has the screw in connectors (though I admit some laptops don't have the screw holes), and can go direct from computer to monitor.

Heath McKnight · December 11th, 2010, 05:49 PM

Josh,

I had to help run prompter at my first gig in late 97, weekend overnights at WPTV NBC in Palm Beach as video editor. Since I edited so fast, I had to help out with the prompter. But I didn't know just how high quality the VGA is for that.

Heath

Josh Bass · December 11th, 2010, 06:10 PM

Couldn't tell you. My experience is 99.9% limited to presidential or lens mount rigs that I physically set up myself, as opposed to walking into someone else's infrastructure, so that's what I meant.

Heath McKnight · December 11th, 2010, 07:09 PM

I've used those, too.

Heath

Sander Vreuls · December 11th, 2010, 08:39 PM

We use prompters via composite video here mostly.. Simply because they have to go through the OBV and then are sent with the other camera signals using triax to the prompter.. It's the standard :)

But yeah, VGA going out is quite nice.. it has had it's time, time to move on :)

Bob Hart · December 11th, 2010, 09:36 PM

I'm sorry folks. The luddite shall speak again.

I don't advocate against the technology. Without progress we would be still standing in caves with our backsides painted blue making handshadows on the walls by firelight and moaning about the cost of the effort involved in collecting the firewood.

What I do advocate against is a seemingly headlong rush towards more flimsy structures which have fail, fracture, break and fall out, built into them. It is almost something like "Yay. we got it working well enough - let's get it out there". - Does a culture of unthoroughness and expediency exist in the R&D departments these days?

If I could poison the dog who presided over developing the physical structure of the SATA plug and must have stood over old school engineers to push it through, I would. There are some simple, commonsense engineering principles which have been ignored. Adequate mechanical support was one of them.

Whoever signed off on the choice of the black plastic material can come in for their fair share too. There are known limits to what that stuff can cope with. As a specialist craftsman, it was your job to spot if the team was headed down a dead-end with the material they chose.

If somebody actually designed a stress riser INTO an airframe or aeroengine component or failed to account for the mass of the wings themselves when designing the attach points to the fuselage ????? It's there to be found with the SATA plug and the stiff cable it supports.

I just hope there are no unmodified SATA plugs going airbourne, or running around Iraq and Afghanistan inside hot battlefield computers or waiting in ambush inside critical life-support medical equipment.

The HDMI cable and its plug are a similar nightmare although I admit, a more robust one with a metal shroud/support.

The lookalike ancestor, a printer plug, ( was the brand "Centronics" ? ) at least had a wire clip or two to hold it in place.

Come on R&D worldwide.

You do some really good stuff and cripple some of it with apparent carelessness. How about lift your game and maybe even hire in some old goat who still possesses intellectual property in his head from a bygone era so you don't repeat some lessons of history.

I will concede one point. Glass tubes were a good thing but the unsystematic ratsnest of uninsulated wire tails on components which was built around them to feed them is a method well forgotten.

I think I will go and brew a cup of tea. I get too edgy these days.

Heath McKnight · December 11th, 2010, 09:40 PM

Good points, Bob. I'd argue that my mom's blender from the 70s that she used until the early 90s ran better than the plastic one my dad bought her.

But progress is progress, and I'd disagree about HDMI's structural stability, and I'll take USB over the old cables we used for printers, etc.

Heath

Bob Hart · December 11th, 2010, 10:12 PM

HDMI.

The cable is very stiff. Its support inside the plug itself appears firm. It exerts a lot of leverage across the plug. The shroud itself has adequate depth and secure fit.

The fail point will likely be when some appliance designer goes cheap on the supporting casework around the socket and the mechanical loadings move to the circuit board pin solder joints.

Retention of the plug in the socket is by friction alone with no latch or clip. I concede that the appliance will likely be dragged off the table or the SI2K camera off my shoulder before the joint fails.

In its normal use it is not as mission-critical as the SATA plug but with increasing use of HDMI as a vision port to recording equipment, added protection against inadvertant disconnection would be nice.

USB flat plugs structurally, only just dodged a bullet in my opinion. Their build standard bears more than just a passing resemblance to those wretched 6 channel laptop firewire sockets which would prise apart from normal cable loadings. Plug penetration into the socket is on the good side of just barely enough for mechanical support.

Some third party suppliers are making versions with the metal shroud material too thin.

The metal shrouded USB mini plugs and the older square plastic USB plugs seem firm enough.

I concede that with the larger older style VGA/SVGA and Centronics plugs, a lot more natural resources are consumed in the making of them and that is something we should be mindful of.

Panagiotis Raris · December 12th, 2010, 06:07 PM

cables in general are expensive to make; layered metal wire insulation etc. if products had built in decoders and self-powered ports, it would be MUCH cheaper, and less damaging to the environment, to use fibre optic cables.

the amount of data going to a monitor is far less than that of say a fibre optic network, and its one way communication. internal components would be even cheaper to manufacture, and faster.

i do agree about SATA cable design, though. at least IDE cables STAYED in and did not flex!

December 11th, 2010, 12:38 AM	#1
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	So long, VGA Today3D: Intel and AMD sign death warrant for VGA port That's the end of VGA, by 2015. Heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

December 11th, 2010, 08:22 AM	#2
Chris Hurd Obstreperous Rex Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: San Marcos, TX Posts: 27,368 Images: 513	Not soon enough, if you ask me... __________________ CH Search DV Info Net \| 20 years of DVi \| ...Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!

December 11th, 2010, 09:14 AM	#3
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	I'm with you there. I was looking at small projectors a couple of months ago, and I was like, "VGA, really?" I'm glad USB and Firewire/iLink came in and conquered. Heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

December 11th, 2010, 05:35 PM	#4
Josh Bass Slash Rules! Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 5,472	You guys are obviously not teleprompter operators, for which VGA is the shizz. In my experience, you have three ways to connect your laptop to your prompter monitor - BnC, VGA, or Svideo. BnC requires a scan converter (needs it's own power supply), which has to be connected via VGA to the laptop anyway. One more thing to go wrong and fail during a live show. Some computers do Svideo out directly, but that is such a flimsy connection (no lock or screws) VGA seems the sharpest, and also has the screw in connectors (though I admit some laptops don't have the screw holes), and can go direct from computer to monitor. __________________ The Bass' camerawork The Bass on IMDB

December 11th, 2010, 05:49 PM	#5
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	Josh, I had to help run prompter at my first gig in late 97, weekend overnights at WPTV NBC in Palm Beach as video editor. Since I edited so fast, I had to help out with the prompter. But I didn't know just how high quality the VGA is for that. Heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

December 11th, 2010, 06:10 PM	#6
Josh Bass Slash Rules! Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 5,472	Couldn't tell you. My experience is 99.9% limited to presidential or lens mount rigs that I physically set up myself, as opposed to walking into someone else's infrastructure, so that's what I meant. __________________ The Bass' camerawork The Bass on IMDB

December 11th, 2010, 07:09 PM	#7
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	I've used those, too. Heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

December 11th, 2010, 08:39 PM	#8
Sander Vreuls Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Hilversum, The Netherlands Posts: 184	We use prompters via composite video here mostly.. Simply because they have to go through the OBV and then are sent with the other camera signals using triax to the prompter.. It's the standard :) But yeah, VGA going out is quite nice.. it has had it's time, time to move on :)

December 11th, 2010, 09:36 PM	#9
Bob Hart Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: PERTH. W.A. AUSTRALIA. Posts: 4,477	I'm sorry folks. The luddite shall speak again. I don't advocate against the technology. Without progress we would be still standing in caves with our backsides painted blue making handshadows on the walls by firelight and moaning about the cost of the effort involved in collecting the firewood. What I do advocate against is a seemingly headlong rush towards more flimsy structures which have fail, fracture, break and fall out, built into them. It is almost something like "Yay. we got it working well enough - let's get it out there". - Does a culture of unthoroughness and expediency exist in the R&D departments these days? If I could poison the dog who presided over developing the physical structure of the SATA plug and must have stood over old school engineers to push it through, I would. There are some simple, commonsense engineering principles which have been ignored. Adequate mechanical support was one of them. Whoever signed off on the choice of the black plastic material can come in for their fair share too. There are known limits to what that stuff can cope with. As a specialist craftsman, it was your job to spot if the team was headed down a dead-end with the material they chose. If somebody actually designed a stress riser INTO an airframe or aeroengine component or failed to account for the mass of the wings themselves when designing the attach points to the fuselage ????? It's there to be found with the SATA plug and the stiff cable it supports. I just hope there are no unmodified SATA plugs going airbourne, or running around Iraq and Afghanistan inside hot battlefield computers or waiting in ambush inside critical life-support medical equipment. The HDMI cable and its plug are a similar nightmare although I admit, a more robust one with a metal shroud/support. The lookalike ancestor, a printer plug, ( was the brand "Centronics" ? ) at least had a wire clip or two to hold it in place. Come on R&D worldwide. You do some really good stuff and cripple some of it with apparent carelessness. How about lift your game and maybe even hire in some old goat who still possesses intellectual property in his head from a bygone era so you don't repeat some lessons of history. I will concede one point. Glass tubes were a good thing but the unsystematic ratsnest of uninsulated wire tails on components which was built around them to feed them is a method well forgotten. I think I will go and brew a cup of tea. I get too edgy these days. Last edited by Bob Hart; December 11th, 2010 at 09:43 PM. Reason: error

December 11th, 2010, 09:40 PM	#10
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	Good points, Bob. I'd argue that my mom's blender from the 70s that she used until the early 90s ran better than the plastic one my dad bought her. But progress is progress, and I'd disagree about HDMI's structural stability, and I'll take USB over the old cables we used for printers, etc. Heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

December 11th, 2010, 10:12 PM	#11
Bob Hart Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: PERTH. W.A. AUSTRALIA. Posts: 4,477	HDMI. The cable is very stiff. Its support inside the plug itself appears firm. It exerts a lot of leverage across the plug. The shroud itself has adequate depth and secure fit. The fail point will likely be when some appliance designer goes cheap on the supporting casework around the socket and the mechanical loadings move to the circuit board pin solder joints. Retention of the plug in the socket is by friction alone with no latch or clip. I concede that the appliance will likely be dragged off the table or the SI2K camera off my shoulder before the joint fails. In its normal use it is not as mission-critical as the SATA plug but with increasing use of HDMI as a vision port to recording equipment, added protection against inadvertant disconnection would be nice. USB flat plugs structurally, only just dodged a bullet in my opinion. Their build standard bears more than just a passing resemblance to those wretched 6 channel laptop firewire sockets which would prise apart from normal cable loadings. Plug penetration into the socket is on the good side of just barely enough for mechanical support. Some third party suppliers are making versions with the metal shroud material too thin. The metal shrouded USB mini plugs and the older square plastic USB plugs seem firm enough. I concede that with the larger older style VGA/SVGA and Centronics plugs, a lot more natural resources are consumed in the making of them and that is something we should be mindful of.

December 12th, 2010, 06:07 PM	#12
Panagiotis Raris Major Player Join Date: Apr 2010 Location: Reading, PA USA and Athens, Greece Posts: 269	cables in general are expensive to make; layered metal wire insulation etc. if products had built in decoders and self-powered ports, it would be MUCH cheaper, and less damaging to the environment, to use fibre optic cables. the amount of data going to a monitor is far less than that of say a fibre optic network, and its one way communication. internal components would be even cheaper to manufacture, and faster. i do agree about SATA cable design, though. at least IDE cables STAYED in and did not flex!