Back in the days before HDMI existed, some laptops or PC video cards used to have an S-Video output along with the standard VGA port, so adapters like this were very useful to connect those computers to a regular TV which only had a composite video input but not an S-Video one.
I remember soliciting for a job at ASML early 2000s and the VGA port on their laptop had 2 pins shorted out, took my thrusty old chinese army knife and bent them back and voila i could enjoy a 2,5 hour long powerpoint along with 85 other people. Didn't get the job though.
The back of the package also says it's useful for connecting multiple things by s-video to a tv with one s-video input. Unfortunately this is about the worst way to do it, behind just using composite all the way for the other input, and finding an s-video switcher or y-adapter.
It's no wonder why analog signal processing is starting to catch on again in some applications where it can work faster and cheaper than digital equivalents, even some AI processing tech is taking analog approaches because it can be made ridiculously efficient and fast
For many purposes, "close enough" is fine. An old friend of mine who was an electronics tech referred to it as "analog schmoozing" where most of what you wanted in an electronic signal still got recorded or displayed in spite of various limitations of media and playback devices. Heck, in spite of being digital data, with modern spinning hard drives, the playback circuitry is making it's "best guess" and depending on various kinds of error correction to make sure it's a good guess.
@@UNSCPILOT I dunno what part of the digital process does it, but whatever it was, it's ruined some modern movies, at least in theatres, for me. During scenes with at lot of movement, the fragmenting, or whatever people want to call it, actually hurts my eyes.
I got one of these for a TAM that only has Svideo input. They’re actually very electrically simple. It ties both signal grounds together, and ties C and Y together with a very tiny capacitor on the C signal. This apparently makes all the difference and mixes or splits the C and Y very well.
From your description it sounds as if the capacitor acts as a crossover filter, perhaps? So that only low frequencies as passed through the Y channel and only high frequencies through the C channel. That would explain the softening of the image, as the Y channel is apparently band-limited; the TV does its own filtering of the chroma band when decoding composite input on top of that, so that's why it looks even softer when wired in the S-Video->Composite direction. That's my theory at least. I wonder how it performs on PAL signals. The PAL chroma signal is considerably higher in the spectrum than NTSC, so if my crossover theory is correct, then even more of luma would be lost, but the chroma signal would contain a considerable amount of higher-frequency luma interference. I wonder how do displays cope with that. That being said, S-Video was never as big in PAL regions. We got RGB in the form of SCART in the 1980s, and that served as the higher-end signal format, rendering S-Video largely pointless for anything except perhaps the actual S-VHS decks.
@@kFY514 yeah, I only saw S-video on actual S-VHS decks back in the day. Most TVs only had SCART and needed an adapter even for composite. A little later, I would see it on a bunch of LCD TVs, as it looks like those jellybean composite/S-video jacks (which would share audio) were standard and cheap.
@@kaitlyn__L SCART could carry composite or RGB (or both mixed together, that was intended for the early teletext decoders and the like), and when you connected a VCR via SCART, that carried composite. You needed an adapter for the RCA jacks, but those were completely passive as well. Aside from the S-VHS decks, I also remember S-Video as TV-outs on early 2000s computers (and inputs on TV tuner cards), so that was perhaps an option for a slightly better image on a TV. Probably that's because those computer parts were designed in NTSC lands, and perhaps the connector size was a factor as well. I heard you could hack together a passive VGA-SCART (RGB) adapter and force at least some GPUs to output 576i over that, for even better picture - although I've never seen it in action.
@@kFY514 indeed! I said that with the understanding that SCART carried multiple types of signals :) Come to think of it, a friend at school had a very techie dad, and he kept an S-video deck around purely to plug his laptop into his TV stack with (after he’d moved-on to DVD and his DVR for movies and TV recording).
I thought to myself "he's not going to play that video 4 times" and then he went ahead and did it like a boss! I absolutely love this level of detail, keep up the good work ❤️
When life gets me down, this kind of miscellaneous content keeps me going. Thanks for all the great content. Love how many nerdy folks are out there reminiscing about RadioShack.
I used to use this with a laptop that had a special TV out port that looked like S-video but had 3 extra pin holes, so it could output s-video, composite through the extra pins, or component using a combination of all pins somehow. The adapter that went from that port to composite rca female got lost, so the radio shack adapter made for a suitable replacement. As mentioned by someone else, it uses a capacitor between the chroma contacts to act as a filter to prevent smearing and dot crawl.
Assuming the C pin is also responsible for Cb or Cr, one of those extra pins could’ve just been a signal pin, which told C (for S-video aka Y/C) to become, say, Cb. Or, perhaps it was simply wired to produce Cb and Cr from the extra two non-composite pins, leaving the C pin entirely alone, and sharing the Y for both. Quite interesting that they didn’t add any extra grounds to that custom connector though, since half of the pins on an S-video mini-DIN are separate grounds to avoid crosstalk between the Y and the C. If I were to hazard a guess, composite might’ve shared a ground with C, Cb, and Cr, to keep the Y clean. But it would’ve still produced a slightly degraded signal overall, almost-certainly letting some higher-frequency Y back-in to the C (just like composite always does) even in the other modes.
@@kaitlyn__L The 7-pin connectors are pretty nonstandard but it seems usually component video mode involves retasking one of the pins. Sometimes the sixth and seventh pins are ground, sometimes they are sense. All I know for sure is that a random PNY cable I picked up somewhere, when plugged into my Dell, will output composite on its Pb jack.
Like you, I didn't know an adapter like this was possible but I bought one, or perhaps an adapting cord, around 2005-06. I don't think it was from Radio Shack. The reason I wanted it was because my Windows XP Dell had S-Video out so I could technically hook it to my adjacent TV, which I did. It made for an easier time sharing 'viral' early RUclips and Google Video videos with guests. But if I wanted to capture something from my PC for prosperity, such as the look of a website, online video, or PC game, my best option for capturing video was VHS. Since none of my VCRs recorded from S-video, I found this adapter. I did use it to save video from some PC things at the time but I used it much less often than I'd imagined.
Yes, I had the cord version, too. I had a home built computer with an ATI All-in-Wonder video card that had both SVGA and S-Video outputs. The cards were meant to be used in conjunction with video capture cards in media systems.
I think you can just switch in your GPU settings or in EnTech PowerStrip whether it outputs composite or luma-chroma via the S-Video plug. Though i don't remember for certain when i last did printing to VHS from a PC graphics card, whether it was on the TNT2 or on the GeForce 2mx. Anyway i also needed some custom modes and stuff to make it look good, but it did look excellent. I think the card itself came with a little S-Video to composite pigtail which did nothing, it just connected the baseband (luma) pin straight through, did not combine chroma itself, and you had to use the software to set the corresponding mode.
I think I got one for exactly the same reason. I had some early GeForce card and wanted to use the S-Video output. I might have worked at Radio Shack at the time. It was annoying, because you needed an S-Video cable and composite cable too in order to do this, due to the weird gendering of the adapter (female on both ends).
Man, I so miss Radio Shack. Up here in Canada, they were bought and converted into "The Source" but they were a mere shadow of Radio Shack and even they started disappearing from a lot of cities. There are so many BestBuy stores around, I am surprised they haven't decided to add a more Radio Shack section to the stores.
Then there was Future Shop and Best Buy being one in the same company. I bought a TV that says on the back of it only for sale at Best Buy at Future Shop. 😂
Back when Circuit City was involved, The Source was OK. But, with CC out of the picture, it has just become a rebranded Bell Store that sells more than just phones.
@Vaquero357 Yep. There is one in my hometown of Roundup Montana. It's paired with a contracting business ran by an electrition and a electrical engineer. I think all the ones that are left are "RadioShack Dealers" but any of the corperate stores are gone. There where like 5 in Billings, pop 200k(as compaired to Roundup at 1,800) but they are all gone. I think RadioShack would be smart if they just said screw the brick and morter stores, like they already did. But they should put effort into expanding this dealer system. Then maybe we could have a nice RadioShack parts section in Best Buy for example. Then I can buy a capacitor from BestBuy and RadioShack still gets to exist.
It's simple enough, both grounds are tied together, and the active pins (luminance and chrominance) are tied together with a 470 picofarad (or 1 nanofarad in some rare cases) capacitor, the tied grounds then go to the RCA connector's ground, and the tied Y and C go to middle pin. Not really much is going on in this kind of dongle
@@JessicaFEREM the luma signal will pass through, as it has the sync pulses, the chroma will be capacitively coupled onto the luma as it’s an AC signal and luma is basically a DC level
I remember back in 2003 when I wanted to connect my new (at the time) PC to my video recorder so I could record from it. The video card had video out and I could switch between NTSC and PAL but there was no composite out, only s-video. So shat I did was connect the VCR straight up to the luma wire, then used a small (I forget the value) ceramic capacitor to connect the chroma. It worked quite well if I remember, maybe that's what's in that little black box.
With maybe a small inductor in the luma side to stop it squashing the chroma from the cap. That's probably why the picture is a bit softer using the adapter
Yes! It's unfortunate that we NO longer have access to a plethora of adapters, etc. I, for, one, have an entire box of wires and adapters from RShack, some of which I still use!
I miss Radio Shack. They had so many adapters that allowed you to convert any type of wire to another connector I had a police radio scanner as a teenager and one of the best adapters I bought was a F-type to BNC adapter which let me connect our home's TV antenna to the scanner. Obviously it wasn't the most elegant solution but since the majority of the frequencies I wanted to listen to on were VHF anyway, it worked very well.
Radio Shack products. Always reliable, never cheap, but always on the edge of crap quality. Used them whenever I couldn't find a mainstream brand name product.
I loved those Radio Shack catalogs. There was once a pair of very expensive speakers - 1 Woofer, 1 midrange and 1 Tweeter, that was cooled by crystal salt for when the frequencies and usage raised the temperature in the tweeter. Sounded like science fiction or creative marketing. I never got a chance to hear one myself. Now lost to the sands of Time.
most Radioshack stores slowly disappeared around me by the time I was around 10, so I sadly missed this era of technology. I love old electronics tho, so thank you for documenting all these things! its so calming and fun to watch, and helps me wonder about what sorts of interesting innovations I missed.
Dell used to supply a very similar cable with some of their laptops that came with a S-Video jack on the laptop. This was in the days well before HDMI when TVs and projectors had Composite video and S-video was not as common. As I remember, they worked about as well as this Radio Shack adapter.
I remember my Dell laptop had an S Video as well as a VGA out...one time I broke the pins on one end of my S Video to S Video lead so I then chopped that plug off and soldered an RCA plug on the end by paralleling up the Lumina and Chroma together and it worked for TVs without S Video
Hi! I love your channel! I'm 52, and have been in the A/V field since my first job back in 1983. I've seen one component in the wild that only included S-Video and L/R audio inputs. It's a 4-channel analog RF modulator with MTS stereo, purchased from B&H. It came with four adapters similar to the one in your video. The only difference I see is that the included adapters had male S-Video outputs. We used two of those units to inject 8 in-house channels with a broadcast antenna for a hotel. We used USB media players that only included HDMI and composite outputs. Oddly, when using the adapters, only the luminance part of the signal was passed, producing a monochrome image. I found that opening the modulators and soldering a jumper between the luma/chroma pins solved the problem.
I had an old PC with S-video output and I wanted to hook it up to my (then) cheapish CRT Television, which had only RCA inputs. So I bought one of these adapters and all was well in my world.
I did the exact same, still have the converter in a box of old AV cables and such. Oddly enough, I somehow still have the CPU and hard drive from that PC in another box, possibly the video card as well. I might have a hoarding problem 😂
It does quite a good job considering the adapter wont be able to differentiate what part of the composite signal is 3.58Mhz colour sub carrier (for NTSC) and what part is high frequency luminance.
It kind of does, though. The only component inside one of these is a capacitor (I've seen schematics with 470 µF) that acts as a crude low-pass filter.
It differentiates in the same way as any other analog signal: Just toss in the appropriate resistor or capacitor and you've got yourself a filter that can do what it needs to do. Double the signal and then make one filtered down to 3.58MHz and pass thru the rest.
I agree, but seeing as he is one of the few people who still do RUclips for the love of it and not for the money, he still has a regular job and does this in his spare time. It's a double edged sword because it keeps his content honest and sincere but he must make time to do it out of his everyday life so unfortunately he isn't able to create as much as we would like.
This adapter was very useful back in the days. There were a lot of graphics cards out there featuring a “TV-OUT”. Most of those inexpensive cards were S-Video only. The problem of FBAS is that there is a “colour carrier” modulated on top. This limits the bandwidth of the Luma signal so your picture has to be less sharp. With S-Video, the Luma signal is independent so you can have all the sharpness there is since there is no bandwidth limit any more. This is the idea of S-VHS which needs the S-Video cables to perform as best as it can. The C64 generates Chroma (F) and Luma (BAS) independently but a TV needs an FBAS signal. So the C64 mixes both signals using two resistors inside the video modulator. There is an extra FBAS output in the Video output but you need a special cable to use it. The same trick is done with the S-Video only TV-out graphic cards. They came with an adapter with two resistors inside. The problem of mixing F and BAS is that both signals have a 75ohm impedance. If you simply merge the lines, half of the signal level is pulled down by the other output and you get a 35ohm impedance which doesn’t match to the TV/VCR input. This is why those lines are merged using two resistors to reduce stealing half of the signal by the other output. Obviously, this still reduces signal quality and level. But there is a method to do it properly. This is built into any TV or VCR and this is called the “colour trap”. Its just a crossover network. It separates the high frequency colour carrier from the signal and then limits the bandwidth of the Luma signal. In very old TVs, this is done by passive LC networks. And it is highly likely that this adapter uses the same passive LC circuits since it works both ways. And the quality of this circuit matters a lot! If the radio shack adapter has a very narrow bandwidth separation, it could do a much better job than the cheap built in stuff inside your TV or VCR. Also it would defiantly do a much better job than the cheap 2-resistor kind of adapter. If you have a high bandwidth Luma from a TV-out graphics card, Luma is often interpreted as colour and vice versa using FBAS. Then there are “ants” crawling on the shoulders of a news anchor while his pin striped suit flickers with weird colours.
It was also sometimes included for the opposite functionality, some Hauppauge TV-tuner cards had one of these included because they couldn't fit all of the connectors on like the low-profile pci cards
That's right. Every PC video card I have ever had from late 90's and early 2000s would usually have S-video for TV out and would always come with a s-video to composite dongle.
@@kerrymccluskie my uncle had a Win 98 computer that had S-Video card. It was used to hook up to a TV/VCR for video capture, the composite adapter was suited to TVs that don’t have S-Video input.
First! Nice comparison of the different video types to s-video... rare haul indeed VWestlife! (P.S. Congrats on the verified; hope to get a Silver Play Button soon)
I had to solder an adapter like this in 2001 to get my $2400 Compaq laptop that had a mini-din S-video output connected to my TV with composite input. An amazing experience to use the laptop to watch movies on the big screen! Not too complicated, just one capacitor: connect ground to ground, then luma directly to the center pin of an RCA jack and add the capacitor between chroma out and the RCA center pin. My gizmo worked perfectly for years, but a ready made adapter like this would have been better. Mine didn't even have any casing, the whole thing was kept together with just the wires and the capacitor! :D
I used one of these years ago to connect a laptop with DVD and only VGA or S-Video out to an older CRT tv with only RF and composite connections. I was living in a pretty cramped space at the time and it was a good way to use the laptop to watch DVDs, etc on a larger screen without needing additional equipment and worked well enough.
One of my favorite Radio Shack products was a AUX cable to Cassette accessory. In my old Van I didn't have an AUX port to plug my phone's audio into the radio with, but it had a tape deck. So I used that accessory to get around that issue. Sure I know bluetooth exists, but lets just be real, bluetooth sucks... It has a delay, that actual physical wires DO NOT.
@@alextirrellRI beware. Some cassete adapters are junk. I grabbed one and they put a mono head and sounded dull…awful. I have a older one, and have a stereo head a plays really nice.
If you had a really old car, you could connect an Aux to Cassette adapter to your phone or MP3 player, and put the adapter into a cassette to 8-Track adapter, which would then go into your car's 8-Track player.
I used these around that time period to hook up PCs to TVs. For a while, laptops and video cards would often have S-Video out, but no composite - and even those that had both usually combined them into a special 7-pin mini-DIN connector that'd accept standard S-Video cables directly, but needed a breakout adapter to use the composite. Many TVs still only had composite and RF inputs though! It was one of those "it sucks, but better than nothing!" kinda deals for getting video and emulated games onto a bigger screen. Methinks we can specifically blame the rising popularity of DVI for that situation; there just wasn't enough space on a PCI slot cover to fit more than a VGA, S-Video and DVI port. The iPhone wasn't the first to donglify simple A/V connectors!
People have been trying to make these for the MiSTer FPGA project. There are optional cores that can output S-Video but need an adapter like this to get it down to Composite.
This was 100% for connecting a laptop to a TV. I used something similar along with a 3.5mm>RCA adapter through my VCR to watch those sweet sweet divx-encoded theater cams. It was passable on a late-80s TV
When you showed that tv I thought the Image was weirdly letterboxed in center of the screen. I have never seen an LCD display with such massive bezels. There is as much bezel surface area as there is screen real estate. It might even have more bezel than it does screen lol.
I worked in the UK RadioShack ('Tandy') and we had plenty of cardboard boxes lying around in the storeroom with heaps of random opened and unopened adaptors that just languished for months on end. I seem to remember this one was often found there. I miss it though!.
I worked at RS in the US for many years, and we had boxes of cables and adapters we had used in the store to hookup displays in the audio / video / home theatre section. Often when someone would hookup a new display, though, they'd just open fresh new cables rather than sort through the box in search of the ones they needed, hoping they weren't defective. Or when a customer would return a cable or adapter that wasn't suitable for their application, rather than put the torn up package back for sale, they'd write it off and throw it in the box. When the collection got too big and tangled up, the manager would sometimes just give a bagfull to employees to take home. Small adapters would usually end up in a spare cash drawer at the end of the counter, where they would be easy to sort through, and were handy when needed to demonstrate a product or provide service for one the customer brought in. Cables and adapters were some of the most popular and also most profitable items we sold. I remember one optical audio cable we sold for like 39.99 and the store's cost was only like a dollar. While that was an extreme case, gross margins were typically around 80% for these accessories, often making them more lucrative for the company than the TV or stereo they were connecting, which might only have a 10-20% margin.
@@jasons8479 You're right - that was pretty much my experience too. The small parts and accessories/cables etc. flew off the shelves most days. We were encouraged to tape up the returned packs and put them back on the hangers - which made the racks look shoddy of course. It was all too easy to get into 15 minute conversations with customers about the products and invariably that's where individual knowledge about the technicalities came into it's own!
A few of those clips in the demonstration video were shot one town over from me in Wantagh Park here on Long Island!!! Very random (but cool). The ironic thing is that for the last few years there has been a STRICT rule of NO PHOTOGRAPHY at the pool (after some creep was taking pictures of all the kids). 7:26 and 7:43 for example... Great video as always, VWestlife!!!
I actually used one of these long ago. The GPU I had on my computer had a S-Video out, and I ran a cable from that to my TV, but the TV did not have an S-Video input, only composite. As I recall it worked pretty decently.
It must be the age of the viewers, but no one has mentioned what S Video was. (Actually, I did see one reference in passing) S VHS was developed and the only way to get the HD (relatively) output out of the VCR into a TV without lots of expense was to separate the Luma and chroma signals. so the S-VHS output was invented. This was later renamed to S-Video because other systems wanted the HD output. ( HD compared to Composite). The PAL version of VHS had a luma response of 240 lines. the S-VHS first gen recorders had in excess of 450 lines luma response. A UK S-VHS VCR could record teletext data and it was decodable on playback. I Know because I did it. Handy for subtitles. However, these S-VHS VCR and the TVs compatible with them were very expensive. £1000 for VCR and £650 for the HD (they called it) TV. normal good VCRs were around the £650 mark and good TV around £450. In short, these adaptors were not much good but as has been said before, better than nothing. They were no good for real S-VHS quality signals but at least they were in colour. I tried one once but sent it back because it was so soft on the picture.
My 2005 15 inch PowerBook G4 had an S video input, however, to convert to DVI on the smaller 12 inch, you had to use an adaptor. Also, they now make HDMI adaptors for things like the Playstation 2, since that was from the era when everyone used the white, red, and yellow cables, as many TV's had them. Thanks for the video, Kevin.
Definitely an oddball adapter that had its uses when new. Off the top of my head, I could use one with my Handycam to get an extra output to monitor tape transfers on a bigger screen. The camcorder's 3.5mm to composite AV out is already hooked up a standalone DVD recorder, so I just need one more composite output for connection to a cheap LCD monitor that lacks S video--this converter is just what I need. Hopefully there's still a few of these floating around on eBay.
$449 FOR AN HDMI CABLE? WHAT ON EARTH! I've seen ridiculously priced audio cables, so I don't know why I'm so shocked seeing HDMI cable being expensive for no reason, but damn...
Considering that it's all digital (which usually means it either works perfectly or doesn't work at all, and not anything in between, quite unlike analog signals) it's really ridiculous
@@igorszamaszow171 It’s a real bugbear of mine they claim it reduces signal jitter, some even claim it reduces banding artefacts 🤦♀️ really preying on the uninformed.
It has lights on it that indicate resolutions, so it may be a fancy cable that upscales lower resolution video to 4K, hopefully using a higher quality scaler than what the TV has.
I bought a handful of these back in 2005-ish to simplify my setup by having everything on S-Video. Messed up the picture pretty bad so I gave up on them. My next AV receiver was capable of converting everything to component so I didn't need to think about it again. Literally just a couple months back I dug one out from my adapter bin to try it again - resulted in a black in white picture when I went from my Laserdisc player with composite to a CRT TV on S-video (via a passive S-Video switch box). I figured something went bad in the adapter.
I actually have one of these from around 2007! Back then I had a Lenovo laptop which had an S-Video output, and when I would travel to visit my grandparents in the summer I would want to play my ripped movies on the TV, which of course only had a composite input. So that was my use case for it where I actually had an output device with S-Video but no composite, and an input device with composite but no S-Video. Remember it working "fine" back then.
I had a friend in year 2003 or 2004 that dowloaded divx movies from internet. At time, movies normally had alot of compression and atifacts and we find out if we connected the computer to a CRT TV, the TV “masked” all artifacts making movies more washable. We were very happy at time with result.
Someone's probably beaten me to saying that these are very handy for those computer video cards with built in scan converters that had only an S-video output when you needed composite. I used one of these for years that way with several GeForce and Radeon cards. At least with nVidia, I didn't get a usable picture until I used the card's control panel software to configure the output as composite. (A GeForce 4 and later a 6200 just gave me a bunch of bouncing dim lines until I made that change.) I have an active Kramer branded converter than can convert to and from both types of video, at once and with separate signals (one composite to S-video, the other S-video to composite). It's moderately better than RadioShack's passive converter. I suspect your first attempt might have gone better with a few well placed resistors. The luma and chroma circuits were probably trying to "drive" one another, reducing picture quality even further. I had really hoped RadioShack would make it when they relaunched under new ownership. Alas, it just wasn't to be. (On the other hand, I got an awful lot of fun stuff at fire sale prices when what was a *very* good RadioShack store finally closed.) Edit: yes, very definitely beaten to it many times over. :-)
I used my S-Video to Composite converter to no end. I dealt with PC's graphics card S-video output connected to with my CRT TV and VCR, actually :') Lower-end PAL AV gear do not actually have S-Video inputs or outputs built in, and SCART converters with S-Video tend to have weird behaviour with S-video (especially with camcorder cables with both S-video and composite). (Namely VCRs and HDD recorders, at least those from Panasonic. And ANY CRT TV that came with RF and non-RGB SCART only) Might be just bad luck, but I have to say that S-Video>Composite saved me a lot of headaches when a normal S-video>S-video connection failed. (The converters, cables and settings were OK xd) And British comedies are the best, Fawlty Towers especially :D Greetings from Czech!
Speaking of nowadays, I now use a Sony DA3500ES receiver :D One HDMI output that upscales component, composite and S-video video, takes optical, analog and SPDIF audio, output excelent. Makes dealing with retro consoles and Hi-fi gear (even amplifying my AT-LP60) pretty good :D It would have saved me from dealing with so many quality-degrading adapters... but we gotta start from somewhere, hey
I didnt had luck wirh svideo too. I tried to use svideo in PAL region and for some reason picture didnt show right. I used one of these adapters and i prefered svideo converted to composite than real direct svideo.
Radio shack has been gone for quite some time up here in Canada. I remember buying out a TON of their old stock. I have an old pic, maybe 15 years old now, sowing off all the stuff I got from RS before they shuttered in Canada. I got things like touch sensitive remote controls, rolls of RG6U, cans of 'air', video switches, etc. I also walked away with their entire local stock of individually packaged resistors, capacitors and such. I miss Radio Shack :/
I miss Radio Shack... I drove past their former location in a shopping center where they were starting when I was in High School. The sign is still there under the walkway, but the storefront is empty. That being said, the last time I went there when the store was still open, around 2009, I was looking for some capacitors to fix a flat panel TV's power supply. Gone was the "wall-o-components" I remembered from the late 1980's early 1990's. Instead they had a tiny box with a pathetic assortment of passive components and maybe 4 or 5 different types of capacitors. None of which were what I needed. But they would have been happy to sell me some overpriced batteries or a remote controlled toy car...
I used to go to Radio Shack all the time and get blank cassette tapes. And now, thanks to eBay and others, I have a whole stack of Radio Shack Realistic cassettes from the 1970’s and 1980’s. These are now in my collection.
Man I miss RadioShack. Not just because I worked there in 2016-17 but because they always had these cool unexpected gadgets. One of the simplest yet coolest things I bought was a 2xAA battery to usb charger. A modern phone will drain the batteries in maybe 10 minutes and get them pretty warm but I never would have found that anywhere else in a store.
I founded a Radio Shack MP-X 110 minute Type IV cassette at the thrift store, very rare to find, 2 sealed tapes, and Maxell XL II for 80 cents, because the cashier miscounted one of my 4 cassettes!
If you plan to use them and not just collect you might examine the tape itself first. They are rebadged as RadioShack but were really TDK behind the ugly pink and purple lettering -same shell. Now RadioShack did sell some cassettes that were made by Denon but the MPX were sourced by TDK but they were bad tapes in my experience. I bought two off ebay last year and had to throw them out as the tape itself was curling on the sides and was not making proper contact with the heads on my deck (Sony TC-K615S). At least you got them for a low price though so if they don’t work you won’t have spent a lot!
I remember finding one of these new in the package several years ago at a local habitat for Humanity reuse store in a big tote full for various cables in their packages that came from a closed down Radio Shack that was right down the street, so I snatched it up for $.20, along with $.50 and $1 HDMI cables(back when HDMI 1.1 cables where sometimes still $20+ for the BS 'Oxygen Free" ones), component cables, etc... but I have yet to find a use for this converter lol!
Most laptops with a TV output have more pins on the jack so you can either directly plug in an S-video cable, or use an optional adapter to get a composite video output.
@@vwestlife That just requires that you have the adaptor cable, which could have been lost to time, or have been a note in manual saying that adaptor cables are available for purchase at [very long URL] I've got to admit that despite all its drawbacks, HDMI has solved so many connection issues after it became the universal video standard
this would've been really helpful with camcorders. I know in the early 2000s they all had S-video outputs but no RCA jacks in order to make the cameras smaller. but not everyone had a VCR which had an S-video input. (I know because I am one of these people)
Since Radio Shack's brick-and-mortar demise in most parts of the US, I have turned to 99-cent stores for some of my adaptor and parts needs. Trisonic is a quick fix if the store has the items in stock. When I purchased my first HDMI television and DVD player, I needed a spare HDMI cable and Trisonic sells their cable for $6.99. I couldn't tell the difference. But I never took the time to do a detailed analysis of the image between Trisonic and Pioneer.
Im genuinely super suprised you of all people hadn't seen these adapters before. I had a million of those as a kid. They were for edge cases. or if you only had an svideo connector left on your TV or whatever.
I had one of these back in 2003~4. My first laptop had an S-Video out, but most of the TVs I encountered only had composite and this adapter was perfect for me. As a kid I thought it would be so cool to connect a computer to a TV. (I didn’t know that used to be the norm.)
There is an affiliated Radio Shack north of here, near Concord, NH. It is part of an Auto parts store in that store. When we were in Jensen Beach, Florida, last Winter, there was a similar Radio Shack in a portion of a Western Auto store in the town of Indiantown, Florida, a small town to the west of us, near Lake Okeechobee 😀 .
Separating luma and chroma doesn't require active components. The simple notch comb filter did it with passives from the 50s well into the 80s in consumer gear. The quality was lousy with dot crawl abound, but it works. The reason why the S-Video to composite video doesn't really have dot crawl is the notch filter is very aggressive in that adapter. It basically stomped on the high frequencies (resolution) of the video to avoid it. Running a test pattern through it will reveal how bad it really is.
Oh I had one of those back in the day! I can't remember what equipment I had that I needed "converted" but it actually worked enough for my uses. Edit: I remember now, I had a video card in my computer that only had an SVideo and VGA out, and I didn't have a TV in my dorm room that had an SVideo in. This adapter let me connect my computer up to the TV, and it worked.
Radio Shack is not completely dead! Hobby Town in North Austin, TX (near Parmer Ln. & Mopac) is an official Radio Shack dealer as we speak and has a full wall that is actually pretty well stocked with components and parts. Incidentally, the actual Radio Shack store 30 min. North of there, in Georgetown, TX (where I live) was one of the last in the nation to close. I was one of their very last customers on their very last day. It was a sad day indeed, but I brought quite a bit of their remaining electronic and project parts booty home with me. A Radio Shack memory… As a young teen in the 80’s, I had a dream (more like a fantasy) that I’d be locked in a Radio Shack all night with access to all of their electronics project kits, soldering irons, components and Forest M. Mims III books. I was actually employed by Radio Shack in the 90’s for a bit over a year and the very low base pay/commissioned sales aspect soured my dream quite a bit. Two great memories from working there, I like to be positive, were using a remote controlled toy Army tank to drag CAT5 cable across the top of the drop ceiling panels from the front to the rear of the store (that was my idea. The super smarmy suck-up assistant manager was pissed he didn’t think of it), and helping musician, Johnny Gimble (Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and Grammy winner), replace a potentiometer on his violin, aka; “fiddle”, preamp. He actually brought his violin into the store! The super smarmy assistant manager tried to take over but didn’t have the actual EE knowledge that I had and quickly had to back out-and not so gracefully. No telling what famous music flowed through my little replacement pot after that. Repairs involving soldering irons were normally not allowed at Radio Shacks, but the actual store manager acknowledged my skills and allowed me to do a several, including soldering in new wireless home phone batteries while customers waited, which no other store was doing. I went on to work in aerospace and eventually become a science teacher and official science presenter for the Texas Library System. I’ve even partnered with NASA a few times, including a project that involved habitats in space. But it definitely didn’t involve anything as cool as getting to pull wires across overhead ceiling tiles with a remotely controlled Army tank. 😂
old gpus like mx100 ... mx400 often had an s-video output and a passive composite adapter included, and they worked fine. I remember at one time I even made one myself, there is only one capacitor needed and everything works. as far as I remember, the signals have a different frequency and modulation method so that they can be passively mixed. in the opposite direction, it works most likely for the same reason - the inputs are tuned to different frequencies and have different demodulators
Yes, I came to comments to say this, I had video cards with tv-out using svideo, in times when the common pc monitor was a little 14in CRT, and I had a 20in CRT tv I wanted to connect the PC to, to watch content, and that TV didn't have svideo input. So I think I succesfully used a converter like this, but with a male minidin IIRC...
Yep, I was going to say the same thing. I also had video cards and TV capture cards/USB devices that used a single S-Video jack S-Video to RCA Composite adaptor instead of separate S-Video and Composite jacks (thats in addition to the standard VGA Out on the video cards). Some device for space or cost reasons just decide the single S-Video out or input with RCA composite adaptor was way to go. I had some these S-Video to RCA adaptors work fine and one that didn’t work at all for some reason.
14:12 Indeed, it was certainly handy for me to pop down to Tandy to buy adapters and cables during a video project than waiting for delivery. That store closed in 1992 :(
I built an S-Video to Composite cable some years ago to connect an S-Video out only videocard to a Composite input only TV. It was... functional. I got the instructions on the internet, IIRC it only used a ceramic capacitor (apart from the cable and plugs, of course) and picture quality could be somewhat adjusted by varying the value of said capacitor.
My employer used to use these by the dozen for a large customer. Said customer had a distributed S-video system transmitting and receiving between some 50 rooms (for recording and overflow purposes). Toward the end of the system's lifespan (decommissioned ~2014), S-video devices became very hard to come by, where even today composite video isn't difficult to find. So, as displays/cameras/VCRs/etc. failed, they were replaced with composite video versions. Every last one of them used some version of this adapter, though sometimes with the male/female ends reversed. We probably help keep our local Radio Shack in business a bit longer. 🤣
I still have a couple of these, albeit with a male s-video end. I used these in my video game set-up. The switch box was connected to the CRT via s-video, to take advantage of the consoles that supported it. For those that didn't, I added this to the end of its RCA video cable so I can cleanly switch to it without having to change TV inputs. (The switch box was passive and didn't support internal conversion between s-video and composite. It was all of one or the other only.)
if you were like us we had VCRs, video games, camcorders, multiple TVs all vying for various inputs and outputs in our entertainment centers. Radio Shack was our friend.
I had one from RS back in the day - yeah doesn't work great for splitting but worked ok for combining. Used it with a video editing card that only had S in and out, if you used it to combine it would have the color noise on the lumna signal. The key was the little capacitor between. I think I also built my own doing that. Guess it acts as a high pass filter for the 3.57mhz color signal.
Radio Shack sold a switch box that did this. Whichever type input it had would become S-video out if that was plugged in or composite if S-video was unplugged. It was an un-powered device just like that adapter. It had both S-video and composite inputs. I've got one of those boxes in my main analog rack, and one of the adapters from this video.
My educated guess is that it would _actually_ be composite if composite plugged in or S-video otherwise, a seemingly trivial difference to what you said. However it would likely be implemented by working as S-video internally and the Y would connect to the composite pins and the C would connect to the switch on the composite jack via a small capacitor. On further thought that auto-switching setup would only work on the input side. I don't know how they would achieve auto output switching using only commonly available jacks.
I remember those. I think internally they are just a capacitor and a resistor, something super simple like that, it's been 20+ years since I saw the schematic on how to build one. I borrowed one from a friend to try in a room that had several A/V components and a projector, the hope was to get the composite VCR to S-Video so a simple A/V switcher could be used to select (other two sources being a DVD player and a Dish receiver,) but unfortunately, I got B/W video out of it, probably due to the very long signal cable to the projector (a distribution amplifier may have helped with that. We ended up just having to switch the projector to composite when VHS was used. I have seen a projector with only S-video and VGA, admittedly, such a layout is very unusual. Oh and agreed, it is a shame not having that store with the oddball adapters for most occasions, or the parts to build an even odder adapter.
First let me say I really miss Radio Shack, my uncle used to own the local store, so I was a fixture there. Next, I grew up when we only got 3 1/2 channels,(3 1/2 cause one channel only came in after dark), and on two channels if it came in good enough for the color to come through you was doing great. So I would still watch any of those signals if that is all I had. That adapter could be used to give an additional input back in the day if your TV was limited on number of inputs. Back in the day I had a VCR, DVD, and a laser disk player. and used a switch to be able to connect them all.
Oh my, I still have that S-Video converter that I first bought in 2009, I wanted to hook up my hp laptop (which had S-video out) to my Sony Trinitron WEGA CRT TV, to play some games. It never worked. I ended up making my own cable with some resistors, and that worked perfectly!
I used one in the past. The S-Video jack on my TV went bad and there was no way I was going to buy a new TV just because of that. So just because it was more convenient, instead of running new wires, I simply got that adapter and plugged the S-Video cable into the composite input.
When I was growing up, we had a TV that defaulted to S-video when it was in use. It only had one set of inputs only. We had to use a switch box that converted our VCR to S-Video so we could also watch our DVD player on S-Video. It did the same function as the adapter. It suffered from dot crawl issues.
All three of the 43-inch flat screens we have owned support composite input. Two also support component. One of the TVs I have that supports both was bought this year.
As a kid in Norway even I knew about Radio Shack and envied you for them. Today we have a chain called Clas Ohlson that has a decent assortment of AV cables and stuff like that, even 3D printing supplies, but not really electronics and computers like Radio Shack.
Vizio a few years ago actually made a TV, the d24, which had composite and component inputs, but both of them required the same style breakout cables you would use with a camcorder or portable DVD player, based around a three-pole 8th-in connector. All the modern TVs I've seen still include standard composite inputs. Even our living room TV, a 50-in Westinghouse Roku TV, not only features standard composite inputs, but the antenna setup screen even asks if you're still using analogue devices which require VHF channels 3 or 4.
Sometimes back in the day, I'd go to RadioShack to just look at all the cool adapters they had. Fast forward. 16 years old. The place to go for the band gear... XLR cables, 1/4 inch adapters etc. I miss the Shack!
Was kind of hoping for a teardown to see how it performed this. Maybe in a future video? Either way this is a really neat piece of electronics history.
Wouldn't the Keeping Up Appearances trailer have started life as a 25 FPS 576i PAL recording that was already converted once to 30 FPS 480i NTSC signal? That already tends to make it look pretty soft.
It can be even worse: I know AYBS was shot on vidicon tubes so it was extra soft with artifacts like streaking and bright lights making comet trails. I think most of those other ones were vidicon too (Fawlty Towers, Blackadder), so location shoots where you couldn't bring the huge camera were done on 16 mm film. Keeping Up Appearances would be the only one firmly in the CCD era.
@@straightpipediesel Faulty Towers, The Black Adder, and Are You Being Served? were all from the 1970s, and would all be PAL shot with vidicons. Keeping Up Appearances is 1990s, also PAL, but shot with solid state pickups. The content is digitized to MPEG4 for the DVD. Originally, they were released in PAL and NTSC analog VHS versions.
I used exactly this adapter to hook up my video card to an old TV. The video card only had s-video out. It might've had a possibility of some multi-out adapter but mine never came with one and i wouldn't've known where to get one and probably wouldn't've been able to order it.
PC graphics cards and those pc TV tuner cards used these adapters. You can chop up an svideo cable and composite cable, twist wires together to make the same thing.
My dad use to sell these adapters S video to Rca on the markets, and didn't know how it worked so had just spliced rca into s-video and it produced an image. Also, took the adapter apart years ago to find no circuitry. These things are great when you need 'em in a pinch or to cut corners temporary.
Purchased one of these adapters 18 years ago to connect a PC video card that had an s-video out to a TV that only supported composite. This was the early days of MythTV video capture, basically build your own TiVO.
Back in the days before HDMI existed, some laptops or PC video cards used to have an S-Video output along with the standard VGA port, so adapters like this were very useful to connect those computers to a regular TV which only had a composite video input but not an S-Video one.
I remember soliciting for a job at ASML early 2000s and the VGA port on their laptop had 2 pins shorted out, took my thrusty old chinese army knife and bent them back and voila i could enjoy a 2,5 hour long powerpoint along with 85 other people. Didn't get the job though.
Yep, I have a cable for my HP Pavilion dv6000. That was pretty useful.
This is exactly what I was gonna say.
I even remember getting excited after getting a TV with an actual S-video input
The back of the package also says it's useful for connecting multiple things by s-video to a tv with one s-video input. Unfortunately this is about the worst way to do it, behind just using composite all the way for the other input, and finding an s-video switcher or y-adapter.
This is one of those not really ideal, but "lots better than nothing" solutions that analog signals allow.
It's no wonder why analog signal processing is starting to catch on again in some applications where it can work faster and cheaper than digital equivalents, even some AI processing tech is taking analog approaches because it can be made ridiculously efficient and fast
For many purposes, "close enough" is fine. An old friend of mine who was an electronics tech referred to it as "analog schmoozing" where most of what you wanted in an electronic signal still got recorded or displayed in spite of various limitations of media and playback devices. Heck, in spite of being digital data, with modern spinning hard drives, the playback circuitry is making it's "best guess" and depending on various kinds of error correction to make sure it's a good guess.
@@UNSCPILOT I dunno what part of the digital process does it, but whatever it was, it's ruined some modern movies, at least in theatres, for me. During scenes with at lot of movement, the fragmenting, or whatever people want to call it, actually hurts my eyes.
I got one of these for a TAM that only has Svideo input. They’re actually very electrically simple. It ties both signal grounds together, and ties C and Y together with a very tiny capacitor on the C signal. This apparently makes all the difference and mixes or splits the C and Y very well.
From your description it sounds as if the capacitor acts as a crossover filter, perhaps? So that only low frequencies as passed through the Y channel and only high frequencies through the C channel. That would explain the softening of the image, as the Y channel is apparently band-limited; the TV does its own filtering of the chroma band when decoding composite input on top of that, so that's why it looks even softer when wired in the S-Video->Composite direction. That's my theory at least.
I wonder how it performs on PAL signals. The PAL chroma signal is considerably higher in the spectrum than NTSC, so if my crossover theory is correct, then even more of luma would be lost, but the chroma signal would contain a considerable amount of higher-frequency luma interference. I wonder how do displays cope with that.
That being said, S-Video was never as big in PAL regions. We got RGB in the form of SCART in the 1980s, and that served as the higher-end signal format, rendering S-Video largely pointless for anything except perhaps the actual S-VHS decks.
@@kFY514 yeah, I only saw S-video on actual S-VHS decks back in the day. Most TVs only had SCART and needed an adapter even for composite. A little later, I would see it on a bunch of LCD TVs, as it looks like those jellybean composite/S-video jacks (which would share audio) were standard and cheap.
@@kaitlyn__L SCART could carry composite or RGB (or both mixed together, that was intended for the early teletext decoders and the like), and when you connected a VCR via SCART, that carried composite. You needed an adapter for the RCA jacks, but those were completely passive as well.
Aside from the S-VHS decks, I also remember S-Video as TV-outs on early 2000s computers (and inputs on TV tuner cards), so that was perhaps an option for a slightly better image on a TV. Probably that's because those computer parts were designed in NTSC lands, and perhaps the connector size was a factor as well. I heard you could hack together a passive VGA-SCART (RGB) adapter and force at least some GPUs to output 576i over that, for even better picture - although I've never seen it in action.
This was the cheap way. The best way to do it is with a summing amp that just adds the two signals with no bandpass, e.g. ISL59114.
@@kFY514 indeed! I said that with the understanding that SCART carried multiple types of signals :)
Come to think of it, a friend at school had a very techie dad, and he kept an S-video deck around purely to plug his laptop into his TV stack with (after he’d moved-on to DVD and his DVR for movies and TV recording).
I thought to myself "he's not going to play that video 4 times" and then he went ahead and did it like a boss! I absolutely love this level of detail, keep up the good work ❤️
When life gets me down, this kind of miscellaneous content keeps me going. Thanks for all the great content. Love how many nerdy folks are out there reminiscing about RadioShack.
I used to use this with a laptop that had a special TV out port that looked like S-video but had 3 extra pin holes, so it could output s-video, composite through the extra pins, or component using a combination of all pins somehow. The adapter that went from that port to composite rca female got lost, so the radio shack adapter made for a suitable replacement. As mentioned by someone else, it uses a capacitor between the chroma contacts to act as a filter to prevent smearing and dot crawl.
Oh yes, I have seen those, SOME of them you can use Component Video out on for HD video.(they is another adapter you can get for that)
Assuming the C pin is also responsible for Cb or Cr, one of those extra pins could’ve just been a signal pin, which told C (for S-video aka Y/C) to become, say, Cb.
Or, perhaps it was simply wired to produce Cb and Cr from the extra two non-composite pins, leaving the C pin entirely alone, and sharing the Y for both.
Quite interesting that they didn’t add any extra grounds to that custom connector though, since half of the pins on an S-video mini-DIN are separate grounds to avoid crosstalk between the Y and the C.
If I were to hazard a guess, composite might’ve shared a ground with C, Cb, and Cr, to keep the Y clean. But it would’ve still produced a slightly degraded signal overall, almost-certainly letting some higher-frequency Y back-in to the C (just like composite always does) even in the other modes.
@@kaitlyn__L The 7-pin connectors are pretty nonstandard but it seems usually component video mode involves retasking one of the pins. Sometimes the sixth and seventh pins are ground, sometimes they are sense.
All I know for sure is that a random PNY cable I picked up somewhere, when plugged into my Dell, will output composite on its Pb jack.
Like you, I didn't know an adapter like this was possible but I bought one, or perhaps an adapting cord, around 2005-06. I don't think it was from Radio Shack.
The reason I wanted it was because my Windows XP Dell had S-Video out so I could technically hook it to my adjacent TV, which I did. It made for an easier time sharing 'viral' early RUclips and Google Video videos with guests. But if I wanted to capture something from my PC for prosperity, such as the look of a website, online video, or PC game, my best option for capturing video was VHS. Since none of my VCRs recorded from S-video, I found this adapter. I did use it to save video from some PC things at the time but I used it much less often than I'd imagined.
Got any interesting footage that youd like to share? :D
Yes, I had the cord version, too. I had a home built computer with an ATI All-in-Wonder video card that had both SVGA and S-Video outputs. The cards were meant to be used in conjunction with video capture cards in media systems.
I think you can just switch in your GPU settings or in EnTech PowerStrip whether it outputs composite or luma-chroma via the S-Video plug. Though i don't remember for certain when i last did printing to VHS from a PC graphics card, whether it was on the TNT2 or on the GeForce 2mx. Anyway i also needed some custom modes and stuff to make it look good, but it did look excellent. I think the card itself came with a little S-Video to composite pigtail which did nothing, it just connected the baseband (luma) pin straight through, did not combine chroma itself, and you had to use the software to set the corresponding mode.
actually you can find some cheap chinese hdmi to composite cables and they don't work so yeah, if it sounds too good to be true it probably isn't
I think I got one for exactly the same reason. I had some early GeForce card and wanted to use the S-Video output. I might have worked at Radio Shack at the time. It was annoying, because you needed an S-Video cable and composite cable too in order to do this, due to the weird gendering of the adapter (female on both ends).
Now this is the stuff! Weirdly specific little bits of tech, especially converters, I love that.
"Weirdly specific little bits of tech" SHOULD have been Radio Shack's slogan!
Man, I so miss Radio Shack. Up here in Canada, they were bought and converted into "The Source" but they were a mere shadow of Radio Shack and even they started disappearing from a lot of cities.
There are so many BestBuy stores around, I am surprised they haven't decided to add a more Radio Shack section to the stores.
Then there was Future Shop and Best Buy being one in the same company. I bought a TV that says on the back of it only for sale at Best Buy at Future Shop. 😂
Back when Circuit City was involved, The Source was OK. But, with CC out of the picture, it has just become a rebranded Bell Store that sells more than just phones.
@Vaquero357 Yep. There is one in my hometown of Roundup Montana. It's paired with a contracting business ran by an electrition and a electrical engineer. I think all the ones that are left are "RadioShack Dealers" but any of the corperate stores are gone. There where like 5 in Billings, pop 200k(as compaired to Roundup at 1,800) but they are all gone.
I think RadioShack would be smart if they just said screw the brick and morter stores, like they already did. But they should put effort into expanding this dealer system. Then maybe we could have a nice RadioShack parts section in Best Buy for example. Then I can buy a capacitor from BestBuy and RadioShack still gets to exist.
It would have been interesting to open it up and see what the circuitry was, but I'm guessing that may be tough to do.
I was about to comment that.
what's this magic..
Me too! I didn't think this was possible with a passive adaptor, so I would like to know how that adaptor works.
It's simple enough, both grounds are tied together, and the active pins (luminance and chrominance) are tied together with a 470 picofarad (or 1 nanofarad in some rare cases) capacitor, the tied grounds then go to the RCA connector's ground, and the tied Y and C go to middle pin.
Not really much is going on in this kind of dongle
Likely just some capacitors and or resistors
@@JessicaFEREM the luma signal will pass through, as it has the sync pulses, the chroma will be capacitively coupled onto the luma as it’s an AC signal and luma is basically a DC level
I remember back in 2003 when I wanted to connect my new (at the time) PC to my video recorder so I could record from it. The video card had video out and I could switch between NTSC and PAL but there was no composite out, only s-video. So shat I did was connect the VCR straight up to the luma wire, then used a small (I forget the value) ceramic capacitor to connect the chroma. It worked quite well if I remember, maybe that's what's in that little black box.
With maybe a small inductor in the luma side to stop it squashing the chroma from the cap.
That's probably why the picture is a bit softer using the adapter
Yes! It's unfortunate that we NO longer have access to a plethora of adapters, etc. I, for, one, have an entire box of wires and adapters from RShack, some of which I still use!
i still have an S-Video to SCART adapter for god knows why. I only have HDMI tv''s in the house.
There's all kinds on Amazon.
I miss Radio Shack. They had so many adapters that allowed you to convert any type of wire to another connector
I had a police radio scanner as a teenager and one of the best adapters I bought was a F-type to BNC adapter which let me connect our home's TV antenna to the scanner. Obviously it wasn't the most elegant solution but since the majority of the frequencies I wanted to listen to on were VHF anyway, it worked very well.
Radio Shack products. Always reliable, never cheap, but always on the edge of crap quality. Used them whenever I couldn't find a mainstream brand name product.
I loved those Radio Shack catalogs. There was once a pair of very expensive speakers - 1 Woofer, 1 midrange and 1 Tweeter, that was cooled by crystal salt for when the frequencies and usage raised the temperature in the tweeter. Sounded like science fiction or creative marketing. I never got a chance to hear one myself. Now lost to the sands of Time.
most Radioshack stores slowly disappeared around me by the time I was around 10, so I sadly missed this era of technology. I love old electronics tho, so thank you for documenting all these things! its so calming and fun to watch, and helps me wonder about what sorts of interesting innovations I missed.
Dell used to supply a very similar cable with some of their laptops that came with a S-Video jack on the laptop. This was in the days well before HDMI when TVs and projectors had Composite video and S-video was not as common. As I remember, they worked about as well as this Radio Shack adapter.
I remember my Dell laptop had an S Video as well as a VGA out...one time I broke the pins on one end of my S Video to S Video lead so I then chopped that plug off and soldered an RCA plug on the end by paralleling up the Lumina and Chroma together and it worked for TVs without S Video
Hauppauge offered these with some of their TV-tuner cards as well (popular in some HP models, both desktop and laptop)
I bought one months ago, but the vga to composite converter box i bought seems to produce a sharper image
Hi! I love your channel! I'm 52, and have been in the A/V field since my first job back in 1983. I've seen one component in the wild that only included S-Video and L/R audio inputs. It's a 4-channel analog RF modulator with MTS stereo, purchased from B&H. It came with four adapters similar to the one in your video. The only difference I see is that the included adapters had male S-Video outputs. We used two of those units to inject 8 in-house channels with a broadcast antenna for a hotel. We used USB media players that only included HDMI and composite outputs. Oddly, when using the adapters, only the luminance part of the signal was passed, producing a monochrome image. I found that opening the modulators and soldering a jumper between the luma/chroma pins solved the problem.
I had an old PC with S-video output and I wanted to hook it up to my (then) cheapish CRT Television, which had only RCA inputs. So I bought one of these adapters and all was well in my world.
I did the exact same, still have the converter in a box of old AV cables and such. Oddly enough, I somehow still have the CPU and hard drive from that PC in another box, possibly the video card as well. I might have a hoarding problem 😂
It does quite a good job considering the adapter wont be able to differentiate what part of the composite signal is 3.58Mhz colour sub carrier (for NTSC) and what part is high frequency luminance.
That can be done passively. I'd love to see that thing cut open.
It kind of does, though. The only component inside one of these is a capacitor (I've seen schematics with 470 µF) that acts as a crude low-pass filter.
It differentiates in the same way as any other analog signal: Just toss in the appropriate resistor or capacitor and you've got yourself a filter that can do what it needs to do. Double the signal and then make one filtered down to 3.58MHz and pass thru the rest.
Can the source sense the adapter being used and output a different signal. These were used on late 90s computers to hook up to TVs
@@flapjack9495 That's the point luminance is above 3.58Mhz
You need to upload more. I like these videos too much to only get one per week. 😅
I agree, but seeing as he is one of the few people who still do RUclips for the love of it and not for the money, he still has a regular job and does this in his spare time. It's a double edged sword because it keeps his content honest and sincere but he must make time to do it out of his everyday life so unfortunately he isn't able to create as much as we would like.
@@JaredConnell Based comment.
That TV needs its own video! I lold so hard at just seeing it!
This adapter was very useful back in the days.
There were a lot of graphics cards out there featuring a “TV-OUT”. Most of those inexpensive cards were S-Video only.
The problem of FBAS is that there is a “colour carrier” modulated on top. This limits the bandwidth of the Luma signal so your picture has to be less sharp. With S-Video, the Luma signal is independent so you can have all the sharpness there is since there is no bandwidth limit any more. This is the idea of S-VHS which needs the S-Video cables to perform as best as it can.
The C64 generates Chroma (F) and Luma (BAS) independently but a TV needs an FBAS signal. So the C64 mixes both signals using two resistors inside the video modulator. There is an extra FBAS output in the Video output but you need a special cable to use it.
The same trick is done with the S-Video only TV-out graphic cards. They came with an adapter with two resistors inside.
The problem of mixing F and BAS is that both signals have a 75ohm impedance. If you simply merge the lines, half of the signal level is pulled down by the other output and you get a 35ohm impedance which doesn’t match to the TV/VCR input. This is why those lines are merged using two resistors to reduce stealing half of the signal by the other output. Obviously, this still reduces signal quality and level.
But there is a method to do it properly. This is built into any TV or VCR and this is called the “colour trap”. Its just a crossover network. It separates the high frequency colour carrier from the signal and then limits the bandwidth of the Luma signal. In very old TVs, this is done by passive LC networks. And it is highly likely that this adapter uses the same passive LC circuits since it works both ways.
And the quality of this circuit matters a lot! If the radio shack adapter has a very narrow bandwidth separation, it could do a much better job than the cheap built in stuff inside your TV or VCR. Also it would defiantly do a much better job than the cheap 2-resistor kind of adapter.
If you have a high bandwidth Luma from a TV-out graphics card, Luma is often interpreted as colour and vice versa using FBAS. Then there are “ants” crawling on the shoulders of a news anchor while his pin striped suit flickers with weird colours.
It was also sometimes included for the opposite functionality, some Hauppauge TV-tuner cards had one of these included because they couldn't fit all of the connectors on like the low-profile pci cards
Just in time for breakfast! Really interesting didn't know that about S Video have a nice Thursday Kevin.
Love your videos but Hyacinth Bucket made this one above and beyond! I love Keeping Up Appearances.
S Video was mostly used by computers and DVD players, that adapter was useful to connect devices that lacked a composite video connector.
That's right. Every PC video card I have ever had from late 90's and early 2000s would usually have S-video for TV out and would always come with a s-video to composite dongle.
@@kerrymccluskie my uncle had a Win 98 computer that had S-Video card. It was used to hook up to a TV/VCR for video capture, the composite adapter was suited to TVs that don’t have S-Video input.
First! Nice comparison of the different video types to s-video... rare haul indeed VWestlife! (P.S. Congrats on the verified; hope to get a Silver Play Button soon)
I had to solder an adapter like this in 2001 to get my $2400 Compaq laptop that had a mini-din S-video output connected to my TV with composite input. An amazing experience to use the laptop to watch movies on the big screen! Not too complicated, just one capacitor: connect ground to ground, then luma directly to the center pin of an RCA jack and add the capacitor between chroma out and the RCA center pin. My gizmo worked perfectly for years, but a ready made adapter like this would have been better. Mine didn't even have any casing, the whole thing was kept together with just the wires and the capacitor! :D
I used one of these years ago to connect a laptop with DVD and only VGA or S-Video out to an older CRT tv with only RF and composite connections. I was living in a pretty cramped space at the time and it was a good way to use the laptop to watch DVDs, etc on a larger screen without needing additional equipment and worked well enough.
One of my favorite Radio Shack products was a AUX cable to Cassette accessory. In my old Van I didn't have an AUX port to plug my phone's audio into the radio with, but it had a tape deck. So I used that accessory to get around that issue. Sure I know bluetooth exists, but lets just be real, bluetooth sucks... It has a delay, that actual physical wires DO NOT.
Surprisingly, I still see new cassette adapters in stores.
@@alextirrellRI Good to know. I'm glad there is still a use for them. Especially if you want an internet capable antique radio. :D
@@alextirrellRI beware. Some cassete adapters are junk. I grabbed one and they put a mono head and sounded dull…awful. I have a older one, and have a stereo head a plays really nice.
If you had a really old car, you could connect an Aux to Cassette adapter to your phone or MP3 player, and put the adapter into a cassette to 8-Track adapter, which would then go into your car's 8-Track player.
@@sjogosPT Just like a lot of modern cassette players that only have mono heads in them.
I used these around that time period to hook up PCs to TVs. For a while, laptops and video cards would often have S-Video out, but no composite - and even those that had both usually combined them into a special 7-pin mini-DIN connector that'd accept standard S-Video cables directly, but needed a breakout adapter to use the composite. Many TVs still only had composite and RF inputs though! It was one of those "it sucks, but better than nothing!" kinda deals for getting video and emulated games onto a bigger screen. Methinks we can specifically blame the rising popularity of DVI for that situation; there just wasn't enough space on a PCI slot cover to fit more than a VGA, S-Video and DVI port. The iPhone wasn't the first to donglify simple A/V connectors!
People have been trying to make these for the MiSTer FPGA project. There are optional cores that can output S-Video but need an adapter like this to get it down to Composite.
I’ve used one of those! My laptop only had S-Video output and my TV only had composite. It was a hand-me-down CRT but it did the trick!
This was 100% for connecting a laptop to a TV. I used something similar along with a 3.5mm>RCA adapter through my VCR to watch those sweet sweet divx-encoded theater cams. It was passable on a late-80s TV
Many old passive mechanical AV switches sported this feature. One I have from Radioshack has just about the same video quality as your adapter.
When you showed that tv I thought the Image was weirdly letterboxed in center of the screen. I have never seen an LCD display with such massive bezels. There is as much bezel surface area as there is screen real estate. It might even have more bezel than it does screen lol.
I worked in the UK RadioShack ('Tandy') and we had plenty of cardboard boxes lying around in the storeroom with heaps of random opened and unopened adaptors that just languished for months on end. I seem to remember this one was often found there. I miss it though!.
I worked at RS in the US for many years, and we had boxes of cables and adapters we had used in the store to hookup displays in the audio / video / home theatre section. Often when someone would hookup a new display, though, they'd just open fresh new cables rather than sort through the box in search of the ones they needed, hoping they weren't defective. Or when a customer would return a cable or adapter that wasn't suitable for their application, rather than put the torn up package back for sale, they'd write it off and throw it in the box. When the collection got too big and tangled up, the manager would sometimes just give a bagfull to employees to take home. Small adapters would usually end up in a spare cash drawer at the end of the counter, where they would be easy to sort through, and were handy when needed to demonstrate a product or provide service for one the customer brought in.
Cables and adapters were some of the most popular and also most profitable items we sold. I remember one optical audio cable we sold for like 39.99 and the store's cost was only like a dollar. While that was an extreme case, gross margins were typically around 80% for these accessories, often making them more lucrative for the company than the TV or stereo they were connecting, which might only have a 10-20% margin.
@@jasons8479 You're right - that was pretty much my experience too. The small parts and accessories/cables etc. flew off the shelves most days. We were encouraged to tape up the returned packs and put them back on the hangers - which made the racks look shoddy of course. It was all too easy to get into 15 minute conversations with customers about the products and invariably that's where individual knowledge about the technicalities came into it's own!
A few of those clips in the demonstration video were shot one town over from me in Wantagh Park here on Long Island!!! Very random (but cool). The ironic thing is that for the last few years there has been a STRICT rule of NO PHOTOGRAPHY at the pool (after some creep was taking pictures of all the kids). 7:26 and 7:43 for example... Great video as always, VWestlife!!!
I love your comment about the bezel on the Coby LCD television. I remember those days, not too long ago in my mind.
I actually used one of these long ago. The GPU I had on my computer had a S-Video out, and I ran a cable from that to my TV, but the TV did not have an S-Video input, only composite. As I recall it worked pretty decently.
It must be the age of the viewers, but no one has mentioned what S Video was. (Actually, I did see one reference in passing) S VHS was developed and the only way to get the HD (relatively) output out of the VCR into a TV without lots of expense was to separate the Luma and chroma signals. so the S-VHS output was invented. This was later renamed to S-Video because other systems wanted the HD output. ( HD compared to Composite). The PAL version of VHS had a luma response of 240 lines. the S-VHS first gen recorders had in excess of 450 lines luma response. A UK S-VHS VCR could record teletext data and it was decodable on playback. I Know because I did it. Handy for subtitles. However, these S-VHS VCR and the TVs compatible with them were very expensive. £1000 for VCR and £650 for the HD (they called it) TV. normal good VCRs were around the £650 mark and good TV around £450. In short, these adaptors were not much good but as has been said before, better than nothing. They were no good for real S-VHS quality signals but at least they were in colour. I tried one once but sent it back because it was so soft on the picture.
My 2005 15 inch PowerBook G4 had an S video input, however, to convert to DVI on the smaller 12 inch, you had to use an adaptor.
Also, they now make HDMI adaptors for things like the Playstation 2, since that was from the era when everyone used the white, red, and yellow cables, as many TV's had them.
Thanks for the video, Kevin.
Worked at RadioShack for a few years, this is heckin' nostalgic for me. I know I've seen this around the shop, but I don't think I ever used it.
Definitely an oddball adapter that had its uses when new. Off the top of my head, I could use one with my Handycam to get an extra output to monitor tape transfers on a bigger screen. The camcorder's 3.5mm to composite AV out is already hooked up a standalone DVD recorder, so I just need one more composite output for connection to a cheap LCD monitor that lacks S video--this converter is just what I need. Hopefully there's still a few of these floating around on eBay.
$449 FOR AN HDMI CABLE? WHAT ON EARTH! I've seen ridiculously priced audio cables, so I don't know why I'm so shocked seeing HDMI cable being expensive for no reason, but damn...
Considering that it's all digital (which usually means it either works perfectly or doesn't work at all, and not anything in between, quite unlike analog signals) it's really ridiculous
I've seen $10,000 cables for studios...
@@igorszamaszow171 It’s a real bugbear of mine they claim it reduces signal jitter, some even claim it reduces banding artefacts 🤦♀️ really preying on the uninformed.
It has lights on it that indicate resolutions, so it may be a fancy cable that upscales lower resolution video to 4K, hopefully using a higher quality scaler than what the TV has.
@@thetechconspiracy2 or a faster one to reduce input lag
Only VWestlife can make a video about an adapter interesting to watch
I bought a handful of these back in 2005-ish to simplify my setup by having everything on S-Video. Messed up the picture pretty bad so I gave up on them. My next AV receiver was capable of converting everything to component so I didn't need to think about it again.
Literally just a couple months back I dug one out from my adapter bin to try it again - resulted in a black in white picture when I went from my Laserdisc player with composite to a CRT TV on S-video (via a passive S-Video switch box). I figured something went bad in the adapter.
I actually have one of these from around 2007! Back then I had a Lenovo laptop which had an S-Video output, and when I would travel to visit my grandparents in the summer I would want to play my ripped movies on the TV, which of course only had a composite input. So that was my use case for it where I actually had an output device with S-Video but no composite, and an input device with composite but no S-Video. Remember it working "fine" back then.
I had a friend in year 2003 or 2004 that dowloaded divx movies from internet. At time, movies normally had alot of compression and atifacts and we find out if we connected the computer to a CRT TV, the TV “masked” all artifacts making movies more washable. We were very happy at time with result.
Someone's probably beaten me to saying that these are very handy for those computer video cards with built in scan converters that had only an S-video output when you needed composite. I used one of these for years that way with several GeForce and Radeon cards. At least with nVidia, I didn't get a usable picture until I used the card's control panel software to configure the output as composite. (A GeForce 4 and later a 6200 just gave me a bunch of bouncing dim lines until I made that change.)
I have an active Kramer branded converter than can convert to and from both types of video, at once and with separate signals (one composite to S-video, the other S-video to composite). It's moderately better than RadioShack's passive converter.
I suspect your first attempt might have gone better with a few well placed resistors. The luma and chroma circuits were probably trying to "drive" one another, reducing picture quality even further.
I had really hoped RadioShack would make it when they relaunched under new ownership. Alas, it just wasn't to be. (On the other hand, I got an awful lot of fun stuff at fire sale prices when what was a *very* good RadioShack store finally closed.)
Edit: yes, very definitely beaten to it many times over. :-)
I used my S-Video to Composite converter to no end. I dealt with PC's graphics card S-video output connected to with my CRT TV and VCR, actually :')
Lower-end PAL AV gear do not actually have S-Video inputs or outputs built in, and SCART converters with S-Video tend to have weird behaviour with S-video (especially with camcorder cables with both S-video and composite).
(Namely VCRs and HDD recorders, at least those from Panasonic. And ANY CRT TV that came with RF and non-RGB SCART only)
Might be just bad luck, but I have to say that S-Video>Composite saved me a lot of headaches when a normal S-video>S-video connection failed. (The converters, cables and settings were OK xd)
And British comedies are the best, Fawlty Towers especially :D Greetings from Czech!
Speaking of nowadays, I now use a Sony DA3500ES receiver :D
One HDMI output that upscales component, composite and S-video video, takes optical, analog and SPDIF audio, output excelent. Makes dealing with retro consoles and Hi-fi gear (even amplifying my AT-LP60) pretty good :D
It would have saved me from dealing with so many quality-degrading adapters... but we gotta start from somewhere, hey
I didnt had luck wirh svideo too. I tried to use svideo in PAL region and for some reason picture didnt show right. I used one of these adapters and i prefered svideo converted to composite than real direct svideo.
Keeping Up Appearances! Amazing.
Radio shack has been gone for quite some time up here in Canada. I remember buying out a TON of their old stock. I have an old pic, maybe 15 years old now, sowing off all the stuff I got from RS before they shuttered in Canada. I got things like touch sensitive remote controls, rolls of RG6U, cans of 'air', video switches, etc. I also walked away with their entire local stock of individually packaged resistors, capacitors and such. I miss Radio Shack :/
Radio Shack became The Source in Canada, which I believe is still in business, but really nothing to do with the Radio Shack product line anymore.
@@vwestlife Yeah. It's owned by Bell and they use it as their outlet store for TV and Phone services. Nothing like radio shack.
I miss Radio Shack... I drove past their former location in a shopping center where they were starting when I was in High School. The sign is still there under the walkway, but the storefront is empty.
That being said, the last time I went there when the store was still open, around 2009, I was looking for some capacitors to fix a flat panel TV's power supply. Gone was the "wall-o-components" I remembered from the late 1980's early 1990's. Instead they had a tiny box with a pathetic assortment of passive components and maybe 4 or 5 different types of capacitors. None of which were what I needed. But they would have been happy to sell me some overpriced batteries or a remote controlled toy car...
I used to go to Radio Shack all the time and get blank cassette tapes. And now, thanks to eBay and others, I have a whole stack of Radio Shack Realistic cassettes from the 1970’s and 1980’s. These are now in my collection.
Man I miss RadioShack. Not just because I worked there in 2016-17 but because they always had these cool unexpected gadgets. One of the simplest yet coolest things I bought was a 2xAA battery to usb charger. A modern phone will drain the batteries in maybe 10 minutes and get them pretty warm but I never would have found that anywhere else in a store.
I founded a Radio Shack MP-X 110 minute Type IV cassette at the thrift store, very rare to find, 2 sealed tapes, and Maxell XL II for 80 cents, because the cashier miscounted one of my 4 cassettes!
If you plan to use them and not just collect you might examine the tape itself first. They are rebadged as RadioShack but were really TDK behind the ugly pink and purple lettering -same shell. Now RadioShack did sell some cassettes that were made by Denon but the MPX were sourced by TDK but they were bad tapes in my experience.
I bought two off ebay last year and had to throw them out as the tape itself was curling on the sides and was not making proper contact with the heads on my deck (Sony TC-K615S).
At least you got them for a low price though so if they don’t work you won’t have spent a lot!
I remember finding one of these new in the package several years ago at a local habitat for Humanity reuse store in a big tote full for various cables in their packages that came from a closed down Radio Shack that was right down the street, so I snatched it up for $.20, along with $.50 and $1 HDMI cables(back when HDMI 1.1 cables where sometimes still $20+ for the BS 'Oxygen Free" ones), component cables, etc... but I have yet to find a use for this converter lol!
A high resolution CMOS sensor flow for professional football
I can imagine this being useful for connecting a s-video only laptop to a composite only TV
Most laptops with a TV output have more pins on the jack so you can either directly plug in an S-video cable, or use an optional adapter to get a composite video output.
@@vwestlife
That just requires that you have the adaptor cable, which could have been lost to time, or have been a note in manual saying that adaptor cables are available for purchase at [very long URL]
I've got to admit that despite all its drawbacks, HDMI has solved so many connection issues after it became the universal video standard
this would've been really helpful with camcorders. I know in the early 2000s they all had S-video outputs but no RCA jacks in order to make the cameras smaller. but not everyone had a VCR which had an S-video input. (I know because I am one of these people)
Since Radio Shack's brick-and-mortar demise in most parts of the US, I have turned to 99-cent stores for some of my adaptor and parts needs. Trisonic is a quick fix if the store has the items in stock. When I purchased my first HDMI television and DVD player, I needed a spare HDMI cable and Trisonic sells their cable for $6.99. I couldn't tell the difference. But I never took the time to do a detailed analysis of the image between Trisonic and Pioneer.
As a bonus, Trisonic gives you some inspiration thoughts on their packaging. Bet the more expensive Pioneer cable doesn't have that value add!
Im genuinely super suprised you of all people hadn't seen these adapters before. I had a million of those as a kid. They were for edge cases. or if you only had an svideo connector left on your TV or whatever.
I had one of these back in 2003~4. My first laptop had an S-Video out, but most of the TVs I encountered only had composite and this adapter was perfect for me. As a kid I thought it would be so cool to connect a computer to a TV. (I didn’t know that used to be the norm.)
There is an affiliated Radio Shack north of
here, near Concord, NH. It is part of an Auto
parts store in that store.
When we were in Jensen Beach, Florida, last
Winter, there was a similar Radio Shack in
a portion of a Western Auto store in the town of Indiantown, Florida, a small town to the west of us, near Lake Okeechobee 😀 .
Yes, there are still several hundred independently owned Radio Shack stores still in business, mostly in small towns.
I miss old Radio Shack.. I need a new Battery Club Card 😜
Separating luma and chroma doesn't require active components. The simple notch comb filter did it with passives from the 50s well into the 80s in consumer gear. The quality was lousy with dot crawl abound, but it works. The reason why the S-Video to composite video doesn't really have dot crawl is the notch filter is very aggressive in that adapter. It basically stomped on the high frequencies (resolution) of the video to avoid it. Running a test pattern through it will reveal how bad it really is.
Oh I had one of those back in the day! I can't remember what equipment I had that I needed "converted" but it actually worked enough for my uses.
Edit: I remember now, I had a video card in my computer that only had an SVideo and VGA out, and I didn't have a TV in my dorm room that had an SVideo in. This adapter let me connect my computer up to the TV, and it worked.
Radio Shack is not completely dead! Hobby Town in North Austin, TX (near Parmer Ln. & Mopac) is an official Radio Shack dealer as we speak and has a full wall that is actually pretty well stocked with components and parts. Incidentally, the actual Radio Shack store 30 min. North of there, in Georgetown, TX (where I live) was one of the last in the nation to close. I was one of their very last customers on their very last day. It was a sad day indeed, but I brought quite a bit of their remaining electronic and project parts booty home with me.
A Radio Shack memory…
As a young teen in the 80’s, I had a dream (more like a fantasy) that I’d be locked in a Radio Shack all night with access to all of their electronics project kits, soldering irons, components and Forest M. Mims III books. I was actually employed by Radio Shack in the 90’s for a bit over a year and the very low base pay/commissioned sales aspect soured my dream quite a bit.
Two great memories from working there, I like to be positive, were using a remote controlled toy Army tank to drag CAT5 cable across the top of the drop ceiling panels from the front to the rear of the store (that was my idea. The super smarmy suck-up assistant manager was pissed he didn’t think of it), and helping musician, Johnny Gimble (Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and Grammy winner), replace a potentiometer on his violin, aka; “fiddle”, preamp. He actually brought his violin into the store! The super smarmy assistant manager tried to take over but didn’t have the actual EE knowledge that I had and quickly had to back out-and not so gracefully. No telling what famous music flowed through my little replacement pot after that.
Repairs involving soldering irons were normally not allowed at Radio Shacks, but the actual store manager acknowledged my skills and allowed me to do a several, including soldering in new wireless home phone batteries while customers waited, which no other store was doing.
I went on to work in aerospace and eventually become a science teacher and official science presenter for the Texas Library System. I’ve even partnered with NASA a few times, including a project that involved habitats in space. But it definitely didn’t involve anything as cool as getting to pull wires across overhead ceiling tiles with a remotely controlled Army tank. 😂
old gpus like mx100 ... mx400 often had an s-video output and a passive composite adapter included, and they worked fine. I remember at one time I even made one myself, there is only one capacitor needed and everything works. as far as I remember, the signals have a different frequency and modulation method so that they can be passively mixed. in the opposite direction, it works most likely for the same reason - the inputs are tuned to different frequencies and have different demodulators
Yes, I came to comments to say this, I had video cards with tv-out using svideo, in times when the common pc monitor was a little 14in CRT, and I had a 20in CRT tv I wanted to connect the PC to, to watch content, and that TV didn't have svideo input. So I think I succesfully used a converter like this, but with a male minidin IIRC...
Yep, I was going to say the same thing. I also had video cards and TV capture cards/USB devices that used a single S-Video jack S-Video to RCA Composite adaptor instead of separate S-Video and Composite jacks (thats in addition to the standard VGA Out on the video cards). Some device for space or cost reasons just decide the single S-Video out or input with RCA composite adaptor was way to go. I had some these S-Video to RCA adaptors work fine and one that didn’t work at all for some reason.
14:12 Indeed, it was certainly handy for me to pop down to Tandy to buy adapters and cables during a video project than waiting for delivery. That store closed in 1992 :(
I built an S-Video to Composite cable some years ago to connect an S-Video out only videocard to a Composite input only TV. It was... functional. I got the instructions on the internet, IIRC it only used a ceramic capacitor (apart from the cable and plugs, of course) and picture quality could be somewhat adjusted by varying the value of said capacitor.
My employer used to use these by the dozen for a large customer. Said customer had a distributed S-video system transmitting and receiving between some 50 rooms (for recording and overflow purposes). Toward the end of the system's lifespan (decommissioned ~2014), S-video devices became very hard to come by, where even today composite video isn't difficult to find. So, as displays/cameras/VCRs/etc. failed, they were replaced with composite video versions. Every last one of them used some version of this adapter, though sometimes with the male/female ends reversed. We probably help keep our local Radio Shack in business a bit longer. 🤣
I still have a couple of these, albeit with a male s-video end. I used these in my video game set-up. The switch box was connected to the CRT via s-video, to take advantage of the consoles that supported it. For those that didn't, I added this to the end of its RCA video cable so I can cleanly switch to it without having to change TV inputs. (The switch box was passive and didn't support internal conversion between s-video and composite. It was all of one or the other only.)
its literally a direct connectionfrom the composite pin to the svideo for luma and a 470pf to 1nF capacitor for chroma
It's very relaxing for me watching your videos:)
if you were like us we had VCRs, video games, camcorders, multiple TVs all vying for various inputs and outputs in our entertainment centers. Radio Shack was our friend.
I had one from RS back in the day - yeah doesn't work great for splitting but worked ok for combining. Used it with a video editing card that only had S in and out, if you used it to combine it would have the color noise on the lumna signal. The key was the little capacitor between. I think I also built my own doing that. Guess it acts as a high pass filter for the 3.57mhz color signal.
Radio Shack sold a switch box that did this. Whichever type input it had would become S-video out if that was plugged in or composite if S-video was unplugged. It was an un-powered device just like that adapter. It had both S-video and composite inputs. I've got one of those boxes in my main analog rack, and one of the adapters from this video.
My educated guess is that it would _actually_ be composite if composite plugged in or S-video otherwise, a seemingly trivial difference to what you said. However it would likely be implemented by working as S-video internally and the Y would connect to the composite pins and the C would connect to the switch on the composite jack via a small capacitor.
On further thought that auto-switching setup would only work on the input side. I don't know how they would achieve auto output switching using only commonly available jacks.
I remember those. I think internally they are just a capacitor and a resistor, something super simple like that, it's been 20+ years since I saw the schematic on how to build one. I borrowed one from a friend to try in a room that had several A/V components and a projector, the hope was to get the composite VCR to S-Video so a simple A/V switcher could be used to select (other two sources being a DVD player and a Dish receiver,) but unfortunately, I got B/W video out of it, probably due to the very long signal cable to the projector (a distribution amplifier may have helped with that. We ended up just having to switch the projector to composite when VHS was used. I have seen a projector with only S-video and VGA, admittedly, such a layout is very unusual. Oh and agreed, it is a shame not having that store with the oddball adapters for most occasions, or the parts to build an even odder adapter.
First let me say I really miss Radio Shack, my uncle used to own the local store, so I was a fixture there. Next, I grew up when we only got 3 1/2 channels,(3 1/2 cause one channel only came in after dark), and on two channels if it came in good enough for the color to come through you was doing great. So I would still watch any of those signals if that is all I had. That adapter could be used to give an additional input back in the day if your TV was limited on number of inputs. Back in the day I had a VCR, DVD, and a laser disk player. and used a switch to be able to connect them all.
Oh my, I still have that S-Video converter that I first bought in 2009, I wanted to hook up my hp laptop (which had S-video out) to my Sony Trinitron WEGA CRT TV, to play some games. It never worked. I ended up making my own cable with some resistors, and that worked perfectly!
I have a handful of these. I used them a lot when PC TV cards were big in the 90s.
I used one in the past. The S-Video jack on my TV went bad and there was no way I was going to buy a new TV just because of that. So just because it was more convenient, instead of running new wires, I simply got that adapter and plugged the S-Video cable into the composite input.
I can see how this is useful because I noticed that older TVs and VCRs often times didn't have s-video unless it was a high end TV or an S-VHS VCR.
When I was growing up, we had a TV that defaulted to S-video when it was in use. It only had one set of inputs only. We had to use a switch box that converted our VCR to S-Video so we could also watch our DVD player on S-Video. It did the same function as the adapter. It suffered from dot crawl issues.
All three of the 43-inch flat screens we have owned support composite input. Two also support component. One of the TVs I have that supports both was bought this year.
As a kid in Norway even I knew about Radio Shack and envied you for them. Today we have a chain called Clas Ohlson that has a decent assortment of AV cables and stuff like that, even 3D printing supplies, but not really electronics and computers like Radio Shack.
Vizio a few years ago actually made a TV, the d24, which had composite and component inputs, but both of them required the same style breakout cables you would use with a camcorder or portable DVD player, based around a three-pole 8th-in connector. All the modern TVs I've seen still include standard composite inputs. Even our living room TV, a 50-in Westinghouse Roku TV, not only features standard composite inputs, but the antenna setup screen even asks if you're still using analogue devices which require VHF channels 3 or 4.
Sometimes back in the day, I'd go to RadioShack to just look at all the cool adapters they had. Fast forward. 16 years old. The place to go for the band gear... XLR cables, 1/4 inch adapters etc. I miss the Shack!
I got one of these back when they came out. Still have it too. I used it to go from s-video to composite on my TV that didn't have s-video.
Was kind of hoping for a teardown to see how it performed this. Maybe in a future video? Either way this is a really neat piece of electronics history.
I had one of those but it was a cable. It worked pretty well for using the TV as a second monitor back when laptops had an S-video out.
Wouldn't the Keeping Up Appearances trailer have started life as a 25 FPS 576i PAL recording that was already converted once to 30 FPS 480i NTSC signal? That already tends to make it look pretty soft.
It can be even worse: I know AYBS was shot on vidicon tubes so it was extra soft with artifacts like streaking and bright lights making comet trails. I think most of those other ones were vidicon too (Fawlty Towers, Blackadder), so location shoots where you couldn't bring the huge camera were done on 16 mm film. Keeping Up Appearances would be the only one firmly in the CCD era.
@@straightpipediesel Faulty Towers, The Black Adder, and Are You Being Served? were all from the 1970s, and would all be PAL shot with vidicons. Keeping Up Appearances is 1990s, also PAL, but shot with solid state pickups. The content is digitized to MPEG4 for the DVD. Originally, they were released in PAL and NTSC analog VHS versions.
These came with graphics cards back in the day. I used them to output to my composite-only TVs. I didn't get an S-Video input until I bought an HDTV.
I used exactly this adapter to hook up my video card to an old TV. The video card only had s-video out. It might've had a possibility of some multi-out adapter but mine never came with one and i wouldn't've known where to get one and probably wouldn't've been able to order it.
I miss Radio Shack.
PC graphics cards and those pc TV tuner cards used these adapters. You can chop up an svideo cable and composite cable, twist wires together to make the same thing.
My dad use to sell these adapters S video to Rca on the markets, and didn't know how it worked so had just spliced rca into s-video and it produced an image. Also, took the adapter apart years ago to find no circuitry. These things are great when you need 'em in a pinch or to cut corners temporary.
Worked at radioshack for 9 years, Have a handfull of those i think. Though never realy knew how they worked
I found one of those original EOS Rebel cameras in a skip in my local tipping/recycling centre. I nabbed it still use it!
Purchased one of these adapters 18 years ago to connect a PC video card that had an s-video out to a TV that only supported composite. This was the early days of MythTV video capture, basically build your own TiVO.