When SCART launched in the 1970s it was a genuine game changer. Find out more!
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Sources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_and...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal%2B
#littlecar
SCART is the USB-C of yesteryear. Extremely versatile, but you KNOW some corner-cutting vendors will skimp out on some features to hide incompatiblity.
More like HDMI
@@ShadowriverUB Bluetooth moment.
Bollocks! It was more like a half-a$$ed HDMI. USB-C on the other hand, works and works well, is very convenient , and pairs well with USB-A (*and* there is easy availability of USB-to-other connectors for compatibility with older cellphones, cameras, etc.)
Imagine micro-USB 3.0 crap everywhere: phones, gadgets, low speed devices like kb, powerbanks, printers and scanners (cuz, you know, type B is "obsolete"). Imagine this crap big and bulky and that's what SCART is. 99% users of the era used triple RCA to SCART connection and this often means they got multiwire cable instead of 3 coax as a "bonus".
Why Bluetooth? And it's more like yesteryear of HDMI than USB C right?
The thing that frustrated me most about SCART leads was that the cable always seemed to point in the "wrong" direction for whatever I was trying to set up, the additional bend to send it where I wanted would then cause tension on the (probably very cheap) cable and then things would start to pop out.
You could get ones that used ribbon cable instead of round cable, they didn't have that problem. Harder to find though.
If that's your biggest gripe, you have never had to solder the 21 wires onto the 21 pins, just to find out you left the "cable nut" holding the housing together and grabbing the cable so that it would not be pulled out of the connector. THAT my friend was the biggest frustration with these cables :)
@@JohnDoe-bd5sz you are entirely correct, I have never had to solder any of the pins on a SCART lead, but I can imagine your pain!
@@kyle8952 Just about to say that! Still got 5 or 6 ribbon SCARTS somewhere.
@@JohnDoe-bd5sz That a common type of problem with many connectors for example TRS or XLR connectors so it really is about experrience of soldering cables over all, i have done it professionally but mainly worked on circuitboards and repairing electronics.
SCART is/was amazing - a good example of where a good standard becomes mandatory, it breaks the chicken-egg cycle and also stops manufacturers penny pinching! The US really missed out
While the standard for the signals was very well thought through, the physical connector was simply awful. As if the French developed it. Oh wait, they did...
@@mjouwbuis Exactly, but on the other side, it is probably awful so it stays cheap to manufacture, and that might have helped in its industry-wide adoption, at least for consumer gear.
@@mjouwbuis Sort of the SCSI of it's time, big and bulky connectors and cables.
Connecting TVs in the USA was such a pain in the butt with all the different types of connectors we had. Now the big problem is that many TVs don't have enough HDMI ports on them. It never changes!
@@mjouwbuis connector size was never really an issue tbh - looks big now but then, it was just normal. VCRs were never very slimline and it was never really an issue with dvd players. Only seemed big once hdni appeared
I never understood why SCART was never a thing in the US, where entertainment centres, big TV's, etc. were much more common much earlier.
Actually it makes sense when you think about it. These explanations are valid: 1. Oblivion. If you don't know something exists you don't know what you're missing out on. And for the American public this rings true for virtually everything which isn't widely broadcast or repeated in commercials. Not just consumer products. 2. Standardization. SCART was standardized to be used with the PAL system - which was the most common encoding system in the world during the analogue broadcast era - but would have had to be standardized for the NTSC system as well. Licensing rights and the fact the tv sets (either local brands or the increasingly more popular Japanese giants) were designed and sold specifically for the PAL/SCART market took time and effort. CENELEC who were behind SCART thought long-term. History proved them right. 3. Cost. Implementing SCART would drive up costs. And the American public are very cost-aware and reason with the bang-for-the-buck factor. I recall the Xbox360 not even having a HDMI port when launched in late 2005. The Playstation 3 did. Why no HDMI in the era of digital connections? I'm fairly certain cost and sale price were the deciding factors. Detroit cars sold thanks to the bang-for-the-buck factor. A buyer of the (contemporary) Ford Mustang saw the looks and heard the sound of the V8, that sufficed. That same buyer never saw the 1930's technology live rear axel (cheap to manufacture) and the people assembling them... Amongst other things. 4. Public need. You see the average consumer isn't a hi-fi or consumer electrics aficionado. They are/were perfectly happy being able to do something (watch a film at will in this case) and superior quality or overall connecting convenience isn't a factor for them. "where entertainment centres, big TV's, etc. were much more common much earlier." And this is why you don't understand the market. What you mention was a niche market for enthusiasts. Your average consumer (who the market is targeted towards) was perfectly happy hooking up his/her VHS to a tv set using simple RF cables. SCART wasn't designed for "people owning big tv's". " never understood why SCART was never a thing in the US, where entertainment centres, big TV's, etc. were much more common much earlier." Well, that's because you both look at it wrong and interpret it wrong. I'd say that any of the aforementioned explanations are valid on their own but combined they paint the whole picture and explains what you find odd.
@@McLarenMercedes Not invented here (the USA)? To summarise the French made it mandatory on large TVs early on so the design work had to be done and it just made sense in other European countries. With the cheapest colour portables it wasn't uncommon for the base model to have a blanked out area in the cabinet where SCART could have been fitted and the luxury model costing £20 more to have a remote and SCART.
@@McLarenMercedesNone of them are valid reasons. Everything is unknown until it is introduced to you. Was a licence needed to use scart and why couldn't the already standardised scart become standard for NTSC areas as well? Cost wasn't an issue anywhere else and given how may connections us telly's had, scart could've driven down cost by removing a few of them. The public always want the latest and newest tech and are always looking to improve their viewing experience, especially in the us.
@@McLarenMercedes Xbox 360 didnt use HDMI because most TVs didn't have HDMI. HDMI didn't appear on TVs in the US until 2004, one year before the 360 was released, so that means barely any TVs had HDMI. The PS3 had HDMI due to Blu-Ray and Sony was really pushing Blu-ray.
SCART was about France protecting French companies from competition. It backfired on them when manufacturers modularized their television sets and decided it was cheaper to just lump France in with all of Europe, slapping a SCART connector on PAL stuff as well. Was it a neat Idea? Sure, but for the consumer it was a solution to a problem that didn't really exist. In the US most homes at the time just had a cable box hooked up to their TV, they added a VCR by the end of the 80's maybe a game console that only their kids used. All of this could be switched by dirt cheap switching boxes; the VCR already had a passthrough. There was simply no benefit to adding a connector that adds $5 to the manufacturing cost of your product, that would go completely unused in NTSC land. @Gambit771 " scart could've driven down cost by removing a few of them." Ever look at the price of old parallel printer cables? Cables with a bunch of conductors are not cheaper than a bunch of individual cables. I just bought a bunch of 3 foot 78 conductor D-SUB cables and they were $50/each; RCA cables are effectively a rounding error on your bill of materials if you buy them in bulk. I can solder the ends on and assemble 21 individual RCA cables (42 conductors) faster than I can solder and assemble 21 in a cable similar to a SCART cable.
SCART has been a godsend for us vintage computer and console enthusiasts. Many of these old machine can output RGB, either natively or with a modification, for much better video quality especially on modern TVs.
The most typical fuckup with SCART is when TV actually accept c-video only, no s-video, no rgb. Scart is just dick slipping on your lips...
I still connect a GameCube and a Sega Mega Drive with SCART RGB. It’s the best option for retro gaming. I remember when I brought my Dreamcast to Canada in 2005 and tried to connect it to the TV and realising that they don’t use SCART in NA. It was a surprise to me because everything used it in Europe be it VCRs, DVD players, Digital TV decoders etc.
I was surprised he didn't go into RGB in more detail. I used my Atari ST connected to the TV via a SCART RGB cable for excellent picture quality. I recall that one of the official Amiga monitors has a SCART socket on the back for similar usage.
7-pin DIN plug we used here in Eastern Europe for RGB connector on TV did the job for our Spectrum clones been 3 times smaller than SCART.
Yeah, I had a famiclone in the late 90s/early 2000s that came with SCART right from the factory, the picture on that thing was so amazing compared to the one one of my cousins had that supported only composite (red/white/yellow Cinch connectors).
It was referred to as Euroconector here in Spain. The use of SCART really makes CRT TV sets still relevant today. My current 'daily driver' is a SABA branded set fitted with a Thomson ICC3 chassis and a Videocolor FS-10 picture tube. It is hooked up to an HD capable DTT set top box using RGB over SCART. It delivers an image quality that was imposible when that TV was new.
I personally have no use for a CRT anymore but I love that there's an enthusiast community out there, where you discuss your custom build TV and it's components like it's some kind of pristine oldtimer in a sunlit garage in the countryside 😮
Same in poland, translation would be "Euroconnector" or often just "Euro".
Yes, I remember the quality improvement using a good quality cable and also component video on a 29" Sony Trinitron. When I replaced the TV with a 37" Samsung, the image (and sound) quality was worse.
I live in the UK and have a French-made CRT television with SCART cable. I can tell you for a fact, that I've never seen the N64 (RGB modded) or SNES graphics look so good as they do on that old screen. Its eye candy.
Same, the difference back in the 80's/90's was like night and day, but even today I'm often surprised at how good my Amiga looks when I plug it into an old CRT TV with SCART, no fuzzy antialiasing of the pixels, just crisp clear visuals like you would expect from a computer monitor.
@@krashd I've got my Amiga pluged into a CUB Monitor through RGB. No sound on that monitor though so it needs separate skeepers. An RGB display really does make all the difference to this eara of machines.
I was surprised that he used the SNES as an example of a console that didn't support scart, since it was pretty much the only Nintendo console that did support SCART. And I agree, seeing the SNES in RGB mode is gorgeous.
To my experience, SCART was pretty much THE standard in Europe during the 90s an early 2000s. Virtually every TV, VCR and DVD-Player had it and gave you a superior picture and sound quality. And as far as I remember, most devices supported component or at least S-Video. But you really had to watch out for those low quality SCART cables which were missing some lines or even the pins. The later were at least easy to spot.
It was mandatory in most of europe yes, for every tv sold
up until blu-ray came about, everything had to have SCART connectors (in the EC/EU) and typically it was all they had. Never seen any device with component or composite in/out before blu-ray, and even then there was a very long time where TVs still had SCART connectors along all the others because it was still mandatory for a long time after HDMI proved itself. Even though SCART is no longer mandatory, a lot of stuff still includes SCART adapters in the box, because it will be a very long time before all the SCART-only devices disappear
@thesteelrodent1796 Most DVD players up the range from the major manufacturers had component video, even in the first generations, because of plasma TVs which the AV enthusiasts bought. HDMI appeared on DVD players and recorders in the UK before Blu-ray in 2006. The players had HD upscaling already then because HD-Ready was the latest thing then.
SCART was the HDMI Port of the 90th and early 2000th. Our first HDTV had a SCART connector and Component connectors for picture. VHS on HDT does not run well at all. It was only a try. The Video recorder was retired.
As a retired A/V repair tech i remember scart very well, it was bulky but it allowed any video standard to be sent to/from compatible equipment, it even had autoswitching and compared to HDMI most of the time it worked provided that you bought high quality fully connected and shielded cables, to the trade they were inexpnsive but the mark up for retail made them very expensive if you bought them from the wrong place. You could buy cheap ones that were a waste of money, and caused me a lot of call outs. It had one weakness, the blade like pins in the plug were made of soft metal that bent and in cheap connectors tarnished. Still compared to the nightmare of todays HDMI that can be very difficult get it to handshake scart served us well for many years.
One funny info about SCART though is although it was oboslete in 2000's, in France it stayed mandatory on new TV until 2015. I remember buying a new TV in 2013 and next to the 3 HDMI entry, there was a SCART one.
I'm in the UK and my 40" Toshiba is only about 8 years old and has two SCART inputs. It's a shite TV but having the SCART sockets on the back makes up for it.
my samsung tv has a break-out cables to scart to kind of overcome the big connector on the TV i think that has been the norm for flat tv's here in western europe for 10-15 years orso
I might be a bit odd but I loved the SCART standard, it made connecting multiple devices so easy. Great, informative, video.
Still using SCART today for my legacy computers and consoles. It lives on.
Still use SCART on DVD to smart tv. Works great.
When I was old enough to buy my own TV, I bought a 66" JVC model, picked because I liked the colour rendition in the showroom. At the time, the only thing I had to connect to it was an antenna, so the SCART sockets on the back were a curiosity. But I later bought one of JVC's early flagship S-VHS decks. And that's when I discovered JVC liked to put nice surprises in their hardware. Both devices were SCART and were well implemented. JVC also used a very good comb filter in their S-VHS deck which meant even the composite signal was excellent. Fast forward to my first DVD player and the hot models were ones that supported RGB* output. I found a Pioneer model that did so over SCART and it was a very good addition to my setup. And that's when I discovered another trick of that JVC TV - it could do anamorphic and auto-switching! I loved that TV. * Yes, RGB is technically "component" video but Component Video was *usually* YPbPr video (also called "fully separated" video). Using "component" to also refer to RGB has been a persistent and annoying source of confusion for all concerned. Back in the day I had arguments several times with salesmen over that. And the SCART standard specified RGB; YPbPr was a later, unofficial extension.
When I learned what SCART was in 1990, I was instantly jealous of it. I grew up an Air Force brat and a friend of my dad had a multi-standard Hitachi TV with 2 SCART ports. He also had a Sega Genesis (née MegaDrive) and a NEO•GEO AES. Both looked good with composite but amazing with RGB. America got screwed with composite.
it has to be said that the PAL standard came a lot later than NTSC irrelevant to most people now, but that's part of it
I remember buying a scart cable for my PS2 and it having a switch in the middle of the cable to switch from "Game" to "DVD". What it acutally did was switch between RGB and composite video because the PS2 had a copy protection feature where if you tried to play a DVD over an RGB scart cable, you would just get a green image. So you were forced to watch your DVDs over the lower quality composite video signal, unless you modchipped your PS2.
Once again, DRM only hurts honest comsumers. Actual pirates can just mod it out for literal CENTS... but oh no it would be a shame if consumer could enjoy high qualiy movies. Also personal copys of purchased media should be a right...
I mean, that doesn't really change now since HDCP exists.
@@awii.neocities It's just a gimmick, bypassed without issues using some HDMI splitters/switchers etc.
@@override7486 I forgot to bring up Widevine too, which cannot be bypassed except for getting decryption keys
@@override7486 oh and I also forgot widevine too
Cable drag and pullout was also a problem with SCART, as the thick off centre cable tended to pull its side out
Errata: To be clear, SCART could do RGB from the start, not component. Later on in life it was also used occasionally for YPbPr component video. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART The comment around USB was it's not clear which way around the connector should go, so you invariably have to try both ways. No so for SCART.
Oh, I didn't even know that RGB was a thing. Now I don't know what my adapter actually does. I guess the USB-situation is not different from SCART. You can see which way the connector goes by looking at it, or you try both ways. I think the orientation for USB-Sockets are standardized, so you should not need to look at the socket.
Maybe someone from France could explain whether SCART was intended for Minitel. Irrespective, in some aspects the French were very forward looking.
You might want to make this a sticky, as I'm sure many people will comment something about RGB, as I also did before reading this.
@@MrDuncl SECAM was a big contributor to the need for SCART for the French. Unlike with PAL, mixing two SECAM signals doesn't result in a valid signal so it was difficult to modify the signal after the fact, such as for overlaying subtitles. It also simplified manufacturing costs for consumer equipment like game consoles; they didn't need to support SECAM at all, they could just output a pure RGB signal.
Fun fact, the "trident" USB symbol embossed on the plug should be uppermost when a Type A USB plug is inserted correctly. I know, ""Why didn't someone tell me twenty years ago". The problem is when the socket is mounted sideways, then I think all bets are off.
Yeah so SCART was well designed except for one thing: it was impossible to plug in "blind" - which, given that connectors are always around the back of every device, was a major problem. That weirdly shaped shielding would have been fine if they'd only had a chamfered edge to the socket to guide it in, but no, for some reason they made the socket completely flat, requiring absolutely perfect alignment which was just not feasible if you couldn't see the socket. The chunkiness of the cable, and the weird angle of exit, didn't help either, as the plug would always want to tip over rather than sitting horizontal, and was prone to falling out if the cable was disturbed at all.
Believe it or not, after much practice I developed a method to do it. Just locate the recepticle with your fingers, slide the connector sideways until it sets in place and gently push. If it doesn't want to ser in place, turn the connector a try again.
Nothing worse than trying to reach over the back of a giant, heavy old tv to blind plug in a cable with no obvious indent to guide you in.. So much time spent scraping the plug across the back of the tv praying that at some point it will "fall in", lol
Agreed. You could pull a muscle in your shoulder trying to reach and plug in the SCART blind. And the connector could work its way out and the TV signal goes mono colour etc.
yeah, not impossible though, with a bit of patience and feeling around, unlike av or component, since those were color coded.
@@UHF43 Yep as someone that still uses SCART for my retro CRT setup, and don't want to buy one of those RGB switches that go for 150 euros plus. You eventually make a method. I usually use my finger to find the bottom of the port slide it down till the shield goes in a bit, then just move back or forth till it fits into place.
I was jealous of SCART back in the day as an American for the video quality. I only really learned what we were missing years later.
I mean, we still had component cables anyway. Sure, it doesnt have all the fancy bells and whistles of channel changing and whatnot, but the quality outside of resolution (using analog) was/is just as good
In the 90s most of us had no idea we were getting something special with RGB via SCART on our Playstations :) it was just very convenient and basically every TV had the port.
I had SCART on my grey import Sega Megadrive but later official versions in the UK used the round plug shown in the video. Believe me, the difference between RF and RGB composite was night and day, stereo sound too, which really helped to hear the full potential of the Megadrive's sound capabilities.
Scart is the connector that just worked and never broke. Never had to replace one of these. It's just an aged standart.
Great informative content as ever. Have you ever done one on CAN bus? As an automotive engineer from the early 80's realising these were on (almost) ever car came as a complete surprise. Just a thought.
That might be fun.
@@LittleCar Especially considering the fact that the early versions of the standard were practically as simple as a low-voltage line to see if the circuit breaks or not. (I've always imagined it as a highly complex system with bells and whistles and what not.) When these were new, every (obviously inexperienced) service owner warned of using a car with a CAN bus system, as they allegedly were a pain to service and unreliable. Crazy to think how far we've come in terms of an onboard computer, even if we take only the last decade or so into consideration, especially with the advent of better screens and GUIs, so that your car can essentially just say "nearside roof cabin light off, mate".
Nice vid, as a teenager I was a huge fan of the SCART cable and remember being very proud of the RGB Scart cable I used to connect my Megadrive to my 14" Phillips AKF12 monitor (didn't have a TV in my room but did have the monitor from my BBC Micro). Sadly pretty much all my mates with TVs seemed quite content with their RF cables despite the, to my eyes at least, obviously inferior quality vs SCART.
Enjoying classic PS1 games with SCART = full heaven!
Sometimes though, picture get so sharp you can see through the cracks in the Matrix. ;)
The worst part of the widescreen transision was companies mastering DVD's with widescreen original content, into hardcoded letterboxed borders for 4:3 TV's. This despite all DVD players having the ability to format a DVD with true widescreen images correctly at the press of a button.
Yeah, they were annoying!
Some even went so far as to sell 4:3 cropped, 4:3 letterboxed and 16:9 anamorphic versions of the same movie side-by-side. If I remember correctly, there even were some "16:9 anamorphic but tagged as 4:3" ones---those would play correctly on a widescreen TV set to stretch the 4:3 picture, but were otherwise useless.
This tradition is still alive when people upload an originally portrait video in a horizonal format. So I have no chance to see the video on the full screen of my phone.
Yes 4:3 letterboxing was an extremely amateur thing to do, and showed which companies had competent management and which ones was garbage.
It was old masters being used, probably made for TV before widescreen TVs were available.
The best thing about scart was the plug and play, no faffing around. Always found the pass through a great feature. When the parents called to say the could hear the dvd but not see it, it was the scart had fallen out a bit
Ecky Thump! I didn’t realise that SCART was that old. Until the 90s, most people I knew used the RF cable and just tuned their TVs to whatever channel the VCR was outputting. This became an issue in 1997 when Channel 5 was launched, using the what had previously been a spare channel. An army of video retuners had to be employed to retune everyone’s equipment. My first cable box (late 90s) was a retrograde step as it didn’t have SCART and had to be connected to the aerial socket. Presumably this was because it was made by Scientific Atlanta and therefore made in the USA where SCART wasn’t common.
My cable box has SCART but if you wanted stereo sound you could not use it. The no had no NICAM decoder, it just passed the NICAM signal that was not decrypted to the antenna output. It could not do the same to SCART. I preferred the image to the stereo sound and so I used th SCART.
I remember us getting SCART in the early/mid 90s for our little dining room telly. We had an Amiga computer in front of it, and I seem to recall three leads coming out of the Amiga and into an adaptor or something which connected to the SCART lead.
@@danyoutube7491 Both the Amiga and Atari ST used strange video connectors. However, I am sure one of the official Amiga monitors had SCART on the back.
@@MrDuncl Both my Amigas have 23-pin DIN sockets for video which you can connect to SCART via an adaptor, the picture on my 40" flat screen is superb thanks to it.
I like SCART and use it with as many things as possible, even now.
The EuroScart was a great standard/invention. I think in the EU from 1980 onwards all devices had only that (all with video, some had the old RCA type connectors on top of EuroScart mainly for audio). To clarify, my experiences are from Finland from 1980 onwards - here all devices with Scart had the marking 'EUROScart' in them next to the port as per its origin/name. Some devices did have RCA for audio of course and there was a mishmash of various port types still but I don't remember seeing one device without EuroScart ever from 1980 onwards.
I grew up in France (where we indeed called it Péritel) and was extremely surprised when I found out this wasn't common outside the EU. So simple!
@@alles_klar France was the reason it was so ubiquitous in Europe to start with as they made it mandatory on TVs sold.
I remember the port was sometimes labelled "Euro AV"
1980 seems way too early to be omnipresent as it was in the mid 90’s
*SCART allowed imported video game systems to be played in color and stereo sound in the 90’s* 💡 👍 💡
When we bought our last TV about a year ago, we were amazed that almost everyone still has at least one Scart or offers one with an adapter. At least in Austria and the online shops we compared.
It is literally the law xD Or ok, more a pattent and license thing partialy law-enforced but still, DVB-T MPG4 license required manufacturers to include at least one RGB SCART input on their TVs, it was sadly dropped with DVB-T2 HVEC
Still use it for my digital set top box and my DVD player.
Interesting, I'm from the US, I never heard of SCART till I started getting my Retro Gaming collection together. I started using it to get RGB out of retro consoles. I never knew it supported features like HDMI supported. Thanks for telling, I really wish in the US it was a standard. I was a A/V buff back in the 80's till today, and back then, with a GOOD SCART cable, I could had way better pictures in my gaming. Thanks again for showing... and kind of blown away here....
We never had SCART in the US, I didn't know it was so advanced for it's time. I remember when HDMI came out, it was a god send, who knew we where just catching up with Europe.
The other way round is weird too. Beeing used to Scart since childhood days, and then coming to america finding out that they don´t have anything similar at all and use primitive white, red and yellow chinch connectors only. Make you think, so that´s our role model, the wealthiest nation in the world...? Hmm... :D
NTSC (Never Twice the Same Colour) looked crap too compared to PAL ...
here on the other side of the pond, HDMI struggled to catch on because we had SCART, and SCART was still mandatory on TVs well past the launch of blu-ray.
you did as the EIA multiport connector but few devices used it
Here in Australia scart was mainly found on European brands and rarely on Japanese brands if at all. It was fairly rare here.
Really class info and presentation.
My bugbear was that it was impossible to plug a scart in when you couldn't see it like behind a tv or into vcr inside a dark tv cabinet. I spent ages faffing doing this. But overall it was a good system.
Especially when the cable had all the pins wired so the thing was THICK and stiff as a board!
Well it could be a pain to connect component video and separate audio cables when you couldn't see what you were doing. So no matter what standard was used there were a lot of faffing about...
I remember having an SCART switch that you can control with an remote and switch the scart inputs and you can have like 3 vcrs and can simultaneously switch it by pressing the remote
Nice video, good blast from the past
Delightful. I wish I could've seen this video 20 years ago, would've saved me a lot of pain troubleshooting TV setups.
A feature used by the video reurn channel was in some Philips VCRs that could detect the channel you were watching on the TV and would scan for a matching channel and record that with a press of a single button.
My mother lived with me for a couple years, a couple decades ago. I got tired of her asking how to work my home entertainment system, so I actually wrote an instruction manual which even included troubleshooting directions. 🤣
And I’ll bet she still asked lol. It’s frustrating being the family’s resident tech support
@@HannahFortalezza Amazingly, once the instructions were debugged, she didn't!
I've heard of folks doing SCART mode on retro consoles and now I see why!
Picrture quality of RGB SCART was amazing. Unfortunately most devices were set up to ouptut composite by default, and most people didn't know that it was possible to have RGB. Also TVs typically had only one SCART that supported RGB, so to connect multiple devices you had to daisy-chain them. Another good feature was daisy chaining, since TVs had only one SCART input (or only one that supported RGB mode) it allowed to connect as many device you wanted. Also it was practical since you never had to change input on the TV, a device OFF did pass trough the signal, if turned on automatically it would output the signal. The downside was that cables were bulky, especially if you had a TV with a rotating stand (common back in the day) the cable did always end up unplugging from the TV.
Back in the nineties we had a Philips widescreen CRT TV and a Philips VCR connected via a good quality SCART cable. It was awesome! First of all, the TV and VCR being both Philips meant you could do things such as press the record button on the TV remote and the VCR would instantly start recording whatever channel you were watching on the TV. Even better, you could select programs via TeleText and with the press of a button, set the VCR to record that program when it would air. And what I really loved about the Philips widescreen TV was that it took 4:3 broadcasts and instead of simply forcing them to a 16:9 ratio, which would look terrible, Philips would stretch the image horizontally to fill the screen, but also slightly stretch it vertically. This meant you lost a small slice of the original image at the top and bottom, but the image would not appear distorted and still fill the entire screen.
Excellent video about this connection.
I actually assembled a new SCART cable recently to use with a computer from the 80s. The computer does not have SCART connections, but it does have RGB, which is mapped to SCART pins totally fine. That goes to a box (GBS Control) and ends up as HDMI :)
I loved scart in the 90s but mostly as JP21 for import consoles. Always amazed me how many people kept on using composite for them. That kept me going until component started to get adopted.
Thank you very educational again Thanks
I remember discovering the settings to change the sky digibox output from PAL to RGB. It was a massive upgrade and felt like the HD of its time. Arguably on a decent CRT, it would still be a pleasant picture to look at. Certainly better than SD channels on a modern UHD panel.
SCART was basically the analog version of HDMI.
I was not prepared for this : a British youtuber praising a French technology ! :-) :-) Thx for an interesting video bringing back old memories. I have still some "peritel" cables in some drawer...
I worked in Dixon’s in the early nineties, and remember demonstrating a stacking hi-fi to a couple who asked if it had a scart socket. I explained that scarts are only found on video equipment but they didn’t believe me and were adamant they must have one with a scart because the woman’s brother told her. I had a similar incident in which someone asked if a particular telephone was PABX-compatible. I asked if they had their own private exchange and they said no, but had been told that they should buy a phone that was PABX-compatible. Ah, the great British public!
11:20 This is correct but it could be expanded with more information: Old consoles used proprietary connectors that supported different cables depending on which connections your tv had, usually in europe consoles came with a basic composite cable and a passive scart adapter, but you could buy a RGB scart cable separately to get better image quality. (A playstation 1 rgb cable was one of the first things i ever ordered online from a long gone store called lik sang)
Hey, Little Car! Wow!!!! Your videos are outstanding content but now you suprised even more with subject. Such approach to subject is rarely seen even on dedicated AV/HT channels. In fact you became Little Tech 😊 I'm a big AV fan but assume I could watch your episode on almost anything... Looking forward to next AV/tech video!
I once made a full 21 line cable from scratch as a kid just cos most cables only carried composite - not sure if the VCR even output in RGB but it was a nice bit of soldering practise and the satisfaction of having a full fat cable 😂
The advantage of the "bulky connector" was that it was quite easy to solder. Much easier even than DIN or DB connectors... Quite different from today's connectors like HDMI, DP or USB, that are impossible to solder.
@@Rob2 And when you finished soldering all 21 wires, you looked at your table and saw that the nut that holds everything together was lying on the table instead of being on the cable
Correct! I have once used some self-amalgamating tape instead of the nut. @@JohnDoe-bd5sz
@@JohnDoe-bd5sz so true - and it was always the second one 🤣
I've shocked myself so many times plugging and unplugging SCART cables. I still use them today to hook up home computers and consoles to my CRT.
The Philips protocol was D2B or Domestic Digital Bus. I think it was more or less based on I2C just as AVLink and some other alternative protocols
You could even use SCART to connect your PC's RGB output to a regular TV instead of a monitor. If your display adapter supported the sync on green option (most ATI cards did)
Great video and interesting to see you branching out in subjects. Now do one explaining Teletext to Americans. Back in the 1990s I was addicted to Teletext. I actually offered Techmoan an S-VHS tape with Teletext on it to make a video but it wasn't a subject that he was interested in.
The main thing I remember about SCART are the poor tolerances, which lead to contacts that were often bad, a fact not helped by the weight of the connector itself.
I've never had a SCART connector that felt heavy in any way. The cable, though... A proper, fully shielded one also tended to be rather inflexible, making it hard to install a SCART setup in a confined space
SCART was brilliant, so easy and good quality sound and images. However trying to re insert a start at the back of a 32 in CRT tv but touch alone was a highly skilled operation.
Great video on a topic which seems so normal in Europe but much less known in other parts of the world. There's something to add, I think: the technical reason why SCART came from France and had those lovely component RGB and fast switching signals. It's all about SECAM, the analogue colour encoding invented in France while much of the rest of the world used PAL and NTSC. Broadly speaking, generating a SECAM colour signal was more complex than generating PAL or NTSC so a lot of devices like game consoles and set top boxes just didn't bother, leaving RGB as the only option (the French-market Atari 2600 being a famous example). So the French standard connector had to support RGB. And the fast switching? Really neat for subtitles, but again it's because of a limitation in SECAM. Superimposing text on a PAL or NTSC picture is quite easy to do and has no side effects. But because of how SECAM colour is encoded, superimposing captions results in brightly-coloured sparkles to the right of the captions which makes them hard to read as well as ugly. So doing it in the RGB domain is the only option that works. So we have the quirks of SECAM colour encoding to thank for the oh-so-useful RGB pins on SCART.
I don't look back personally to SCART since I'm all happy with HDMI but as someone who as a kid recorded most of his favourite TV shows and also had videogame consoles ever since, it was really handy to have the auto turnon feature passed through and superb picture when compared to composite cables or even antenna.
I had one of those TVs with 3 SCART sockets. One set up for Svideo. I'm in the UK and had a NTSCU Nintendo Wii. The Svideo enabled SCART socket came in handy for the Wii.
Had NO idea! Thanks for a great bid.
Little Scart? Sorry could not resist it
At around the year 2001, I had a DVD player that was multi-region, but my only way of connecting it was via Composite, to a portable colour CRT TV that had no SCART socket, so Region 1 (USA) DVDs were black & white with a fuzzy image. Then I replaced the TV (a gift from my sister) and it was a colour portable CRT that did have a SCART socket, but I used it with Composite again, until I remembered that there was an unused SCART cable in the attic. So I fetched it down, connected it, and GLORIOUS HO! COLOUR on R1 DVDs on my new TV! What's more, it was RGB, so it was a nice, PURE image with no artifacting at all, and it was an ideal DVD setup for years, and all of my DVDs looked great on it! Unfortunately, CRTs declined and then didn't look near as good on LCD displays, and thus began the slow transfer to Blu-ray. HOWEVER, I can happily say that my experience with SCART (RGB at least) was POSITIVE!
Thank you, I never knew the history of SCART, never needed to, but then SCART disappeared and I wondered why?. Thank you for this video you've answered my questions, I also found the history of the SCART connector interesting too. Keep up your excellent videos👍🏻
Oh yes, good old scart. I used that on my Amiga for that glorious RGB image, I even made a scart interface for Arcade game PCB's with a so called "Gender Changer" which meant I could plug-in games computers used in Arcade machines into my PAL-SECAM-NTSC compatible RGB scart Television back in the days, which meant I could play arcade games on my telly, oh the childhood memories.
As a 2000s kid, I always loved plugging something in with SCART. Learning about engineering behind it is such a treat
For me, RGB can only be used to a limited extent because there is no synchronizing pulse for the gain adjustment in the color signals, and therefore all component tolerances are added up. In older TV sets, RGB often has a too direct signal path that bypasses the brightness and contrast adjusters, and in the worst case even the auto cut off function of the picture tube control. Component Video is YUV (Y + red-Y + blue-Y). The effective contact surface with Scart is VERY small (except for the mass) and the contact plates ended up being so cheap that they were slightly bent.
In my experience only the saturation (and maybe sharpness) adjustments were bypassed. Kinda makes sense, since with composite video all you have to do for increased saturation is boost the color signal. With RGB, it's more complicated than that.
I remember wanting to be able to watch a satellite receiver located in the living room on a tv upstairs in the bedroom. So i made a very long scart lead using screened cable that went into the ceiling out of the roof & made its way down the wall into the living room. It was usable & i made an ir extender for the remote as well.
Wow, made me respect the format more. So future proofed!!
Very interesting as always (:
I always liked SCART but I did have bad experiences with dodgy pins. I remember I had a DVD player once where the green pin got damaged and everything was magenta-tinted for a while. That was in the 2000s so I imagine that's to do with cheaper cables then as you said, same as VHS tapes went downhill in quality.
You're absolutely right that SCART was a fantastically forward thinking technology and parts of the world really missed out. I do however want to clarify a couple of things... SCART didn't use component video (YPbPr) - it used pure RGB which is quite different and much closer to VGA and the internal RGB signals that CRT TVs used; however SCART only supported 15kHz scan rates which means interlaced video only, which topped out in 625-scanline land (the EU) as 576i; 720x576 pixels. There's mention on Wikipedia of 720p, 1080i and 1080p support but this is false. Just to add to the confusion, in some documentation RGB was referred to as component video as it technically is, being separate signals compared to a traditional composite signal, although it differs from what later became known as component video (YPbPr). RGB provides amazing quality over composite or S-video because you're not actually limited to the traditional PAL or SECAM video standards. I believe the inclusion of RGB in the SCART standard was for future proposals such as D-MAC (multiplexed analog components), a video transmission format developed in the UK (IBA) and later adopted by the European Broadcasting Union as a superior format for the future. The failed British Satellite Broadcasting venture was forced to use D-MAC which boasted superior image qualityo over it's rival (Sky... wonder what ever happened to them!), NICAM stereo digital sound, native widescreen support, and the possibility for future 1250-line HD video... back in 1990! Other countries also started to adopt D-MAC, but the writing was on the wall for analog video before long. Digital video compression was on the rise and could squeeze a good quality image into considerably less bandwidth. It appears that there was an incredibly rare 'Golden SCART' for HD-MAC / Eureka 1250 which could carry a 32kHz scan rate 1152i50 HD image, but this effectively never left testing and was dropped in 1993 to focus on Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), which is still used to this day.
Thanks for the clarification.
The interview for my current job (back in 1989) was on the day SES launched Astra. A large part of it was me having to explain the differences between PAL and MAC transmissions. I later converted a BSB receiver into a D-MAC decoder. Unfortunately all the programmes I wanted it for, like FTA MTV stopped using MAC less than a year later.
@@MrDuncl It's honestly a shame that BSB didn't succeed. D-MAC was far ahead of PAL and BSB was a great service. Even the iconic Marco Polo house is no more.
@@cromulence Sky went for quantity not quality. Having had satellite TV in about 1987 (4 foot dish and a receiver with a tuning knob) I sometimes joke that Sky started going downhill when they moved onto Astra 🙂 p.s. Fun Fact. Sky started out as the TV equivalent of Radio Luxembourg without any authorisation to broadcast to the U.K. I think the main reason they became interested in BSB was to get hold of their broadcasting rights,
Very interesting, I never knew about SCART, but I do remember the blue, green, red colour ajustments on my parents old cathod ray SONY tv. We got our first LCD 15 years ago, I remember dad saying the base weighed more than tv. The picture was amazing. I also remembered having to change to channel 3 whenever we wanted to game or watch a tape or dvd.
Now I know what was the output in the ultra-modern SAMSUNG TV my family got in 1997. Thank you. Nice flashback.
I hated SCART. The amount of time I spent trying to connect a SCART cable behind a large TV where you could not see and only try to feel to socket. It was badly thought through and so difficult.
The Scart cable was good, but placing the chunky cable behind the devices was difficult. And I met contact fails several times when the cable was pugged since very long time, I had to budge the plug in the socket to make the contact good again for all pins.
I still have a few SCART cables. I binned most of them last year but kept the posh blue ones I had, just in case!
fascinating stuff
It was pretty mind blowing when I connected my SNES to an RGB Scart cable for the first time. Had no idea it could output such a clean image.
I've recently seen a video about modifying an android TV box with a SCART connector. there, the SCART data-pins were used as a regular UART-connection. this essentially allowed to directly open the bootloader and everything to flash another firmware onto it. I was fascinated by this.
My modern TV, with a second generation decoder for DVB-T2 television broadcasting, and it STILL has SCART. It's such a wonderful standard.
Thats because main role of STBs (thing you call decoder which is called like that from DVB-CA fuction from cable STB that decrypts protected chanels, but with DVB-CI STBs is not needed for that) is to provide DVB tuner to old tvs without DVB tuner, and majority of those TVs are CRTs with scarts
A bit of a departure for you but really good just like your video on the Ford ICE work. More videos like this please👍
How apophenic! Only yesterday, while doing chores, it randomly came into my head how I used to find SCART cables so thick and awkward when using old VHS players. And lo! Your vid pops up in my YT recommendations!
Scart / Péritel. Like the "figure 8" mains connector is known as a Telefunken connector to some of us.
I was obsessed with SCART as a child when we got a new Philips VCR. I even wrote a letter to Philips UK asking about what the unused pins were for. Got a letter back saying for manufacturers to expand the format in future. Some TVs mounted the Scart port on the circuit board with just solder holding it on and the PCB could crack quite easily esp if users wiggled the cable if the connector worked loose. Cables were too heavy. I used the bi-directional feature to make sure I was recording the correct channel as the VCR could record the Scart signal from the TV and VCR would change channel along with the TV. Philips called it the "Euroconnector" early on not Scart or Péritel.
Oh yeah, it would also always annoy me, when a picture was/is stretched. Even as a child I noticed and was annoyed. Weirdly, everybody I pointed this out to never cared. They would rather have a 16:9 movie squished to 4:3 than "losing" some picture through the black bars (devices which would properly upscale were rare). It's the same deal today, when videos get encoded the wrong way and then being squished. I actually work as a video editor, with footage from loads of different sources, including squished footage. I see it as a personal requirement to always restore proper aspect ratio.
Scart was great. 3 different signal types (RGB, S-video, composite). Stereo sound. Could have subtitles on and channel hop on VCR without having to touch the TV remote. Could record TV output while channel hopping. Could set VCR to switch to input channel when powered on or play was pressed. Some VCRs will pass the signal through it while in standby even if its on the the wrong channel, meaning you can watch satellite or DVD without switching on the VCR.
Ah yes the lost northern martial art practiced by black pudding bertha Ecky Thump.
I have found a good "misuse" for them on my model railway. With two wires per turnout and signal (plus a common ground via the shielding) is required it is the perfect wiring to quickly connect or disconnect between module units or from the control board to the layout. The usual Sub-D connectors are fiddly to connect when free flying and cheap ones will even not offer secure connection. SCART is the perfect alternative here, securely connecting up to 10 turnouts or signals with the controller per connector.
Working in domestic and commercial rentals, I hated the damn things - for basic video, RCA/phono for picture and sound meant daisy chaining a few videos together for copying was so simple. I can't magine how many custom SCART cables I had made up to such simple connecting things. Worse were the TVS and videos with dual, or even 3 SCARTS, the switching and loop throughs never did what you wanted. The damn things were too big, and threading them through cabinet holes meant for individual connectors was impossible, unless you, managed to de-pin one end, then put them back in. You also had cables that were directional, so maybe a pair of phonos to SCART for audio in, or a couple of phonos to SCART doing video in to the SCART with mono audio, or of course the same looking cables but the out from the SCART to other devices - what a pain. Hated them, and being non locking, the stiff multi-core cables would gradually work their way out, often losing picture, or sound separately. I've a few white and red Sony phono cables from 1976 that still work!
The SCART connector was, in its own way, the Swiss Army Knife of AV connectors. It was capable of so much. The main problem, in my own experience of a large number of such cables, was that the physical connections were were not designed with enough depth, in the sense that the pins should have been longer and the socket deeper. This would have made and much more positive and reliable connection. In a perfectly manufactured plug and socket this may have worked well enough, initially at least. Once manufacturing tolerances and inherent wear came into it there were lots of issues with cables that didn't quite connect properly or the mass of the physical size of the cable would cause problems over time. A deeper connection would have made the electrical connection as robust as the physical connectors themselves.
Full wired Scart cables weren't cheap. In Germany, it costs around 40 to 50 DM. I never had problems with bad connection.
@@thorstenjaspert9394The more expensive ones were, generally, very reliable. They were solidly made with high quality cable and connectors that gave the best signal transfer and would work well for years. There were also a lot of low quality cables made that were not always sold a low price and just didn't work as well or would eventually loosen enough to cause a bad connection.
My TV came with this funky cable that looks like weird SATA cable on one end and SCART on the other it's been a God-send while connecting old hardware.
I did not expect it on this channel but yes it was the best french invention since the metric system! :D Some of the features it had were so forward barely anything used them - for example it supported sharing a single tv remote with all your devices or a loop back of the picture going out of the tv to VCR recording it or even picture overlays - something like teletext. Nowadays: RGB master race :D :D
Yes, I only recently learned that the main reason it had RGB on it was that France had the SECAM standard which was difficult to mix and fast-switch (due to it being FM based) and thus RGB was required for anything but basic TV viewing. But indeed it was great. I had a big investment in SCART cables and equipment, which only recently went to the junkyard with everything now being HDMI. One of my devices was a 5-port box that could bi-directionally switch all signals, even the RGB.
@@Rob2 true SECAM was a hot garbage but still, it's good we got RGB as a side effect and it looks amazing on my 2005 CRT! I literally have a PS3 plugged in to play old 3:4 content of off blu rays on it haha
@@give_me_my_nick_back I had a CRT but in 2004 I bought an LCD and that still had 3 SCART inputs, 2 of them with RGB. But I had a SAT box, a VCR and a DVD and I wanted to view them in the bedroom as well, in good quality. So I had that 5-port box, one cable to the main TV and another long cable to the bedroom, where I could watch everything in RGB quality... Now that all has been replaced with HDMI solutions, but it worked very well and for some time I even used it with YPbPr instead of RGB (for HDTV).