Someday we’ll find it, the HD connection …

I was not usually the kid who got to run the A/V equipment at school, and that continues to haunt me today. Whenever we get a new piece of A/V gadgetry at the house, I’m the one who gets to get things connected properly, which usually turns into a long period of buying a lot of cables and muttering at options screens.

Well, with the new TV and the introduction of HD TV to the mix, things have gotten an order of magnitude more complicated in our entertainment center. Now we have 480i and 720p and 1080eieio and all that good stuff to mix up.

For the initial connections (just to get things working), I have everything routing through the Yamaha receiver. The Yamaha doesn’t have HDMI (digital video) ports, so I have the Cable Box / DVR coming in via component video (red/green/blue cables) and then component video out to the TV. I have the DVD player coming in via RCA video (yellow cable) and then out again by RCA cable to the TV. Both boxes route audio via standard RCA (white/red) cables through the receiver.

I got that working yesterday in fairly short order. The biggest trick is that the TV doesn’t automatically sense the video stream going to it from the receiver, though the manual says it should. As a result, if I change between DVR and DVD, I have to both hit a button on the receiver and flip through the inputs on the TV. Workable, but annoying.

The video output is mixed. Watching one of the HD channels from the DVR is loverly — we watched an episode of Jeopardy and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in HD, and it was great. Ordinary TV suffers from video artifacts a bit. There may be settings I can adjust on that. 

The DVD (which is not HD/Blu-Ray) was okay when watching Stardust; I was annoyed that the screen did not autoset (as I think it should) to match the widescreen image coming from the DVD. More things that needed manual tweaking, and that I need to dig into the configurations about.  

(We’re leaving the VCR out of the mix for the moment. I’ll get that hooked up eventually, but we watch video tapes maybe once every couple of months.)

And, of course, there’s the remotes. We used the old TV remote solely for turning the TV on and off; with the new TV, now all of a sudden the TV remote becomes a crucial element in selecting video inputs, screen configurations, etc. In theory, I can program each of the remotes to do about 90% of what the others do; I need to now look into doing that.

Part of the problem with all the above is, of course, my unfamiliarity with the equipment, the technology, and the drug interactions between all these boxes. Part of it may well be the component video connection — which provides high quality analog video, but may not be passing on some of the magic beans that a digital connection would. Howsomever, I may be able to get my digital cake and eat it, too.

1. The DVD player, for all it’s a cheap tiny box, has an HDMI out on it. In theory, I can leave the audio going to the receiver and have digital video going straight to the TV.

2. The DVR has a DVI out on it, which means with the right cable I can connect it straight (for video) out to one of the TV’s HDMI ports. Again, this should mean beeyooteeful digital video.

I’ve found some inexpensive HDMI and DVI/HDMI cables via Amazon, so those should arrive in a few days (since things are working, I don’t need to run right out and buy wildly overpriced Monster cables). We’ll see how this cunning plan works. It’s not clear to me that it will make a wild amount of difference, and I still need to poke into the manuals, and it still may require changing inputs (time for another instruction sheet write up for visitors and babysitters) on both the TV and the Receiver … but …

… well, but nothing. It’s working now, I might be able to get it to work better, but I’m pretty happy with what we got.

Well, except for the sneaking hunch that we’ll be looking at a Blu-Ray DVD player sooner than I’d expected. 😛