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component video Last modified: Friday, February 02, 2007

A high-end video interface that supersedes both composite video and S-Video. Component video offers better signal clarity, which results in better picture quality. Component video cables have three RCA cables: one green, one red and one blue. Component video is an analog format that carries visual data only, meaning audio cables are still required.

DVI vs. HDMI vs. Component Video — Which is Better? DVI/HDMI and Component Video are all video standards which support a variety of resolutions, but which deliver the signal from the source to the display in very different ways. The principal important difference is that DVI/HDMI deliver the signal in a digital format, much the same way that a file is delivered from one computer to another along a network, while Component Video is an analog format, delivering the signal not as a bitstream, but as a set of continuously varying voltages representing (albeit indirectly, as we'll get to in a moment) the red, green and blue components of the signal. Taming the Composite, S-Video, Component and RGB Jungle In the days before DVD, this topic wasn't relevant to the vast majority of home theatre enthusiasts. Most of us would have used the RF (antenna) output of our VCR to connect up to our TV. Things have changed. DVD has brought a new level of readily-accessible video quality into the home environment, and along with it, several unfamiliar ways of connecting up to your video display device to access this additional quality.