HDTV Tutorial

Connecting Thru Component Video

If your HDTV panel doesn’t have DVI nor VGA inputs, the solution to connect it to your PC is using its component video inputs. To use this type of connection your video card must have component video output. The problem, however, is that is not so easy to recognize if a video card has or not this kind of output because it shares the same connector used by Super Video (S-Video). Almost all video cards nowadays have one S-Video connector, but the majority don’t have component video output available in this connector.

One way to detect if your S-Video connector has component video output or not is looking at it. If it has only four pins, this means it has only S-Video output and doesn’t have component video output. If it has more than four pins, this may mean that it has component video output. Check in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Identifying the S-Video connector used by your video card.

Pay attention that we said “may”. This happens because there are some video cards – specially those with video capture (VIVO) function – that have more than four pins on their S-Video connector, but these extra pins are used by another feature, not by component video.

In summary: if the S-Video connector from your video card has four pins, it doesn’t have component video output, if it has more than four pins, it may have component video output.

To be sure, only reading the board manual and looking on its specs to see if it has this feature.

To use the component video output from your video card, you will need an adapter. This adapter usually comes with video cards that have component video output. So, if you video card came with a component video adapter, this means it has component video output!

The aspect of this adapter can vary, the two most common models we show on Figures 7 and 8.

Figure 7: Component video adapter.
 
Figure 8: Another model of component video adapter.