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The Digital Home

If you want to send video and audio from your PC to your TV set, there are several types of cables you can use.

The standard connection is a set of three cables, one yellow (composite video); one white, sometimes blue (left audio); and one red (right audio). These are called RCA or phono connectors (the female sockets on the PC or TV are called jacks, and the male connectors on the cables are called plugs). "RCA" is such an old term that no one considers it a reference to a brand of TV. The yellow cable is called composite video because all the information about building the picture comes on that single connection. The word "composite" refers to video, not to audio, but if you ask for a composite AV cable, you'll get all three.

Much better video comes from an S-Video connection, a cable with four signal pins (all for video) inside the jack. This is the one that looks a bit like a round mouse or keyboard connector, in that it's a little circle thingie on the back of your PC. You have to line it up just right, because when you don't, one of the pins inside breaks and you have to go buy another S-Video cable.

Component video is the highest quality available. It comes on middle and high-end TVs; it comprises three cables that are labeled with red, green, and blue, each one indicating something esoteric like chrominance, luminance, and brightness.

Separately, you can get better-quality audio from a single digital audio cable, ei-ther a coaxial digital cable, which looks like an RCA cable and is sometimes called S/PDIF, or an optical-digital cable, a thin fiber-optic cable that is sometimes called Toslink.