[music] Tired of the cable chaos in your entertainment
centre? Frustrated with endless plugs and sockets? Say goodbye to the mess and confusion!
Introducing SCART – the ultimate solution to simplify your audio and video connections!
With SCART, you can connect your VCR, Laserdisc and set top box to your TV
simultaneously with one connection, delivering a crystal-clear picture! No technical
expertise required. Just plug, play, sit back and enjoy your entertainment hassle-free!
But that's not all! The SCART Connector is designed to withstand the test of time.
Its durable construction ensures that it will keep your entertainment centre
tidy and organized for years to come. Order now! Just $9.99 for 1 SCART cable.
Order in the next 15 minutes and we’ll throw in an additional 999 cables. That’s
1,000 cables for just $9.99. Call today! SCART may not have been quite that good, but
when it launched in the 1970s it was a genuine game changer. Up until then most TVs didn’t have
any inputs – the only connector on the back was an aerial socket to give better reception for
broadcast TV. SCART launched at just the right time to support the growing use of VCRs and
set top boxes, allowing one simple connection to transfer high quality audio and video. The
non-standard shape meant it was impossible to connect it the wrong way, something you couldn’t
say for standards like USB that launched 20 years later. By sending control information along the
same wire, it was future proofed until digital TV came along in the 1990s and survived into
the Millenium. Yes, it was a bulky connector, but a bulky connector that just worked. Cheap
cables damaged its reputation with a shoddy video experience, but in its heigh-day SCART could
deliver high definition 1080p component video with surround sound, something that would only become
everyday with Blu Ray players in the 2000s. SCART is named after the organisation that
created it in the 1970s – the Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et
Téléviseurs – the French "Radio and Television Receiver Manufacturers' Association", but in
France it’s known as Péritel or Péritélévision. Before SCART, in Europe at least, early audio and
video devices used a variety of connections – RCA jacks, DIN, the SO239 connector or even BNC, the jack
that was used for networking in the 1990s. They were all decent connectors, but different
connectors meant conversion cables needed to be used. SCART swept all of this away. It
appeared on devices in 1977 and became a French standard in 1980. It spread across
Europe, appearing on TVs, set top boxes, VCRs and eventually DVD players, all manner of
things in fact that needed to connect to a TV. From day one it supported both composite and
component video. Component video was much higher quality, splitting out the three colour parts
of the signal, and much higher quality than most customers were used to in a day when you
were lucky to have a 30” (76cm) TV. SCART also included control wires that allowed remote devices
like the VCR to power on the TV from standby. It would also automatically switch the audio / video
output to the correct channel. So, for example if a user inserted a pre-recorded video cassette,
the VCR could power on the TV, and start playing the content with the TV on the correct channel.
That’s a great thing for people who struggle changing TV inputs, a problem that remains to
this day. SCART aimed to solve this problem and Sky’s UK set top boxes used it to great effect.
In the 1960s the TV set didn’t have anything connected to it. By the 1970s video games
machines were using the aerial socket, requiring splitters which degraded the signal.
By the 1980s this had expanded to VCRs and set top boxes that decoded satellite or over the air
broadcasts such as France’s Canal+. SCART included the ability to daisy chain devices together, with
the TV at the end. This allowed the VCR to record the decoded video. On the way to the TV the SCART
connector allowed the correct audio language to be chosen. As DVD players became popular in the
1990s, these could also be added to the chain. The video signal didn’t have to go just one
way either, SCART allowed the audio & composite video signal to be bidirectional. The
Canal+ set top box used this feature. So, the TV would receive the signal and pass it
through the SCART cable to the set top box which would decode it and send it back to the TV.
SCART allowed for two types of video input switching, a slow and a fast method. The
slow type is what you’re probably familiar with – switching from one source to another.
The fast method of video switching was a lot smarter. The video signal could be switched at
the pixel level, allowing devices to interleave subtitles or overlayed teletext information
over the top of a regular picture with the help with teletext’s “transparent” colour.
Again, SCARTs ability to send bidirectional audio and video meant a teletext decoder or
subtitle box could take the signal from the TV, mix in subtitles or teletext at the pixel level
and send the altered video back to the TV. SCART also had a pin to send serial data
in a manner similar to USB. The format of the data wasn’t defined which led to some very
creative implementations! Some satellite set top boxes used it to send data about the satellite’s
position in the sky to boxes that controlled the dish. Some devices used it to transfer stored
channels or other settings between compatible devices. Philips created a “multi-master”
command protocol in the 1970s - an early form of home automation. Another protocol –
AV.Link – allowed for remote control of devices and negotiating video signal types. AV.Link
would be carried forward to work through HDMI. The data pins were also used to send Dolby
Pro Logic or other surround sound information between devices, but it wasn’t widely used.
This lack of a standard way of dealing with surround sound meant customers had to send audio
separately with RCA cables. This negated many of the advantages of SCART as the audio didn’t switch
when SCART automatically changed the video source. The SCART committee continued to adapt the
standard to a changing world. S-Video was superior to composite video and gained popularity
in the 1980s. The SCART standard was extended to support S-Video, meaning while some countries
used new S-Video cables for compatible devices, SCART customers could continue using the same
cable to get improved video. One downside was it couldn’t be automatically detected,
meaning users had to set it manually. It’s important to say here that S-Video
was inferior to component video that SCART already supported, but more devices
supported S-Video than component, presumably because it cost less to support.
The 1990s brought widescreen TV, and DVD players. SCART was extended to support automatic
switching to widescreen to maintain the correct aspect ratio. Another option was the support of
“pan and scan” where the most important part of a widescreen image was shown on an old 4:3 TV. SCART
helped through this transition to widescreen, but despite this the world of the late 90s and
early 2000s was blighted with TV screens showing stretched people and I can’t have been the only
person who found this immensely frustrating! The original SCART standard was limited
to a resolution of 800x600, but subsequent iterations in the 1990s pushed that to up to 1,250
lines of video data. This meant component video could support 720p, 1080i and 1080p, meaning
SCART could showcase high definition video. Admittedly that was mainly limited to some
technology demonstrations like HD Laserdisc shown here in a video from Techmoan and linked
above. HD Laserdisc never took off – videophiles were still using regular old Laserdiscs with
just 425 lines of resolution, and when DVD came along in the late 1990s it wasn’t much
better at 480 lines. But SCART was ready in the 1990s in case high definition content
became available for an affordable price. Many DVD players supported component output
through the SCART socket, but set the default to composite. Some customers didn’t realise
they could get a better picture by making a setting change and this could leave an impression
that SCART didn’t deliver a good DVD picture. This was further hampered by low quality
SCART cables. Not all pins were wired up, meaning only composite video was supported and
daisy chaining didn’t work. And although it was recommended that each audio and video wire had its
own coaxial shielding, many scrimped with cheap wires leading to crosstalk which led to “ghosting”
on the video even on short cables. All this wasn’t obvious for consumers – a SCART cable was a
SCART cable, right? But high quality cables could deliver an excellent image over several metres,
and could be made longer by amplifying the signal. There were more serious problems. With 12V going
through the cable, swapping the cable when devices were switched on opened up the possibility of
frying one of the devices if the cable wasn’t connected properly, although the cable design was
of course designed to make that as hard to do as possible. If the cable was connected to a powered
TV with the other end unplugged, the large exposed shield on the SCART connector would be held at
approximately half mains voltage. If the cable is then plugged into an earthed device with a metal
case, inadvertent contact with the SCART cable shield while the earthed device is touched with
the other hand could result in a painful electric shock! Ensuring the TV is off and connected
last would prevent all of this from happening. Japan & Korea also used the SCART connector, and
it’s commonly known as RGB-21 or JP-21. While it used the same connector of course some bright
spark didn’t make it pin compatible with the SCART standard! One of the few pins that matched with
SCART was the red RGB pin, so one way of spotting a SCART/RGB-21 mismatch is red component video. It
was also expanded to support S-Video in the 1990s, but RGB-21 never caught on like it did in Europe.
If the SCART socket was rare in Japan and Korea, it was even rarer in the USA, but it was a thing.
The SCART protocol was turned into a US standard by the American Electronic Industries Alliance
as the EIA Multiport, but adoption was almost non-existent without any Government or industry
push behind it. That’s probably why SCART never appeared on the back of games consoles that
were designed for a worldwide audience. SCART was always rooted in the analogue world,
so when digital audio & video came along in the form of DVD and digital TV the writing was on the
wall. Besides, the socket was far too big for many smaller devices, using chunky cables which made it
hard for home theatre setups that were installed in tight spaces. What’s more, it hadn’t become
a standard in the large North American and Far East markets. New standards such as DisplayPort,
then HDMI took over, offering many of the same features but with a higher quality digital signal
that also provided the copy protection content producers demanded. Requirements that devices
support SCART were dropped in favour of HDMI, SCART to HDMI converters appeared
and SCART was consigned to history. Poor quality cables damaged SCART’s image, and
there weren’t clear standards to show a level of quality like USB tried to do by colour coding
faster USB 3 sockets and cables. There wasn’t the ability to handshake between devices to negotiate
the highest video quality, meaning many customers got stuck watching composite video. And that
connector was just way too big! But these are minor problems – the standard was after all
developed in the 1970s when DVDs were just a pipe dream. It was a very forward thinking
standard which, when implemented correctly, allowed several devices to work seamlessly
together with crystal clear high definition video. If you’ve ever wondered what those three letters
are on the back of a CD, there’s a video about that on the right, as well as one about the
history of the Telex – when people texted using a machine the size of a piano! Thanks for
watching and I’ll see you in the next video!
