GeekNights Monday - Video Cables

Tonight on GeekNights, we talk about display cables. The standards can be confusing, S-Video was not that common, VGA was king for a long long time, and we grew up in the days of RF. In the news, web scraping is perfectly legal, the bad man is trying (and failing) to buy Twitter, and Rym got a 3080Ti.

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The go-to cable place you should go to is cablematters.com it has saved me so much.

Also since the topic is about cables here is some way too detailed information about cables.

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The thing about USB-C adapters “just working” is almost true now but wasn’t for the first several years of type C consumer stuff, I had to buy a bunch of adapters at work because I deal with other people’s devices and none of them worked with everything. These days most are basically thunderbolt data with C-PD for power so that allows most everything to work unless your host device only supports USB data. A funny side effect of this is most of those little hub dongles with an HDMI port actually have a display port to HDMI bridge inside them because thunderbolt uses DP.

I kinda hate HDMI for a variety of reasons, but one of the best things about DisplayPort is that it can generate virtually every old video signal you can think of. HDMI to VGA adapters are active converters, DP to VGA is just some resistor ladders or something. I don’t know if the DP spec covers RF signal generation but it does support composite, component, S-Video, LVDS, DVI, VGA, RGB-S, and I think CGA and EGA.