Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The Art of SCART
Who invented SCART? Home Entertainment Nightmare connections!
The answer (often the case these days) is found on WikiPedia. The reason I bring this up though, is that I find it particularly frustrating in that corner of the house where we have TV, DVD player, VCR and cableTV box, it is very difficult to get any sensible solution to connecting all of this together.
We are luckier than many I suspect, becuse our (rather ancient) Sony TV has 2 scart inputs on the back and this removes the need for any adaptor box.
I have recently had to get one of these multi-scart connector boxes for my parents ...
furthermore...
My parents have (at least) 4 remote controllers for their various devices, and that, alone, causes terrible stress! Most of these controllers will actually adjust the volume of the tv set, but other features will only work with the correct controller for the device. This can be very confusing, since the tv and the VCR are both Panasonic, the controllers look similar. In fact you can switch one to control the TV or the VCR. I would be tempted to remove one of these controllers altogether!
The multi-scart connector box does allow us to have a DVD player, VCR and Satellite box connected to the TV. However, a button needs to be pressed on the multi-scart box to feed through the DVD player. There is also an RGB button which gets a better picture from the DVD player, but then stops the signal from the other devices.
The next problem is the recording of broadcast programmes to the VCR. Again it seems that this whole procedure is fraught with pitfalls. My parents had been used to using the menus from the VCR to select a timed programme, however, recording from the satellite (Sky) system is very confusing for anyone! The VCR needs to be set to a special mode to get auto-recording. The Sky menu system is poorly designed and very hard to understand. It seems that by setting a programme as a 'favorite', this will then switch the VCR on the record the programme when it starts.
My concluding point is that connecting and using home entertainment systems has become a stressful activity, particularly for the older generation.
