S-Video provides a better image quality than composite video. On composite video there are only two wires, one carrying the video signal and the ground. On S-Video, three wires are used; one for carrying the image in black-and-white, one for carrying the color information signal and the third is the ground – hence the name of this standard, separated video.

All current TV sets and videoprojectors have this connector. You should connect your DVD player to your TV or videoprojector using an S-Video cable only if your DCD player and/or TV or videoprojector don't offer a better connection option, like component video, DVI or HDMI.

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Figure 12: S-Video connector on a TV set.

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Figure 13: S-Video connector on a DVD player.

Also, if you want to connect your computer to your TV to use it as a video monitor, this is one option, but should be used only if your TV doesn't provide any better connection option, like component video, VGA, DVI or HDMI (listed from the worst to the best).

Keep in mind that the image quality of CRT-based TV sets is far below any video monitor. There are two reasons. First, the TV screen works at 640x480 resolution (a.k.a. 480i or SDTV), lower than the most common screen resolutions nowadays. Secondly, TV sets work with interlaced scanning, while video monitors work with non-interlaced scanning (a.k.a. progressive scanning), which provides a far better video quality.You will only get good results if you use a HDTV set with progressive scanning as a video monitor and of course the higher the resolution of your HDTV, the better.

For connecting PCs to videoprojectors you should use the DVI or HDMI connectors, as we will explain you later (if your videoprjector doesn't feature any of these two connectors then the option is to use the VGA connection).

Nowadays, almost all video cards have S-Video output, as you can see in Figure 13. On video cards with video capture function (a.k.a. VIVO) or with component video output, this very same connector is also used by these functions. The standard S-Video connector has four pins. If the S-Video connector from your video card has more than four pins, that means your video card has component video or video capture functions. We’ll talk more about this in the next page.

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Figure 14: S-Video connector on a video card.

In Figure 15 we see the standard S-Video connector and cable. S-Video signal can be transformed into composite video by using an adapter (shown on Figures 16 and 17). This is useful to connect a video source that has S-Video output (like your PC) to a TV set that doesn’t have S-Video input.

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Figure 15: S-Video connector and cable.

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Figure 16: S-Video to composite video adapter.

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Figure 17: This cable provides S-Video input and composite video output.