Can anyone help me with this one? I did a search and wasn't able to find anything that would help.
I have a Home Theater system that I can get video to work fine from until I plug in the audio cables from my digital cable. I have tried various different setups but haven't been able to make it work. Here are the details.
I have Charter Cable's digital cable service. I run S-Video cable from an A/V selector box to a projector to use as my primary television. I have S-video connections running into the selector box form both the home theater's dvd receiver and the charter cable box. This all works, I can watch and listen to DVD's just fine and I can get the video from the cable. But when I run either Red/White component cables OR digital audio coax from my cable box to my home theater I get a distorted video output. Sometimes it's just screwy picture, sometimes the projector loses the source all together.
My first question is why do we have an A/V selector box? Doesn't your DVD receiver have an aux S-video (and audio) input into which the cable box can be hooked? If so, why can't the A/V switching be done internally by the receiver?
No the home theater is a couple of years old and doesn't have any type of video input. It only has connections for Red/White Input, Digital Coax Audio Input and then the standard S-video and Red/White/Yellow component outputs. That's why it puzzles me that even the dvd output would be scrambled when I plug in the cable.
Tom I feel your pain. As I understand it the video from both the DVD and the cable is fine until either the analog or the digital audio is connected (but not both at the same time, I assume) from the box to the receiver?
Is the DVD video OK even with cable box's power off? Does the problem persist with the audio from another device, like a VCR, hooked up to the receiver? If yes to both questions, then the problem surely lies with the receiver. Something is defective with its audio inputs.
So I would sit back, sip a Bell's Two Hearted Ale and contemplate your next move.
Incidentally, are those two separate selectable audio inputs, or are they the same input with two options? Also, even though the video is screwed up from the box, do you hear the cable box's audio OK?
Wow lots of questions, let me see what I can do to answer them. I love all the attention you guys are giving this. It's annoying having all the toys and not being able to use them.
Ok: Stof: When I bypass the selector box using s-video cable directly from the dvd receiver then I can watch dvds but when I do the same coming from the cable box it's screambled.
John: Yes, video from both is okay until either digital or analog audio is hooked up. The video DOES, however, get scrambled even with the cable box's power off and there is no interference when I plug a vcr's audio into the receiver. I had thought it might be a faulty receiver at first too and took steps around it.
And the receiver has several audio inputs, it has an analog one labelled "TV", another labelled "AUX" and a digital coax audio input as well. Depending which you plug into you can then select TV, AUX or DIGITAL on the receiver.
I wanted to give an update that I eventually figured out this problem.
I don't know what exactly was causing the distortion but when I moved the home theater including the cable box next to the projector it all corrected itself.
The only thing I have done differently is to plus the cable's video straight into an S-video input on the projector and the dvd/home theater's video into the RCA video input on the projector. This didn't work with my old configuration but with the reduced distance it's working fine.
I just have to manually switch between the two video inputs on the projector since it doesn't have the capability to do that manually.
Thanks for all the suggestions... you had som ideas I never thought of. Appears it just turned out to be too long of a distance for the video feeds.
Jay L
Unregistered guest
Posted on
Did you use a different power outlet when you moved the system? Just curious I have seen problems with projecters being farther away from the audio receiver that they end up ground faulting. Normaly this is heard through the speakers and not seen with video.
