Last week, I had to exchange my cable box for a new one. I have an CRT TV, but the cable company said that as long as it had a coaxial cable, the box would work. So, I flipped to “On Demand,” and accidentally chose an HD episode of a show. Previously, if I did this with my old cable box, I’d get a message that my box was set up for HD. Once in a while, I’d get sound, but no picture. Now, I can view HD shows on my TV. Exactly how does this work? I thought HD was for, well, HD TVs.
the new cable box has a video scaler chip which is down-scaling the video to NTSC (standard definition.)
… to show HD channels as SD…
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Some CRT’s were HD capable, but ok mostly not.
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Coax ? well all the signal cables you plug into the TV are coax.
I guess you mean the heavy guage one, which is for RF (as if antenna) connection. -
Isn’t it a digital box, so really it just required a programmer to program it to turn HD feed into SD output. Sure, it may be easier to just do it in hardware, probably they don’t make SD only chips anymore, but its just not possible to assume that… the HD digital (MPEG) decoder easily be programmed to turn HD into SD on any form of output - those RCA plug types(eg composite, component), VGA RGB, SCART, DVI, HDMI… … they can all carry SD !
stop posting nonsense.
HD CRT televisions were never more than a niche (i.e. expensive, early-adopter) market. Almost none made it to store showrooms because flat screen technology was maturing simultaneously with HD and manufacturers knew that, after retooling, they were an order of magnitude cheaper & easier to mass produce.
RCA cables (and RG-6 coax) are coaxial, but HDMI cables are definitely not. And the vast majority of HD TVs are connected via HDMI.
Not only that, I’m honestly surprised your old cable box did not. I’d expect any device that receives HD input and can output to SD TVs to have a scaler. I’ve never encountered a device that didn’t. (Then again, I’ve never encountered a device without RCA jacks, which are limited to SD anyways.)
The more likely reason is that the old box wasn’t capable of decoding HD signals at all. If you had an SD TV, you wouldn’t have ordered an HD box. Older cheap boxes had less powerful chips that couldn’t decode an HD stream. But these days, even the cheapest boxes being manufactured can decode an HD signal, since the chip manufacturers no longer make SD-only decode chips (actually combined CPU/decoder chips). So the new box is happily downscaling the HD signal to SD and putting it on the coax output for you, while the old box couldn’t decode the HD signal at all.
Good luck with that.