What does an S-Video cable do?

Question

Just video... or audio as well? what kind of hook up would use s- video?

Answer 1

Just video I believe.  There's always seperate sound connections.  

A lot of dvd players/recorders, tvs, video cards, and various video devices provide s-video as a connection option.  Pretty common connector. They usually come with a cable for it as well.  

Better picture quality than composite video.

There do seem to be a couple different kinds of s-video connectors though.  Not sure what the difference is.  Mostly I see the 4 pin ones.

Answer 2

S-video is just as it says, video only. Buy it allows for a better picture than composite or RF cable (coax). The reason is that the video signal in s-video is split up for a better picture. This is done by splitting the 'luminance' from the 'chrominance', or the black & white from the color. This makes for a sharper, more accurate color picture. Be careful with plugging these in, they are fragile compared to other type connectors. The small pins in the end of the s-video plug bend and break easily.

Answer 3

It's video only.  It allows for a higher resolution (i.e. better picture) than standard video (i.e. composite video or your standard analog TV broadcast).  The most common use for S-Video is used to connect a Super-VHS player to your TV.

Answer 4

Video only.

S-video, a.k.a Y/C video, stands for "separated video."  This is because the luminance (grayscale, or B&W along with a 50/60 Hz sync depending on whether it's PAL, SECAM, or NTSC) and chrominance (color) are delivered as two separate signals to the display whereas with a composite signal, both luma and chroma are composited into one signal (hence the term).

Your TV display must take a composite video signal and separate the chroma and luma elements through the use of a comb filter before that signal can be used to drive the display.  The comb filter can't completely separate the elements, which is also why you have artifacts such as dot crawl since the elements can never be completely separated.

With s-video, the video feed is already separated so there's no need to run the video through the comb filter. This means that less processing is done to the video (provided that the video source itself was natively separate to begin with, such as DVD), which results in a cleaner, sharper picture with richer colors.

There's also component video, which is like s-video, but taken a step further as there are two chroma components (Pb, Pr) instead of one along with the luma component (Y).

Component and s-video are not to be confused with RGB, which are three primary color signals (red, green, blue) either with a separate sync signal or "sync-on-green," which is where the sync for refresh is composited with the G line.