obsolete electronics for teh lose :-(

[zwol]

I bought a cheap-ass TV off Craigslist to watch movies on.

Then I discovered that the TV is so old that it doesn't accept any sort of input except plain old cable. (could be worse, i suppose; could only have antenna screws.) So I went and bought a handy dandy "RF modulator" from Rat Shack, which takes your standard red/white/yellow feed from the DVD player and puts it on cable channel 3 for the TV. About the same price as the TV.

This works, except that a few seconds after you turn the signal on, the picture develops lots of horizontal white streaks which appear and disappear. They seem to be worse the brighter the picture is. Large areas of white in the signal make the entire picture jitter around as well as streak.

After some headscratching, we drug out queenpam's old Super Nintendo, which has the RF modulator function built in (channel 3 or 4! Luxury!) — this worked better, but still had streakage.

Anyone know what the hell is wrong with the thing, and just how hard it would be to repair? It's a "Quasar" brand TV from 1989. Note that anything that's going to cost me more than about ten bucks is not worth doing.

Comments

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the macrovision copy protection isn't being removed -- normally the TV does it, I think.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I'm not aware of any reason why the output from a Super Nintendo or a Playstation (playing games, not DVDs) would have Macrovision on it in the first place...

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I think it's on the DVD, not added by the player.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Or, maybe I'm just too busy today, failed reading comprehension, and thought you were only talking about movies. It's been a long month...