There was a several-years-long period of my life when I spent money to build a home theater. This was sometime after DVD became popular, because the motivation was my realization of how much superior DVD picture quality was over VHS. With movies on VHS, noisy visual artifacts were a limitation of the analog magnetic medium. With movies on DVD, the media-imposed limitations were gone and now there are all these other limitations I could remove by spending money, lots of it, to do things like upgrade from composite video to S-Video connections.

Eventually home theater moved to all digital HDMI, and I stopped spending big money because even the cheapest flat panels could completely eliminate classic CRT problems like color convergence. (My personal peeve.) I thought I have left the era of CRT and composite video behind, but throwing out my pile of analog interconnects and video equipment turned out to be premature.

Now I've found an interest in old school video again, because they are accessible for the electronics hobbyist. It is much easier to build something to output a composite video signal rather than HDMI. Local fellow maker and tinkerer Emily likes the old school tech for aesthetics reasons in addition to accessibility. So one day we got together at one of our regular SGVTech meets to dig a little deeper into this world.

Emily brought an old portable TV with composite video input, and two candidate Arduino sketches each purporting to generate composite video. (arduino-tvout and one other whose name I can't remember now.) I brought my ESP32 dev module running Bitluni's composite video demo. For reference Emily had an actual composite video camera, the composite video Wikipedia page and the reference document used by Bitluni for his demo.

All three were able to get the little TV to show a picture. However, they looked very different under the oscilloscope. The [name will be filled in once I remember] sketch had the wildest waveform whose oscilloscope trace didn't look anything like a composite video signal, but the proof is in the fact an animated 3D vector graphic cube showed up on the TV anyway. The waveform generated by arduino-tvout was a little rougher than expected, but unlike the previous, it was clearly recognizable as a composite video waveform on the oscilloscope and accepted by the TV. Waveform generated by Bitluni is the best fit with we expected to see, and matched most closely with output generated by the composite video camera.

Knowledge from tonight's investigation will inform several of our project candidates.

https://twitter.com/MLE_Online/status/1194135855721369600