What is a good video quality to convert to?

Is there a way to convert standard RCA video quality up to S-Video quality?

• I was wanting to know if it's possible to convert a standard yellow video rca jack to S-video quality. I know you can buy adaptors but it doesn't change the quality. is ...show more

• Answer:

  The simple answer is that you cannot restore an RCA/composite video source to an S-Video quality signal. The key difference is that S-Video separates the chroma (color) information from the luma (luminance) information. This provides superior quality and keeps the information for both channels intact. An RCA video signal is a composite of both the chroma and luma information. It's essentially mixed down to one channel, and in the process of doing so, some information is lost as the chorma and luma signals interfere with each-other. This cannot be recovered by use of an RCA to S-Video adapter. The other responder talked about improving the resolution and using various up-conversion techniques. This is irrelevant to your question. Both Composite and S-Video provide the same resolution (480i), but the signal quality is not the same. The use of up-converters can help improve the resolution of the video in general and enhance the definition a bit, but it cannot recover the lost chroma or luma information specifically resulting from mixing the video down to a composite signal. This is an example of what happens when you mix the chroma and luma channels into one (like an RCA/composite signal): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crawl.jpg There is no up-converter that can fix that. Take note that there is a difference between resolution (definition) and quality. Resolution refers to how many pixels of detail are encoded in the image where as quality refers to things such as the significance of compression artifacts, video noise, blurring, interference patterns, etc.. Something can be 'High Definition', but still be very poor quality. In the case of composite and S-Video, they both share the same resolution/definition, but the quality of both is significantly different, and up-converting them to a higher definition would still show a difference in quality.