SCART is the USB-C of yesteryear. Extremely versatile, but you KNOW some corner-cutting vendors will skimp out on some features to hide incompatiblity.

The thing that frustrated me most about SCART leads was that the cable always seemed to point in the "wrong" direction for whatever I was trying to set up, the additional bend to send it where I wanted would then cause tension on the (probably very cheap) cable and then things would start to pop out.

Never thought I would watch a 13 minute video about SCART. Well done. Keep them coming!

You are asking for confusion when you say things like “component video is superior to S-Video.” Much of the world uses “component video” to mean YPbPr component, but the people who know that RGBS, RGBHV, RGsB, etc are other forms of component video ALSO know that Y/C S-Video is component video. “Component video is superior to S-Video” makes little sense without specifying both types of component video, and since they are all types of component video you should then drop the word “component.”

Never thought I'd watch a video featuring a British man praising an accomplishment of French engineering. I'm an American so I'm not super familiar with SCART but it sounds like the standard was often plagued by poor quality cables and cables that fell out of the socket. Couldn't they have introduced a cable test mode of some kind into electronics that could warn the consumer if a bad cable was detected? Couldn't they also have introduced screws (like VGA and DVI) or those "vampire pin" things like DisplayPort uses to hold the cable in place?

The cable that did everything, and did everything poorly.

I never understood why SCART was never a thing in the US, where entertainment centres, big TV's, etc. were much more common much earlier.

Yeah so SCART was well designed except for one thing: it was impossible to plug in "blind" - which, given that connectors are always around the back of every device, was a major problem. That weirdly shaped shielding would have been fine if they'd only had a chamfered edge to the socket to guide it in, but no, for some reason they made the socket completely flat, requiring absolutely perfect alignment which was just not feasible if you couldn't see the socket. The chunkiness of the cable, and the weird angle of exit, didn't help either, as the plug would always want to tip over rather than sitting horizontal, and was prone to falling out if the cable was disturbed at all.

SCART is/was amazing - a good example of where a good standard becomes mandatory, it breaks the chicken-egg cycle and also stops manufacturers penny pinching! The US really missed out

To my experience, SCART was pretty much THE standard in Europe during the 90s an early 2000s. Virtually every TV, VCR and DVD-Player had it and gave you a superior picture and sound quality. And as far as I remember, most devices supported component or at least S-Video. But you really had to watch out for those low quality SCART cables which were missing some lines or even the pins. The later were at least easy to spot.

SCART has been a godsend for us vintage computer and console enthusiasts. Many of these old machine can output RGB, either natively or with a modification, for much better video quality especially on modern TVs.

It was referred to as Euroconector here in Spain. The use of SCART really makes CRT TV sets still relevant today. My current 'daily driver' is a SABA branded set fitted with a Thomson ICC3 chassis and a Videocolor FS-10 picture tube. It is hooked up to an HD capable DTT set top box using RGB over SCART. It delivers an image quality that was imposible when that TV was new.

I live in the UK and have a French-made CRT television with SCART cable.

As a retired A/V repair tech i remember scart very well, it was bulky but it allowed

One funny info about SCART though is although it was oboslete in 2000's, in France it stayed mandatory on new TV until 2015. I remember buying a new TV in 2013 and next to the 3 HDMI entry, there was a SCART one.

I might be a bit odd but I loved the SCART standard, it made connecting multiple devices so easy. Great, informative, video.

When I learned what SCART was in 1990, I was instantly jealous of it. I grew up an Air Force brat and a friend of my dad had a multi-standard Hitachi TV with 2 SCART ports. He also had a Sega Genesis (née MegaDrive) and a NEO•GEO AES. Both looked good with composite but amazing with RGB.

Errata: To be clear, SCART could do RGB from the start, not component. Later on in life it was also used occasionally for YPbPr component video.

Scart is the connector that just worked and never broke. Never had to replace one of these. It's just an aged standart.

When I was old enough to buy my own TV, I bought a 66" JVC model, picked because I liked the colour rendition in the showroom. At the time, the only thing I had to connect to it was an antenna, so the SCART sockets on the back were a curiosity. But I later bought one of JVC's early flagship S-VHS decks. And that's when I discovered JVC liked to put nice surprises in their hardware. Both devices were SCART and were well implemented. JVC also used a very good comb filter in their S-VHS deck which meant even the composite signal was excellent.