HDMI to RF, some thoughts

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by judge

Sooner or later I’m going to have to move to converting HDMI to RF for my vintage TVs and I am wondering if anyone has any experience of this. There are converter boxes readily available, but I would like something with these features:

1. I should be able to display 4:3 programs on my old TV full height without the bands I would see on my widescreen TV
2. I should be able to choose between letterboxing and other modes for widescreen programs
3. The downsampling should be of decent quality
4. I should be able to watch copy protected sources without artifacts on my old TVs
5. It would be nice if the converter would accept composite input too, so I don't have to have multiple converters
6. It would be nice if I could broadcast the signal, like I can with my old Blonder-Tongue

Anyone know if any of the converters can do these thing? The first four are the most important.

Don't convert directly to RF. There are few HDMI converters that will convert driect to RF and those that do have RF sections that flatly suck compared to your Blonder Tongue.

Get a HDMI to composite video/audio adapter and feed that to your Blonder Tongue (if you have outer inputs you want to feed the BT get an AV switch box from the 90's*).

I've yet to get an HDMI converter that does everything you want scaling wise with the 2 I bought.

There is a thread here on how to eliminate letterbox with an exetron scaler box (which takes composite and spits out VGA) and a VGA to composite adapter. That combo definitely allows letter box to be eliminated in your choice of crop or vertical stretch (which are the only 2 respectable options). Some menu configuration is necessary for it to work.

I bought a bunch of stuff for this a month ago and need to get to setting it up (all I had time to do was a quick 'does it work after shipping' test).
The only thing one really needs to convert HDMI to composite on these days is a computer driving a vintage set...all DTV/cable boxes I've seen still support RF or AV and a PC can do anything any video player can, including playing BluRays, and then some.

*If one of the other devices you want to connect is a VCR you can plug your HDMI to composite converter into the VCRs AV input and tune the VCR so it passes that through when you're not watching a tape....If you don't have a VCR and want remote controled AV switching look for an old home theater amp that has video inputs and outputs... those have built in AV switchers that can be controlled by the amps remote.