AV Reciever

[syncro.]

I'm thinking of buying an AV receiver but the feature i'm most bothered about is the ability to take any video input and produce an output in a single format.

For example take a scart input from a DVD player and a HDMI input from an xbox and output both these to the tv through HDMI (or VGA).

What's this feature called when I start my search in the next couple of weeks? TIA

[Plotloss]

Format upconversion.

Generally appears on mid range amps and up.

[syncro.]

Brilliant, thanks for your help!

[OldSkoolRS]

Sometimes listed as 'Video upscaling' as well depending on the make. You might struggle to find an amp that will take a scart connection (in fact I don't know of any off hand), if your DVD player has a component output (Red, green and blue sockets) most of the decent amps will be able to take that signal and convert it to HDMI and upscale it at the same time.

Depending on how good your TV is at upscaling it might be better to leave it to do the upscaling and just let the amp do the conversion to HDMI, leaving your DVD player at 576i output (assuming it's PAL).

[Plotloss]

To do SCART you'd need to break it out into Composite+Audio which is easy enough.

[OldSkoolRS]

Plotloss said:

To do SCART you'd need to break it out into Composite+Audio which is easy enough.

However using composite should be a capital offence on any reasonable size flat screen TV. The amp (or TV) can only upscale not perform miracles if given such a poor quality signal to start with. At the minimum try using the S-video output (most AV amps will accept this to upscale)if the player doesn't have component output, failing that try Richer Sounds for a cheap DVD player that has a HDMI output already on it....might be little more than the cost of the scart adaptor (and FFS don't buy such an adaptor in Currys or Comet for £30/40/50 or whatever).