Need some help in the A/V department

[Bonez]

After about five years of faithful service, my DVD/VCR player gave up the ghost this weekend. I was going to go pick up another one, when I hit a problem that we have in the living room as well. My cable comes from, *gasp*, a cable! I know it's becoming old school, since the last time I tried to buy a DVD player for the living room I discovered that they don't make them with the cable input jacks any longer. I'm pretty sure that my TV doesn't have one either, because when I set the whole thing up I would have bypassed the DVD player and gone directly into the TV instead of setting it up cable>DVD>TV.

Now downstairs we have a cable box, and I know that they can be set up using A/V cables. I suppose my question is if there's any kind of adapter that anyone knows of that will turn a cable input into an A/V input, or am I basically out of options?

Stupid technology...*grumbles*

[HMXDave]

You can definitely get a coaxial to RCA adapter. Try RadioShack.

[seinman]

If you're talking about cable TV, then no, no such adapter exists. Well it does, it's called a cable box. You see, a composite cable (what you're referring to as A/V cables) only carries one channel of video. Your cable, obviously, has lots of channels. That's why you can't directly convert: you need a tuner. Your VCR was probably acting as your tuner, or at least letting you pass the cable signal through to your TV to tune. DVD players don't include tuners because they can't record.

Your ideal setup (for a cable TV and DVD player) would probably be plugging the cable directly into the TV, and using your TV's tuner to tune your channels. Then, plug the DVD player into the composite (A/V cable) connection, and switch to that input when you're watching a DVD.

If you absolutely must have your cable go through an external tuner, then you need another DVD/VCR combo, or a DVD recorder. They have cable inputs because they can record, so they do have tuners.

[harbingerofdoom]

check the back of your tv to make sure you dont have coax...
even the tv's around me that are 10+ years old all still have a coax connection.

but, if you dont for some reason, ^^^ is correct, you will have to get a cable converter box or vcr of some sort.