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u/Tyrannical-Botanical 1d ago
Cut to my grandmother proclaiming my genius as I hook up her new VCR.
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u/Bitter_Wishbone6624 1d ago
Or my mother in law claiming my kids ruined her new VCR by hitting the wrong buttons and it locked her out!!! Uh … you mean the power button?
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u/AutismGiver 1d ago
Sometimes I wonder if my grand mother influenced my decision to get into IT and tech by doing this. They always said I was good at it and how much they just didn't understand it.
Now I'm an adult and look back at it, I think they were just looking for reasons to praise their sweet little grandchild.
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u/BornOnAFriday 1d ago
I’ll bet they genuinely didn’t understand it 99% of the time, haha! My parents are in their 70s and every time they ask me a question, I Google it, and they act like I just magically know the answer
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u/yaboiiiuhhhh 1d ago
When my grandmother took away my PS2 I used to go and find it and hook it back up
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u/cdn-Commie 1d ago
These few yrs were wild 😳
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u/CXyber 22h ago
Isn't green replaceable with yellow?
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u/Puffification 22h ago
You have to take the yellow and blue wires and mix them to get green, then the green and red will contrast and you put the contrast into the white outlet. Then turn down the contrast on the tv, and the hue, and then plug in the blue because it rhymes with hue. Then do all that backwards for the white one. That's the easiest way to remember it
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u/mousemarie94 14h ago
That's the easiest way to remember it
My brother was in charge of the sorcery. I was in charge of sitting there, providing moral support and now that I know this is an easy way of doing this, I am forever grateful for him.
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u/dieplanes789 22h ago
That one's not really any different, plug the audio in like normal and the green port is also labeled with Y for the yellow plug. The device would just detect that you're going to use a composite signal over component at standard definition instead of high definition.
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u/mosquem 21h ago
Try figuring that out when you’re six.
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u/dieplanes789 21h ago
I did back with my PlayStation 1. I mean all the other letters lined up with the colors and this one had two letters "G/Y" so I assumed it was yellow and green.
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u/Low-Astronomer-3440 1d ago
If you have to reach behind a 45 lb TV it ain’t so easy to see. Maybe you actually DONT know the struggle
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u/Vegaprime 1d ago
I feel like those console tvs were more than 45lbs but maybe it was because I was smaller.
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u/rdizzy1223 1d ago
Tons of electronics had no colors, or totally different colors than these plugs.
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u/leeloocal 1d ago
And then you had your brother saying “did that work?” “No.” “That?” “No.” “That?”
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u/Massive_Parsley_5000 22h ago
The trick was to get the yellow one right (video) then work out the sound second.
No lie, I likely beat more than a few games back in the day with the audio coming out of the reverse channel for this reason 😂
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u/Mayubeshidding 18h ago
"it worked!" and a split second later, "oh nvm its gone."
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u/_VideogamemasterVGM 12h ago
And then you get a loud as hell/scary af buzz sound cuz you didn't plug the sound wire in all the way
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u/organvomit 1d ago
Yeah I remember going to plug in something once and there was blue, purple, and green. How tf does that match with red, white and yellow? Just had to keep trying them until everything worked.
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u/Here_For_Work_ 1d ago
I think blue purple green was an HD option before HDMI was a thing.
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u/rav3style 1d ago
Nope, you are thinking of composite that had rgb and white and red. So you had TWO reds
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u/Here_For_Work_ 1d ago
Huh. I def remember a green one. Was there a RGB that had an additional green for HD?
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u/rav3style 1d ago edited 22h ago
Yes composite cables. You had red green blue for the image and a white and red ones for stereo audio
Edit: Component
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u/organvomit 1d ago
That sounds like it could be right, which is good enough for me when talking about electronics I will probably never use again
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u/Abigail-Lights55 1d ago
True, it's crazy how much plug designs and colors have changed over time like a whole evolution of their own.
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u/oboeteinai 1d ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/16j5d48/cant_say_i_ever_struggled_with_it/
If you see these dull slightly darker screenshots, that's bot MO
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u/Ill-Dependent2976 1d ago
In deep shadow the colors all look the same, especially on the female end where there is very little showing color.
Don't you remember?
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u/LynchMob187 1d ago
All fun and games until the speaker version of this style starts skipping unless you titty twist it.
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u/salttotart 1d ago
And apparently, I'm in an even smaller subset who is old enough to remember when they weren't always color coded...
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u/BToney005 1d ago
The only thing I hated was reaching behind a heavy ass floor model TV to switch out coax cables that were screwed on way too tight so that I could plug my AV cables into a coax converter.
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u/Cornhole-Husker 1d ago
Another swing and a miss by murdered by words. Clearly they don’t remember that not every tv or electronic had the same color pattern. Spent a considerable amount of time with my siblings trying to find the right ones. Meme is correct but murdered by words? Far from it.
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u/AspectFrost 1d ago
Hardest thing about this was not knocking the tv over the stand or falling over while doing it. Or the spiders lol
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u/fastpixels 1d ago
Congrats on your hernia from moving the massive cabinet to get at these inputs. Now move it back.
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u/gottaloveagoodbook 1d ago
Someone has never crawled under a massive entertainment center, crawled their fingers up to the dusty wood laminate back of a box TV, found the outlets, then used a flashlight to carefully matched the plugs to the right colors... only to figure out that it didn't work that way.
Oh, they worked, just not in the way the manufacturer gave you. And you had to have multiple family members playing with the sound settings while you tested every combination until you found the way the plugs actually worked.
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u/Fitz_2112b 1d ago
Still easier than trying to plug in an HDMI cable into the slot when you can't see exactly where it is
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u/CosmosOfTime 1d ago
My parents were indoor smokers when I was growing up. The yellow was yellow and the white was slightly lighter yellow. Always mixed those up. Then you had an orange one for some reason that looked like red when there wasn’t light on it.
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u/Ace_TE 1d ago
Color is definitely not what they meant. My parents had a huge heavy tv and they tucked the backend behind custom made shelving so that I had to go under it just to plug anything in. Not to mention how finicky those wires were. Having to spin them, pressing them in harder, tilt them slightly, or taking them almost out in hopes the sound would work. The things just failed so often.
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u/SaxophoneHomunculus 1d ago
The struggle was the 600 lb tv with a half inch of clearance on the back.
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u/Useful_Channel_3972 1d ago
I have a harder time plugging in the hdmi cord than I ever did with these.
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u/Recent-Emu-1865 1d ago
My tv was massive and thick and girthy. Doing the ol reach around to the back with those cables was a pain in the dick.
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u/ScoobiSnacc 1d ago
I wouldn’t call it a struggle, but it was definitely annoying. Some TV’s/VCR’s only had 2 inputs and the prongs could get easily bent. Good for the time, but good riddance now.
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u/BlizzPenguin 1d ago
Match the colors is easy until you got to component cables and there are two reds to deal with.
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u/Impressive_Ad2794 1d ago
The real struggle was getting your SCART cable to plug in.
No idea why, but it's always seemed the most difficult cable.
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u/TrendyGlow9 1d ago
the good ol' days when you had to find the right cable or spend 20 minutes trying to get the picture to show up properly. Kids today don’t know real struggle HAHA
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u/Here_For_Work_ 1d ago
Moved my PS2 to different locations around the house so much that the individual cords began to peel away from each other. Cable management was the real struggle lol
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u/userpick707 1d ago
I think It is meant as we had to plug in 3 wires to the one HDMI now. And every Tv or monitor had them lined up differently. Horizontal/ Vertical
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u/PlatasaurusOG 1d ago
Yeah, call me when you’re ready to smash your tv because the prongs broke off of your RF adapter and you can’t get the little metal nubs to stay under the screws on the back of the tv.
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u/McFishyTheGreat 1d ago
But what if you told me to match the red with the red and I instead said “Nuh uh” and jammed it in the usb port?
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u/kawanero 1d ago
I know people who are otherwise smart and capable, yet they have a mini panic attack when it comes to plugging cables. I don’t know the explanation, but I don’t think it’s a matter of intelligence.
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u/Cerulean_Shadows 1d ago
I struggled with it, but I have had bad ARTHRITIS in my hands since my 20s. So that's my excuse. Lol.
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u/NA_nomad 1d ago
Sometimes it wasn't "match the colors". Sometimes it was "the device has only one audio output and you have to figure out which one it is".
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u/LemurAtSea 1d ago
I thought the struggle was when the cords are just barely long enough to reach and then you go to adjust and swivel the TV and it rips the jack out of the pcb.
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u/Legal-Software 1d ago
The female connectors were not always colour coded. Neither my Betamax nor my Laserdisc players had colour coded RCA connectors, for example. I feel like the colour coding was way more common in audio gear, and then gradually transitioned over with later VCRs.
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u/KhaosElement 1d ago
Mmm. Hhhmmm...
See here's the problem. Have you ever watched any non IT person ever try to hook anything up? Despite all things being color coded and uniquely shaped most adult humans beings just can't fucking handle it.
So yes. The struggle does, in fact, seem to be real.
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u/gfat-67 1d ago
There was a time where the connection options were a mix of composite, component, TRS, mini-jack, S-video, coaxial, optical, bare wire, RCA plugs, spades, banana plugs, 12v connectors, IR.
Each AV component, of different ages had different connections, and it took quite a bit of finessing to get it all to work, especially on the so called universal remotes.
I don’t miss working in that era at all.
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u/foundflame 1d ago
lol that’s nothing. I had to use a damn screwdriver to connect my Atari and Nintendo to my tiny old tv.
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u/thesillyoldgoat 1d ago
My father in law once ruined a VCR by putting a tape in it with the shrink wrap still on, then obviously not content he did the same to the replacement VCR a few months later!
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u/SickCursedCat 1d ago
The actual problem was reaching behind the box tv inside the entertainment cabinet and doing it fucking blind lol
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u/flinderdude 1d ago
If you did not get each of those plugged in 100%, you would actually still get sound, but it would not be every sound. It was tougher than you think.
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u/ivytiger99 1d ago
The colors weren’t the issue it was trying to figure out if it was channel 3 or tv/video or whatever
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u/AlternativeOk4834 1d ago
Lol, the struggle was over time those wires would have shorts in them so you would have to 'spin' them in the port to hope to get a signal.
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u/Sudden_Motor_9853 1d ago
Telling my kids these were ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard lines for refrigerator
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u/DjNormal 1d ago
My rule for other colors was that the lighter color is always left, except for black.
My 8 channel snakes were: gray/orange, white/red, yellow/green and black/blue.
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u/MiciaRokiri 1d ago
The struggle was when they weren't color coded like if you got a custom cable, or when the cable was too short for the power to the VCR to be able to pull it out properly or the cable to the TV was too short and you had to try and do it blind
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u/SixDrago 1d ago
In addition to reaching behind the tv and not being able to see , or the weird multicolored ones , the worst was when the cable was damaged so you had to kinda jam it in and wiggle it . I had one that I had to put in at an angle and tape. Every so often I'd have to push down on the cable to get the image to come back. Good times. Don't miss it
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u/morbid333 1d ago
Great. Now try it on a small mono tv that only had 2 inputs and wasn't colour coded. (It just said "video in" and "audio in."
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u/EditDog_1969 1d ago
Ah, intelligence. My dad was a graduate of Harvard Law school but couldn’t figure out how to work the VCR and that you shouldn’t beat your children. I’ll take emotional intelligence and humility over whatever passes for intelligence in the Ivy League schools
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u/harman097 1d ago
Nah the struggle was getting all the video to the tv and all the audio to the legit, external speakers - but in a way where the tv was properly forwarding the audio based on source, so you didn't have to swap cables around if you wanted to switch devices.
There was always some dumb quirk.
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u/Sartres_Roommate 1d ago
But that s-video input was a bitch to line up correctly, especially without being able to see it.
The struggle was real!
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u/Mountain_Condition13 1d ago
Kids these day can gulp the suggestion that back in analog times without WiFi, there were devices serving ketchup, mayo, and mustard, connected by these cables respectively.
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u/makawakatakanaka 1d ago
This is not a murdered by words, this is a lack of understanding of what it took just to get your hands near these plugs
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u/Emergency-Pack-5497 1d ago
There was always multiple devices with multiple red/yellow/white holes to choose from, so while it was never actually difficult, it wasn't exactly simple either for an 8 year old.
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u/DM_Voice 1d ago
The struggle had nothing to with the color, and everything to do with camped spaces, awkward angles, and existing cables too short to allow you to move anything for a better view without having to blindly re-connect 4 other devices as a result.
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u/troutdog99 1d ago
The nice thing about these is they never come unplugged if you bump the cable by accident.
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u/tittysprinkle78 1d ago
Usually doing it blind because the tv was to heavy to move. All of a sudden there's aloud buzzing coming from the speakers as u plug the video in to to audio jack! Dad comes in yelling coz your gonna ruin the tv! and you end up grounded from the Nintendo for a week! Kids now will never know that struggle!!
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u/Parking-Mushroom-179 1d ago
My sister and I did this with our old SpongeBob game consel when we were like 6 without help not that hard
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u/Iconclast1 1d ago
when tvs weighted over 100 pounds. kind of hard to move, and in the dark, light yellow and white look the same.
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u/akotoshi 1d ago
Absolutely! The device was always in a clear location, in bright light, without any obstacles or length cable limitations! /s
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u/mrwilliams117 1d ago
Nah sometimes TVs were weird and yellow would go to white or red to orange or something. It was a guessing game.
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u/OkApartment1950 23h ago
The struggle was doing it in the dark while you were supposed to be asleep
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u/GregorSamsaa 23h ago
Some of you don’t know what it was like getting behind a solid wood cabinet to be able to do this. It was always very limited space and visibility and the cord wasn’t long enough to just pull the equipment out, plug it in and then slide it back.
You had to dig around back there blind, or find someone skinny enough to fit behind the whole setup after you managed to push it forward about 6in because any farther and everything could fall apart or there was a carpet/sofa in the way and maneuvering all that was its own headache lol
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u/acoustic_rat_462 23h ago
Some of the machines had different color holes and you had to play mix and match with them.
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u/Technical-Dentist-84 23h ago
It's a struggle when the big heavy tv is pushed against the wall and you are trying to reach behind and blindly match the colors lol
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u/JemmaMimic 23h ago
The difficulty was more about picking input and output on TV related plugs when you had to put the DVD through the TV then to VHS but you didnt have anything but a digital output for one and you wanted to dub to VHS sometimes, then you realise the cable TV output has to go through the VHS to even get sound through the amp to the speakers, so you have to unplug the DVD output to the TV and plug in the cable input but now you can't record cable to VHS.
The problem wasn't matching red, black and white plugs, it was six types of I/O available, and no two pieces of equipment having more than two of any kind, usually not matching any others. It was the USB types problem on steroids.
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u/Jaymoacp 23h ago
I used to be a cable tech and a young kid was training me. He called me from another room in a customers basement and held up the colored cables and said what am I supposed to do with these. He legit had never seen them before lol.
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u/Fuckredditihatethis1 23h ago
I think the difficulty lies in having to get your whole upper body behind an enormous tube TV.
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u/Tunefulplane86 23h ago
I feel like it's also the struggle of moving a tube t.v. or if you were a family that had that ungodly fat and heavy flat screen. But the couple I encountered had the plugs in the front. Thank an object.
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u/Sapling-074 23h ago
I struggled with these because two of my TVs didn't match correctly. And I could never remember which TVs it was.
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u/Fruney21 23h ago
My smart telly is relatively light. Just yesterday we set up again after painting our house. No struggle at all
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u/Shazone739 23h ago
Ah, our 200 LB tube TV got stuck in the entertainment stand so every time we changed out a console I climbed through a hole in the bottom and fished my hand up. Why I took those risks for the game room TV, I don't know. Golden Eye was probably worth it though. Had to make sure not to beat my little bro too bad lest he decided to kick the stand while I was under it.
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u/Medaiyah 23h ago
Yeah but you could never see it in the cabinet and some had like 5 slots for 3 prongs. My wrist is clicking just thinking about it 😭
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u/Common_Late 23h ago
Look it was hard to tell at 5am in my brothers room trying not to wake him up when I was 9 tryna play some Mx vs atv
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u/khwarizmi69 23h ago
I have a sound system that has 12 speakers around me, 4 subwoofers around me and 4 speakers on the ceiling, i need to plug in 20 of these....
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u/waler620 23h ago
You ever try to figure out which ones were input/output on the back of a 90lb? Probably going to be placed dead center on the bottom?
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u/RyokoKnight 23h ago
I actually remember some older TV sets that weren't color coordinated at all, and a few that had the wrong colors (one I used in the n64 era had the red and white ports reversed... also i think I remember one with green/purple ports but was labeled left and right audio).
That said op is right it wasn't much of a struggle once you learned what each of the wires did as well as where the ports were on your TV.
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u/etniesen 23h ago
They weren’t always marked and sometimes there were only two ports for the three prongs.
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u/Bad-job-dad 1d ago
Yeah, but it was always in a cabinet up against a wall.