Don’t let streaky colors ruin your DVD experience

Everybody loves an easy solution to their technology problems. Like this one.

I received a call from a woman who told me that she had just moved into a new house. She went on to explain that she and her husband hooked up all of the components to their television in their new house but were seeing red streaks across the screen whenever they watched a DVD.

She also mentioned that her satellite programming on her television looked just fine and did not have the same red streaks as the DVD player.

I immediately had a gut feeling what the problem was because I had done the same myself several times.

But before I get to the solution, I want to give kudos to this woman for checking another video signal, in her case the satellite, before calling me. Many times when working through technical problems it is important to eliminate what the problem isn't before you can determine what the problem is.

My first step was to ask the woman if she was using a component cable to connect the DVD player to the television. When I sensed her hesitation I explained that a component cable had three connectors on each end—one red, one green and one blue. She verified that this was the case at which point I told her the problem was probably due to a crossed cable with two of the colors. I told her to check both the connection to the DVD player and the connection to the television.

Sure enough, two of the connectors were matched up with the wrong colors. She reversed the cables and all was well again.