What will give me better composite? Apple TV 1st gen or Raspberry Pi?

Help and Support
1

I’m planning on transferring some 4:3 movies on to VHS for a personal video project I am working on. I have the tapes and the vhs players unfortunately I have no way of getting that footage to VHS via composite.

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 but no apple tv first gen but I know composite on Raspberry Pi isn’t the greatest anyway. With that said I was thinking on grabbing an apple tv and run OSMC and see if that gets me better composite.

I saw a post on the wiki for 720p or 1080p on apple tv and on here one line in the code Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Disable”
EndSection

Caught my attention because I believe if I enable it and set quality to SD480p I could get a 480i composite signal from the Green component jack.

Wanted to see if anyone has had an experience with either or and if I can get composite of the apple tv.

I know I can buy a hdmi to av adapter but I’ve had bad luck with using them as they have all died on me. I do have a a computer with an older AMD gpu that actually can do composite out but I don’t have the adapter to get it to work.

Worst case I can just try using the Pi again.

This wouldn’t be used as a daily driver its only purpose would be to get high quality composite into a VHS player.

2

Assuming you’re talking about an Apple TV 1st generation, don’t buy one. The hardware is almost 15 years old.

You will find better hardware to meet your requirements.

3

Yeah I was referring to the first gen apple tv and yeah its very old. I’ll edit my post but the only purpose it would serve is a means of getting high quality composite into my VHS player for recording to tape. I decided to look up and adapter for the gpu I mentioned a pc I have has and I may be able to get composite out of it after all!

4

Are you sure the composite on the VHS is an in rather than an out? It’s been a very long time but I seem to recall that most VHS had their own RF tuner inside so would typically record straight from their inbuilt tuner rather than from an external source.

7

Most VHS players have RF in as well as composite as well. I have two consumer players but only one of them has composite in so from what I understand its just not common. I’m sure its not hard to convert rf to composite and vice versa so if I have to use it I just have to use a high quality cable.