Blu Rage

So I bought a blu ray player for myself while I was Christmas shopping. It goes with the HD television I finally bought a year and a half ago.

So I look through the instructions today when I finally got around to hooking it up. The instructions said I needed a component cable instead of the standard cables they give you for a standard TV hook up.

That's nice. So I head out to Staples and buy the cable for about $14.00. I come home, call up all my old Army knowledge of signal flow, and hook up the cables.

It didn't work. Nothing. So I kept reconfiguring the cables on component 1 and component 2, rechecking the connections, and turning the various devices on and off in various orders.

It didn't work.

So I resort to my television manual. I actually have the CD for that and load it up. Huh, the manual only shows how to hook up a blu ray player using HDMI cables. I chose component cable because I don't have a good enough TV to make the HDMI cable worth it. Could it be that I simply can't use the component cable?

So I'm off to Staples. The young man thinks it is quite possible that I can't use component cables since the TV is older than the blu ray player. So they exchange my cable for the twice as expensive HDMI cable.

So I go home, hopeful.

I hook up the HDMI cable and ... voila! The player works. I popped in a DVD (No blu ray disks yet) and it works just fine.

It took me 2-1/2 hours to do something that should have taken ten minutes if the blu ray player had come with the HDMI cable. It would have taken me but a half hour to set up if the instructions had only warned me that component cables might not work on all TVs--and maybe had a list of the TVs that could use component cables or needed HDMI cables.

But at least it is done. Well, now I need to hook up the old DVD/VCR to my standard TV upstairs.