What Is Red White Yellow Cable Called?

Last updated: October 2026

🕒 2 min read

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What is the red white and yellow cable called? Monoprice, a cable seller, calls it a composite AV cable. This article follows two of its guides: AV Cable Colors Explained, and Composite Video Cables: What They Are and How They Work. We haven’t tested any cable or TV.

What Is Red White Yellow Cable Called? The Composite AV Cable

Monoprice’s color guide calls the yellow, red and white bundle the composite AV cable setup, and says these cables are sometimes called RCA cables, after the connector type. Its composite guide uses “composite video cable” for the yellow cable alone. “Composite” refers to the picture signal, which that guide says combines brightness, color and sync data in one channel.

What Do the Yellow, Red and White Plugs Carry?

Monoprice says the yellow plug carries the composite video signal, the full picture on one channel. Red carries right-channel audio and white carries left-channel audio. Because the yellow plug carries only video, a picture with sound typically needs all three.

What Is Red White Yellow Cable Called, and Why Does the Picture Look Soft?

Monoprice’s composite guide says this format is standard definition only: around 480i on NTSC systems and 576i on PAL. Because brightness and color share one channel, they interfere with each other. The guide says that causes soft edges, color bleeding and dot crawl, and that fine detail and fast motion can look smeared.

The color guide adds that the softness is more visible on larger screens, and the composite guide says upscaling a 480i signal to a large 4K screen tends to look poor.

Why Does Component Video Also Have a Red Plug?

Monoprice’s color guide says a component set uses five connectors: green for brightness, blue and red for the two color-difference signals, plus separate red and white plugs for audio. That means two red plugs that look identical and do different jobs. The guide advises checking the label on each device port.

What These Guides Don’t Cover

Both guides come from one cable seller, so they’re a single source, not two independent ones, and neither shows a date or author. We’ve used their explanations only, not their product promotion. This article doesn’t cover which ports a given TV has, how to connect a device, or which cable to buy.