Question about cabling up scart leads

[Jux]

We have an oldish TV with no freeview so we have a freeview box, and a DVD player/recorder with an internal freeview box (or maybe two). There is currently a wormery of cables connecting everything. A friend picked up a kind of scart hub type thing from a chap in the market (we know him, his stuff is 2nd hand but has always been working and OK so far, he checks it all), which she gave to me.

The 'hub' is a scart cable, but one end has a box with 3 scart sockets, labelled DVD, video and Aux. It also has Pure AV by Belkin written on it, but I can't find an image or I would post one.

Currently:

TV aerial cable no. 1 goes from the wall to the Freeview box
TV aerial cable no. 2 goes from Freeview box to the DVD player/recorder
TV aerial cable no. 3 goes from DVD to TV.

Scart cable no. 1 goes from Freeview to TV.
Scart cable no. 2 goes from Freeview to DVD.

There is no o/p scart socket on the TV, btw.

This is the only way I can get the whole lot working, though it's not perfect as you can't watch TV via the DVD player's internal Freeview, only record and playback. That's OK, we can live with it.

If I were to use this hub thing, any idea on how to cable it all up? The hub doesn't indicate i/p or o/p, so I am assuming that the scart plug on one end is input and goes into the tv, and the sockets on the other end are all inputs from DVD, etc. Would I put the o/p from the set top box into Aux? What goes into video?

Will this at least rid me of the extra aerial cables (which I can use elsewhere)?

Oh Yes! I thought I remembered you - Elephant hawk moth caterpillar!

I can't really help you with any great confidence. I thought scart cables looked after whether in- or out-put automatically.

I don't want to be rude, but would it not be possible to upgrade to a more modern TV? That would have everything built in, and solve all the difficulties I think. Prices are coming down at the moment as dealers are trying to cash in on the World Cup.

"ao" (Appliances online) are now doing TV; we got Beko washing machine and fridge from them just before Christmas, and they (from our experience, at least) have exceptional customer service. Our old fridge packed up just before Christmas, and "ao" literally delivered the new one on Christmas Eve!

Is it a flat screen TV, and what size? (Surely, you aren't still on a CRT set are you?)

If you don't get better replies, I'll try and come back sometime and work it out (probably have to draw a diagram to get my head around it!)

Meanwhile, whet your appetite here: ao.com/product/tx32as500b-panasonic-as500-series-tv-black-29052-108.aspx

Assuming you only watch Freeview and DVDs you don't need the aerial cable from the DVD player to the TV. You could take that out of your current setup and everything would still work.

I think you've got this product. The idea is you plug it into the back of your TV. You then connect a SCART cable from the Freeview box to the Aux socket and another from your DVD to the DVD socket. The video socket is for a video cassette recorder which you don't have so ignore that. You would still need aerial cables 1 and 2. If you ever watch analogue TV stations (not sure why you would - they should all be on Freeview) you would still need aerial cable 3.

It won't work if you have the DVD and the Freeview box on at the same time. So if you want to record something on the DVD while watching something else you may need to disconnect the DVD from the hub.

If the DVD player is capable of letting you watch one channel while recording another you could simplify your setup by getting rid of the Freeview box. In that case you would just need an aerial cable from the wall to the DVD and a scart cable from the DVD to the TV. You wouldn't need the hub at all in that situation.

prh47 that's what I've got, how clever of you - I couldn't find a pic but I think I was searching for the wrong thing anyway!

I will disconnect the aerial and see what happens, but rl is intruding again, so I'll have to do it later. If I don't need the adapter there I can probably use it elsewhere.

We do have a machine (it used to belong to a tv studio) which will copy videos to dvds, and I want to do that at some point so may shove that into the set up. (We do also have an old vhs machine.....).