Saki70, I still don't understand your being adverse to HDMI cables because of lightning strikes.
If you have a direct lightning strike, regardless of type of cable your components are at serious risk of damage. I'd imagine your best defense would be a combination of a whole-house protection with significant (>$10,000) warranty and unplugging all components during thunderstorms.
An HDMI cable is essentially a network cable. Think of it in the same terms as a Cat 6 data cable. It transmits data packets (which can be encrypted) that represent digital audio and video. A component video cable, by contrast, represents analog video data and nothing more.
HDMI is more future-proofed. Advances in high-definition video and audio will be transmitted over HDMI. Like it or not, HDMI is not only dominant in the present but also in the near-future.
If your concern is having one of them fail for some reason, then put two cables in when you install them. Most modern TV's actually have more than one HDMI input, so you can connect both to the television. The expensive part of installation is repairing the wall afterwards, so running two cables represents a negligible price increase.
It seems you've convinced yourself that component video cables are the solution to your problem, but I truly think you'll be better off in the future by using the data transfer mechanism of the future.
Michael
