Tuesday, January 03, 2006

In With 2006!! Lets Get Our Geek On!!!

Greets All!
SjN here coming down from all the holiday parties that I was invited to. Right now I'm just being a slug and trying to recoop. I hope everyone had a great time over the holidays.

I sure did!

With all of the festivities out of the way, I can now turn my attention on to another passion of mine - TECH! Since I got my new iPod with Video for Christmas, I thought I'd post a quick tutorial on how to broadcast your video content through your TV. It can be a little tricky on your first go around. Bottom line, you don't need to spend big bucks on a special "Apple" connector!

Ingredients -
- First you need an iPod with video (obviously).
- Next you'll need an A/V cable. Be sure to get the 3 way plug
red/white/yellow RCA style on one end with the eighth inch 3.5mm
A/V style plug on the other. I picked one up for around 10 bucks
at my local radio shack. (see photo below)
- TV with RCA jacks (on front preferrably)

Setting Up The iPod -

TV Out:
Set up your iPod to ask you what TV settings you want each time you play a video. You do this by choosing Videos -> Video Settings from your main iPod menu. This screen offers three settings: TV Out, TV Signal and Widescreen. Select TV Out setting to 'ask'. Now, you don't have to do this but it makes it easier in the long run so you don't have to fumble around each time you want to play video on your TV.

TV Signal:
Simple, if you live in the USA or Japan you use NTSC. Europe and Australia use PAL. If your not sure where you live, you got bigger problems than not being able to display iPod video content on your TV!!

Widescreen:
Set this according to your TV type (4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios respecitvely)

Connecting Everything
Start by connecting the eighth inch plug on the A/V cable into your iPod headphone jack.
Now here is where the 'Gotchas' come into play. Apple decided to send all the video signals down the red plug. (Normally, video is sent down the yellow plug). The audio comes down the yellow and white plugs. SO, to make things easier I've documented the correct order:

  • Plug the red RCA plug into your TV's yellow RCA jack.
  • Plug the yellow RCA plug into your TV's white RCA jack.
  • Plug the white RCA plug into your TV's red RCA jack.

After making these connections, your ready to get down to business. On your iPod, get to a movie or video that you want to play. If you selected 'ASK' in the settings, your iPod will display whether you want TV ON or TV OFF. TV ON redirects your iPod's video output through the A/V cable and to your TV. TV OFF tells the iPod to display video on its own screen.

Select TV ON.

I use the volume on my iPod to adjust the levels and then can fine tune audio levels through my TV. What you should have next is this-



Well, hope you enjoyed my little tutorial! Have fun iPodding!!

SjN

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