I finally got around to connecting my iPhone to a big screen TV to see what a movie would look like. To connect the two I got the Composite AV cable from Apple. This AV cable has the yellow video plug, and red and white plugs for audio. It also has a USB cable. I have been using this cable for awhile now in my car – the USB cable goes to a 12Volt power connector and the Red and White go to the MP3 outlet. This allows me to play music from the iPhone (iPod section) to the car stereo.
You would need to have a TV with composite in – Composite has a yellow cable for video and a red and white cable for audio. The movie played on the iPhone looks really good on a big screen tv. I would guess that movies from the iPad will also play through this or a similar cable.
One thing to be aware of – if you connect the USB cable to a computer to power the iPhone it will bring up iTunes and attempt to synch to the computer. Also if you do anything on the computer that brings up iTunes the movie play back will stop.
Another interesting thing is the movie will NOT play on the iPhone screen – when this cable is hooked up. Things like You Tube videos and camera roll videos do play through this cable to a TV but not on the iPhone screen at the same time. If there is a way to show whatever is on the iPhone screen – such as games or photos I am not seeing how to make that work. Everything other than movies comes up on the iPhone screen.
Apple apparently has a way to do this – when they do presentations they show them on a big screen hooked up to an iPhone. The big screen shows games, and iPhone screens. Anyone know how Apple does this?
Oh course the obvious question is can one record from this cable – the answer is yes if you have some sort of composite to digital converter. I was able to play the movie on the iPhone through my digitizer and record the movie on my MAC into iMovie.
If you want to watch a movie on an iPhone – including You Tube or from your camera roll I find you cannot have the AV cable connected. So if you are watching movies on your iPhone and want to externally power the phone – you will need to use the regular USB cable to a power source. Apparently when you plug the AV cable in the iPhone the output video goes to this cable and switchs off the iPhone screen. All you get on the iPhone is the title screen of the movie.
It will be very interesting to see how the iPad works with the iPad iWork software.
Tags: composite video and iPhone, iPad, iPhone, iphone AV cable
