At MacDevCenter, Erica Sadun teaches a trick for Video iPod users on using normal A/V-to-RCA cable to playback video on TV, without fork out a fortune to buy the special Apple video cable. Erica figured out that the signals of audio and video are not coming from the default wires (i.e. yellow being the video signal, and red & white being audio signal. Apple has swapped the wiring to have red RCA wire to deliver the video signal:

… Here’s where it gets a little tricky. In order to make your TV play back the iPod signal, you’ve got to redirect the outputs. You can’t just plug the yellow RCA plug into the yellow RCA jack and the red into the red or the white into the white. No. Those geniuses at Apple send the video signal over the red RCA output. (Normally it arrives on yellow.) The sound comes through the white and yellow plugs.

I ended up going to an Apple store and testing this on iPod after iPod. They all have this quirk. It was intentional. But hey, it’s proprietary. Woohoo. So here’s what you have to do:

* 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.

Nice hack to save some bucks for other goodies. Read the following link for the full how-to.

Getting the Video out of Your New iPod–for Cheap! – [MacDevCenter]