Sunday, September 21, 2008

iPhone 2.1 kills 3rd party AV cable support for 3G

Recently I purchased a third party composite AV cable to use with my iPhone 3G, so I could watch my DVDs encoded with Handbrake while on the road, without having to take the DVDs with me. The cable worked perfectly, and the video quality was actually quite good on small to mid-sized TVs despite the fact that the source was composite video. The reasonable quality was likely because I use relatively high bitrate H.264, at over 2 Mbps for the video alone.

That all changed with iPhone 2.1. After the update, the cable no longer works. Apple has now locked out that cable. Well, not completely. The cable still does work at times, for about 10 seconds, before kicking us back out of the video. It's almost as if Apple is teasing us.


According to reports, iPhone 2.0 also removed compatibility of other 3rd party cables for owners of the original iPhone. Those cables worked perfectly with iPhone 1.1.4, but suddenly stopped working with 2.0.

Conveniently, Apple sells its own AV cables which are endowed with authentication chips . Sorry Apple, I'm not interested. $49 is simply horrendously overpriced, even if it does include an AC USB adapter (that I don't want). Maybe if I can find it cheaper I'll bite, but not at this outrageous price... especially when the $10 cable I had worked absolutely perfectly before.

6 comments:

Chance said...

Having the same problem. But I never tried it before 2.1, so I have never seen it work continuously. It works for me until the nag screen.

Anonymous said...

I bought a cable from APPLE (yes,, apple)- and you know what,,, it does not work with 2.1,, or else its my iphone, or the cable thats something wrong with ???

treycranson said...

Same issue. I bought a cheap cable on eBay and it works fine on my iPod Touch (1.1.4, not ready to upgrade), but my 1st gen iPhone which I upgraded 2.1 gives me that same error.

anon said...

Have you tried jailbreaking, and installing the tvout program?

Unknown said...

yes the tv out program on cydira works for the same time

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwVfO9mCG_Q

firmware 3.0 fix for aftermarket cables