Using a handycam (connected to the tv) to film the N800 screen would do the job too...
Hey .. I like it
Here's my TV-Out work around.. but only to access media on the memory card slots.. The removable media on the Nokia N800 (and I presume the same for other models) are recognized as standard Removable Drives.. as such.. I can plug it into the USB port of my DVD player (with USB Support) and access the memory card and play whatever files the DVD Player supports.. Divx, mp3s, etc.
I'm using the Philips 5982.. which is very affordable ($100 new / $40 used in Canada).. obviously not true tv-out and not a portable solution.. but a cheap means to access films/music from the N800.
Now if anyone could find a small portable DivX/MP3 player that supports USB Flash Drives with tvout... that would be neat.. yes, you could always just take out the SD cards too.. and plug it into a card reader
I'm surprised the N810 didn't include a tv-out.. personally, I think there's a larger market for portable media then GPS.. (ipod obvious example).. add a tv out to the next Internet Tablet and keep the two full size SDHC slots.. and you've got a winner.. IMHO..
There were TV out connectors on every cheap digital camera I've owned.. they're small too (the cameras). It works great, as many TVs have the yellow connector at the front. It would've been even better to have this on the internet tablet too. Definitely my #1 on the next-gen IT hardware feature list (after the all-high: Keep the two SD full-size slots).
Now if anyone could find a small portable DivX/MP3 player that supports USB Flash Drives with tvout... that would be neat.. yes, you could always just take out the SD cards too.. and plug it into a card reader
isn't an N800 or N810 with a usb host mode adaptor a portable media player which takes usb external storage?
Here is a link to an article about using a headphone jack as an IR transmitter. The theory should be about the same.
A composite (yellow RCA cable) video signal is composed of three signals, intensity, horizontal and vertical retrace. Horizontal signals are 5microsecond low-pulls and the vertical similar but about 450microseconds. The data in in the intensity signal, a wave between 0.5 and 2.0 volts transmitted between the retrace signals. The total bandwidth required is about 3.0MHz.
For those that are not engineers, an basic video signal is not that different from an audio signal. If someone wrote a program to output sound through the headphones at the specific signal to represent an video image, the TV would be able to interpret it without a problem.
The worst case scenario would be that you would only have mono output (left channel for video, right channel for audio). Additionally, you would have to output at a resolution the TV could handle (eg, NTSC 525/60 )
The cable itself is easy to custom make, even for a beginner, or readily available from any store for other devices (might have to remark the colors depending on the brand.
In summary, the reason other companies can do it is because it is really an easy problem to solve. Nokia should have don't this from the start. Any solution now will likely only work from that one application. It would have been nice to do it at the system level (like when you switch your laptop to external output)
Issue is NO tv out. what I mean is another cheap portable media player WITH tv out and supports usb removable drives or sdhc cards.
Clearly you are correct, a separate sd card reader with tv out would be a solution. I think we can all agree that the better solution would be to do it from the n8xx directly. That is what everyone really wants, right?
It is funny that this comes up today, after this thread. I think this could be a solution. It appears that it is a wifi dongle that connects to the tv and then allows you to send images over the handhelds 802.11 card directly to the dongle. Most likely the dongle is a little mini server and access point combo running something like VNC. Definitely a little more complex then a video out feature. Of course, with something like this you could not use wifi at the same time from web browsing on the TV screen.
What are the odds they will support the IT? Something tells me we will never see this.
Clearly you are correct, a separate sd card reader with tv out would be a solution. I think we can all agree that the better solution would be to do it from the n8xx directly. That is what everyone really wants, right?
Cheers,
The feature that would be awesome.. until then.. I'm settling using my fancy N800 as a SDHC card reader for my DVD Player with USB support to quickly access divx and mp3 files.. without needing to remove the card..
Cheasy.. but this way I can have portable media.. and then link the media to a tv.. obviously solution is limited to whatever the DVD/USB reader supports. A full blown computer with TV out would be nice.. but booting up is a pain.. and costlier than a $40 dvd player with usb support..
My money is the next Maemo tablet will have some form of TV out, but perhaps through a peripheral connector.. the reasoning would be they could then have cables based on preference.. such as RCA, hdmi, vga, etc.
What might be practical is the following:
1. 1/8 plugs with three stripes (two standard l/r audio, and one for video). these connectors are common enough.
2. A dedicated 1/8 plug just for an external mic option
One possible way might be to use a Neuros OSD. The device can connect to the N8x0 via usb or usb-ethernet (and possibly wifi at some point). A VNC client on that machine could display the Nokias screen.
There are also some small single board computers that can be equipped with a wifi minipci card and have vga out and/or composite/SVideo out... portable enough to put in a small bag, but then most of those machines are powerfull enough to do most things on their own. The Nokia would be a nice interface to control it though.
