A few weeks back, I was given an iPod with Video. It’s a huge step up from the iPod Mini that I had before – not least because of it’s video capabilities (which mean that I can store a few films on the iPod for playback in hotels/planes/trains etc. but I’ve been struggling to get it to output a decent signal to my TV. Apple sells an iPod AV cable to take the 3.5mm headphone socket output to red/yellow/white RCA (phono) sockets but I have a perfectly good cable that came with my Sony video camera so I wanted to avoid spending £15 on the Apple cable. After trying the well-publicised hack for using a normal cable with the connections swapped around I had a picture, but no matter how I tried it was always black and white (ironically I could get some faded colours with NTSC, even though my TV is PAL!).

Then last night I was in Tesco, where I visited the “Apple Store” (note the quotes as the Tesco Apple Store is not a patch on the real thing) and picked up the Apple iPod AV cable. Not only is is a much better quality product (the cables may not be as good as the Cambridge Audio interconnects that I use for my audio-visual equipment but they are a lot better than the thin black leads supplied as standard with most equipment) but it cured my black and white issues – I can now watch films (and video podcasts) in colour without the hassle of connecting a computer to the TV.