I decided to buy the composite AV cable for the iphone today on a whim thinking it only works with the ipod videos... I was pleasantly surprised to find that YOUTUBE outputs to TV also!

It helps justify the $50 purchase a little... also it comes with a power adaptor too.

Pretty cool.

Can you, or anyone, add to to this review? I've been really curious how well that things works.

How does the image look when stretched to a TV screen? I bet the low-quality youtube stuff looks horrible!

The more info about how you like it the better.

Exactly which cable did you buy? Link please. Thanks.

I bought the Apple Composite AV Cable for the iPhone
http://tinyurl.com/2aryje
they also have a Composite version for the same price of $49

The output seems to look better out of a regular SD TV but is passable on a HD TV.
The blacks look a little milky and artifacty on an HD TV. SD seems to hide these flaws better. I'll do more tests tomorrow but I noticed that YouTube seems to load an H.264 mpeg when on WIFI and a low resolution FLV when on EDGE... this will greatly affect quality of the output. The difference between the formats is much more noticeable on a TV than on the iPhone. So I advise being on WIFI when using the TV out function on YouTube.

The quality of the YouTube videos look like badly encoded VCDs with alot of compression... don't expect much. Remember... YouTube videos are inherently 320X240 when encoded in either the FLV or H.264 format so there's no way it can look better that how they look when you make them full screen on your PC.

iPod videos look great. I have a couple of videos I encoded myself at 640X480 and they look pretty clear on the SD TV. I'll try to buy an iTunes video tomorrow and test it. I am almost sure it will look better.

You can switch the output for 4:3 or 16:9 widescreen in the iPod settings.

The cable is about 6 feet long so it conveniently connects to the back of your TV with enough length to crawl it to the front. It also comes with a power adapter so you can charge you phone as you watch stuff on TV. Pretty neat design... it's white with brushed metal heads for the composite tips.

Like I said.. it's a bit pricey but I think the happy undocumented surprise that YouTube works on it makes it worth the cost.

I'll do more test tomorrow. Good night.

I did more test on the cable... it plays movies downloaded from itunes beautifully!
YouTube video quality depends on how you are connected to the interent (wifi or edge) and how the video was encoded by uploader.

Over all the cable seems to work better on SD TVs. The artifacts and the milky blacks are more apparent on HD.

What do you see, if no video is playing - is it the iPhone Desktop or any application? Do you have to switch into a full screen mode. Is there a rotary-detection or any more settings available? And is it possible to view Websites over the TV Out?

I've found a Video with the iPod touch and TV-Out, is it similar with the iPhone TV-Out?

Here the Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIeiBf33cQA

It works exactly like that iPod Touch in the video.
When you have the iPhone connected to the TV and click a movie to play (either in YouTube or iPod) a dialog box pops up and asks if you want to display it on TV.

Upon clicking yes, the video plays on TV... The iPhone does not play the video while it's being outputed to TV.

Unfourtunately, the cable does not work with the coverflow or the web or the springboard. It only works with Video output.

Maybe someone will figure out a hack to make it work like the one Steve used in his presentations.

You don't have to buy a 50 dl cable. Just use a regular cable and try connecting the rca jacks in different places. i can't remember the combination.

play along.

No, I think the iPhone sends the video via USB which is why a normal RCA cable won't work...

Originally Posted by jflc9

You don't have to buy a 50 dl cable. Just use a regular cable and try connecting the rca jacks in different places. i can't remember the combination.

play along.

Yeah, the old iPod Video AV cables don't work with the iPhone. The third "ring" on the 1/8" minijack is used for the headphone microphone.