I have a Chromecast attached to my TV in the living room, and it’s great. I am getting an Amazon FireStick as a late Christmas gift (or a hand-me-down Roku, it hasn’t arrived yet) that I want to use on the kitchen tv, or the bedroom one. But I’ve just realized that neither of those TVs are HDMI-ready. Some perfunctory research by me, who knows next-to-nothing about this stuff, leads me to believe that I can use an HDMI-to-AV adapter to connect it. But since Best Buy doesn’t carry them in stores, and Radio Shack says they have been out of stock for weeks, I have to order one from Amazon, and I want to be sure this is going to work before I do. Both clerks were way too busy with other confused middle-aged women to answer my questions, so I turn to the experts of The Dope to advise me.
I am pretty sure all of these devices are HDMI-only, partly because they are tiny devices without a lot of room for connectors, and partly to maintain DRM. There are NO HDMI converters that will work with any HDCP-encrypted signal. You might be able to get some channels, but not all and possibly not any.
I had to finally get rid of a very nice Panasonic plasma and a beautiful Denon amp because they lacked HDMI. No way around it if you want to bring your video viewing into the 21st century.
You can do it but it requires a converter and not just an adapter. The results may not be perfect and the cost-effectiveness is debatable but it will work if you get something like this (read the reviews; it is more general purpose than the product name suggests).
What Roku is it? Mine is the first generation and it has RCA jacks on the back. I have one TV using that. I’m not sure if the newer Rokus have them or not but it’s probably on the Roku website. I don’t know about firesticks.
The first and second generation have outputs other than HDMI but Roku 3 requires them unless you are willing to use a converter like I linked to above.
Don’t know which Roku…the FireStick is probably what I’ll be using. And the one linked above is the converter I was looking at, though from a different suppler, so I didn’t see those reviews, which seem to indicate it will work. Sorry I used the wrong term.
Are you sure about that? Certainly some converters won’t work with HDCP encrypted sources, but in looking around I can find ones that at least claim to work with HDCP, like the HDFury Nano GX. I’ve never used it but it seems reasonably legit.
Maybe something has changed in the last year, but I looked high and low for an HDMI converter that would preserve HDCP and couldn’t find one that didn’t have a lot of unhappy users. Allowing HDCP to stop with a “gray market” device and pass along component video and 5.1 audio would be a license to steal every protected disc and signal out there, so I can’t believe there is any legit/legal/quality device that does such available.
My Roku 2 has only HDMI, BTW.
The devices that are designed to plug into an HDMI port are probably even more difficult to muck with, since they have to be able to draw power from the connection and a converter/adapter/pirate box may not do so.
Well, I have little doubt that these guys only survive by flying under the radar. And as best I can tell, their company does still receive various forms of legal harassment, though apparently to not much effect.
As a practical matter, HDCP is utterly broken and has been for years. The master keys were leaked in 2010, so anyone with even moderate resources has already had “license” to steal every disc and signal out there. The only result of HDCP’s continued existence is to frustrate otherwise law-abiding folk like the OP.
I’m not in any way defending HDCP or DRM. It’s just a fact of modern video interconnection, and like everything else, if you want to fork around with grayware and hacks it can be gotten past.
I want my video stack to work when I turn it on… not be one more thing I have to hand-crank, patch, use workarounds, etc. So upgrading to AV equipment from the last decade was not a hard decision to make. (For that matter, I have a small TV/DVD player that has an HDMI input, and it’s nearly ten years old.) Trying to make really old video gear work with modern standards, nanny protection or not, is a pointless exercise in frustration. As stable as the line of sophistication was for decades, the last five-ten years have completely turned old standards useless. Time to move up.