Sunday, February 7, 2010

X-Box 360 AV Cable Repair

So my roommate and I enjoy playing xbox together with two xboxes and two TVs side by side. We ran into a little problem with our setup today. In our living room, we usually have my HD TV setup, and when we play xbox, my roommate brings in his old analog TV in from his bedroom. Since he keeps his xbox in the living room, this means he ends up plugging in and out his AV cables quite a few times a week.

Well, today he plugged his AV cables into his TV, but the video wouldn't appear. Eventually, we narrowed the problem down to a bad connection on the cable. The inner tip of the yellow video cable was barely connected. Sure enough, after some playing around with it, it just fell right off.

Something is fishy about these cables. I know it's hard to see in the picture, but can you make out that little piece of metal on the left side of the broken tip? Well, that's the only actual piece of metal in the tip. I expected the whole thing to be metal, but that's not the case. That white area seems to be some kind of plastic. In other words, these cables are cheap pieces of junk.

Anyway, here's the fix. Since my roommate has a low-def TV, he doesn't need the three other connections on the AV cable. Those are only used for high-def TVs. The cable might have been under warranty still, but we wanted to play right now, not in 6-8 weeks.

All I did was cut off one of the extra connectors, cut off the bad connector, and splice it back together. It was a pretty easy process. Just strip back the insulation and twist together the outer cable. There will be some inner cable within more insulation. Just cut that back and twist it together too. A little electrical cable will give it some support.

Here it is finished. It's not pretty, but it worked fine.

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