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I went and got an Ouya. I meant for it to be a replacement for our current media streaming device, a wdtv. I was going to do a writeup on how that went and what I thought of the system.

It turns out that our TV is really dumb. It’s one of those old “HD ready jobbers”. It can display a 720p signal pretty well and, aside from some minor overscan issues, does a respectable job with all the current game consoles. It doesn’t have any hdmi ports, but it does have a DVI port and I have an adapter. All good. Nope.

It will not play nice with the Ouya. The Ouya doesn’t output analog audio at all. Not even through a headphone jack. My fault really, I’m usually very good at sniffing out these weird hardware incompatibilities. I was blinded by the cheap price and potential for fiddling.

So, to make up for this shortcoming, I purchased an hdmi to component converter. It works fantastically with every device I connect it too, except the Ouya.

I feel like this is the point where most folks would pack it in and figure this junk just can’t work together, because either it is broken, or the people who made said junk, are bad, vindictive, people.

I have an uncommon tolerance to hardware jank. I will mess with something to get it running properly, or at least acceptably, far longer than I really should. Sometimes this pays off, sometimes it doesn’t.

At this point I have a small grey box that will send out picture or sound, but never both together. I have come up with a plan that involves an hdmi splitter and some RCA Y adapters.

wish me luck.