In the living room, red, white, and yellow RCA jacks are the universal standard for input. If you've ever hooked up a cable box, a VCR, a DVD player, or any video game console such as an Xbox or PS2, you will find this 30-plus-year-old standard still going strong.

Cars have been equipped with speakers and sound systems since the dawn of AM radio. With the advent of navigation systems and DVD players, most high-end cars have an option for video screens as well--either in the dashboard, or folding down from the ceiling.

Figure 1. A/V inputs (RCA jacks): Wouldn't it be nice if car manufacturers just did the usual and put these jacks in your car?

If you have a factory DVD system in your car, you're probably in luck. Some of these systems include RCA input jacks right on the front of the DVD player, so you can plug in your video game device, digital camera, portable video player, or whatever else you have.

However, the front navigation screen presents more of a problem. Because they don't want to raise the ire of lawmakers, U.S. cars manufacturers don't allow video input to the front screen--even if the car is parked.

Even if you don't need the video, chances are you would like to plug arbitrary devices into your car. Perhaps you need to play cassette tapes but your car only has a CD player. And perhaps you have one of the hundreds of portable music players that isn't an iPod. Well, most of the cars have some way to smuggle sound into the stereo--if you can figure out how.

I'm going to skip the usual cop-out solutions of FM modulators and tape adapters, and point you in the direction of getting a clean audio and video signal into your car.

Figure 2. Fold-out in-dash video screen

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