Okay, That Works Too

A couple years ago my sister bought a new car with a USB input on the stereo.  That year I made her a couple of USBs for Christmas.  They hold like 5 days of music if you fill them up.  Mrs. NoCo has one in her car too (and I guess I do too).

So this weekend my sister bought a new receiver for her home stereo and, surprise, it has a USB input too.  These things are becoming ubiquitous.

So she says to me she says, can you make me some more USBs?

Sure sez I. 

But I have a small problem -- I don't have a convenient way to play them.  I mean I can play them on my computer, or in my car, or on the dorky tabletop stereo we bought for moving, but I didn't have a USB player for my stereo.

No, that's not quite true.  I bought one a couple years ago but could never get it to work.  It's a general purpose "media player" which does USB and SD cards and micro-SD cards, and has outputs for HDMI and composite video.  I plugged the audio connections from the video output into my stereo but could never get it to work.  I gave up after a couple days, figuring I'd get back to it.

That was, uh, probably 2019.

So I pulled it out again today to give it another twirl.  Still no workee, but reading through the manual you need to do some setup first, and to do setup it has to be connected to a video screen so you can see what you're doing.

Hey, I realized, I have a portable DVD player I bought a couple years ago that I don't use either.  Maybe if I hooked up the USB player through the DVD player, it would allow me to see the menus and get the thing set up.

But whoa, what's this?  The DVD player has a USB input too.

Forget the USB player, grandad, and just attach the DVD player to my stereo!  Found an open input, and power, and bam -- works like a champ.

The blue menu screen even matches the color of my other components.

So now my stereo has a video screen on it (flam dancey!)  Hmmm, I wonder what else I can do with this setup?

Wah ho, I can think of one thing.  I can play concert DVDs on my stereo now.  I have several.

Wow, I even found the remote control for it.  Now I don't have to get up off my fat ass.

DVD player plays CDs too.  Sounds good in fact.

Dunno when I'll use this but it's nice to know.  The screen does not, as I'd hoped, display track information or display the album cover.  That's still on my wishlist.