SOLUTION: NTSC/PAL Video Glasses on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

[Joccalor]

It seems that quite a few people buy the NTSC/PAL video glasses and plug them into their Raspberry Pis or other devices expecting them to work and are disappointed when nothing shows up but a black screen or a distorted blinking screen. I definitely fell into this camp. After messing around with it for a while though, I figured out what was going on. The glasses are not defective, but rather the TRRS pinout for the glasses is different from the Raspberry Pi 2.

To figure out if the pinout is the source of your problems, boot up your Pi with the glasses plugged in, but don't plug the 3.5 mm TRRS connector in all the way; insert the first three segments (the tip and the two rings), and leave the sleeve (the metal connector at the base of the plug) out of the jack. You may have to futz with it a little and wait a second for the video to kick in, but then you should see the startup screen for you Pi in full, glorious 320 x 240 resolution. (NB, if this doesn't solve your problem, it's possible that you'll need to reconfigure the Pi's settings. Open up /boot/config.txt on your Pi's microSD card and check your settings. For example, if "hdmi_force_hotplug=1" isn't commented out (i.e. doesn't have a # in front of it), then your Raspberry Pi is only using the HDMI port for video, and not composite video.)

If partially inserting the connector solved your problem, then you can move on to a more permanent solution. You'll need to buy a 3.5mm male-to-female 4-pole cable, cut open the tubing, and reconnected some wires inside. If the cable you buy is like mine, then you'll find a white, a red, a green and a black wire inside. The white and red are left and right audio, and they connect to the tip of the plug and the first ring (furthest from the base of the plug). You don't need to worry about these unless you want to swap your audio channels. The black and green wires are for video and ground. These are the two that need to be swapped. They connect to the second ring (closer to the base of the plug) and the sleeve. Go ahead and clip them, strip them, swap them and secure them with heat shrink wire wrap or whatever you've got. Now you should be able to use your video glasses with the TRRS connector plugged in all the way!

[Alexabix]

Please correct me if I've misunderstood the proposed solution but would a 3.5mm 4 pole female to 3.5mm 3 pole male TRRS adapter achieve the same result?

For example:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharplace-Angl ... ole+Female

[Joccalor]

Ha! Good call. Yes, I suppose that would be an easier solution ;-)