Hooking up my RCA RPJ116 projector to my iPhone and Apple TV

What a boring title.

Warning this post has tons of unimportant details, but what can I do?


Alright, I know I haven't posted a blog in a bit, but meh..... Life happens. A few months ago ( which I mean like a year ago) we bought the RCA projector on sale.

Its a very inexpensive, no frills type of projector. But the price was right and we had been talking about getting one. The thing we liked was we could hook up our Apple TV to watch movies during the summer. ( Spoiler alert: we didn't watch any movies outside this summer, the reason for this blog) When we got it home, we hooked it up to the Apple TV and we were excited, because it was 'working', ie we could see the movie but not hear it. One issue with this projector, there is so little about it online and the manual leaves lots to be desired. So I couldn't figure out how to get the sound to work. We packed it up and pretty much forgot about it. Then I went on a business trip, we moved to a new house etc.. Well we finally decided to pull out the projector because my husband was like we could have a movie playing at our daughter's birthday party. oooookay.

This seems like a cool idea and I'm like YEAH! One problem, my in-laws do not have wi-fi ( we don't talk about it, its just how it is LOL. I swear there is a point to this post!!! ) So we would have to use a phone to play the movie. NO BIG DEAL right? Um very big deal. I still hadn't figured out why I had no sound on the Apple TV so still have to figure that out. 

I decide to spend the next few days troubleshooting the issue. I used to be in tech support. This is my area, I CAN DO THIS! So I bring out the projector, I hang out in the loft and I connect the Apple TV to the projector. I figure I'll start there ( plus I have no way to connect the phone to the unit). You can picture it, I have it on the floor, with all these cords connected because I'm too lazy to move it to the proper place. I'm googling like a mad person because I'm like how do I get sound. Now you can find directions for sound on devices like PS4, Roku, etc.. But nothing for apple products. I finally figure out you have to go into the settings of the Apple TV and change the sound to very basic sound. Then it will play. Mind you I did this on my older gen device, not the newest one. So success I can get it to play the movie AND the sound from the projector. 

Now this does me no good for the party, so I realize I need to get an HDMI to lightning connector. And I have no time for Amazon, so I go to Best Buy and grit my teeth and fork over the $50 for the stupid apple brand connector. I'm still annoyed by it if you couldn't tell. So I get home, I connect the phone and attempt to play Coco on the projector from iTunes and Netflix. No sound. F.M.L.  I'm about to return this $50 connector and say too bad. But I realize I can't. I should mention the speaker worked on other apps so clearly there is an issue with these particular apps. 

As I stated earlier, Google only gave me a few options and none of them relate to the iPhone or Apple products in general, so I'm flying blind. I mess around and realize I can get the movie to play in Spanish or in English with Audio description, but not just regular English. I also can get a much older movie ( Stand and Deliver) to play with zero problems. So I've pinpointed that like the Apple TV it was the sound was too advanced for my basic projector. Alright, I'm getting somewhere. I hop on chat with Apple to see if there is a setting I am missing. I'll spare you even more details, but essentially I got in a fight with the Senior Tech who said it was a Copy Right issue, and I was like:

But he was stuck on this, so in the end he was useless. Back to Google I go. I find a video where a lady hooked up a bluetooth speaker to a transmitter to play sound from her laptop. But she did not say how she did this. 

Bluetooth direct from the phone or device does not work, because it is already playing using the HDMI cord, but the sound is too good for this super basic projector. In the video mentioned above, the lady had a bluetooth transmitter, but again no idea on how to connect it. I realize I remember seeing a bluetooth transmitter at Was-Mart a while back and think I'm already $50 in lets see what else I can do. I head to the store and find one for a whopping $8.88. YAAAAAS. 

I'm still unsure how to get the sound out, but I figure I can do this. I take it home, charge it and try again. I figure out you need to connect the bluetooth transmitter to the speaker directly. Not the projector. Then when you are playing the movie, you will click on the audio options and one will be the bluetooth symbol and the device, click and BOOM sound. 

I didn't take pictures of the exact screen, my apologies, and I'm mostly writing this up for people who might be searching for advice and couldn't find anything using google,  such as me. And considering Apple won't have much information for you and will refer you back to RCA or if you get a very rude unknowledgeable agent you'll be more frustrated. I have some pictures of where you would click within Netflix app, but not what you would see. 

In this picture you will click the box highlighted in the corner. Fun Fact, Netflix can tell when you are taking a screenshot or screen record and blacks out the movie/TV show. 

In this picture, any devices you can stream to will be shown. When it is connected via HDMI it should say dock connected and if there is a bluetooth device available it will show as well. Clicking on the bluetooth device won't disconnect you from cord connection, just allow the sound to play to the bluetooth connected device. 

On most devices there are advanced sound settings, but on phones there usually are not. So you will need the bluetooth transmitter and external speaker, but after that. Golden. 

Here is a short video of the what the speaker looks and sounds like connected. This was taken during the day, so the video quality is crap, but you only need to focus on the speaker part.