Viral hoax in waiting or brilliant marketing display of the iPhone’s hidden capabilities?

Watch and you decide. Maybe we are just one in an early list of sites to be duped by this bizarrely intriguing YouTube video, but we still couldn’t help but watch it several times.

In a two-minute YouTube video posted on Sunday evening, BITcrash44 claims to have added a transmitter to his iPhone that allows him to take over any video screen.

Imagine the possibilities…..”People of Earth, I am your god and master”.




  1. Thomas says:

    Great, now if they just take the suck out of iTunes.

  2. MikeN says:

    Don’t you have a different picture you put with such posts?

  3. Breetai says:

    Now that’s a skill required by every super-villain. Watchin you buddy….

  4. ctlaurin says:

    He does kind of seem like the laughing man from Ghost in the Shell. Not just cause he’s asian, but because of the screen hacking and the jacket.

  5. The DON says:

    Great call on the Ghost in the Shell reference.

    This also showed up on Hackaday, where someone quickly debunked it.
    1) Video out of a headphone jack – Fail
    2) The ‘video repeater’ is actually the guts from a ‘Digipower JS1-V3 cell phone USB boost charger’.

    Damn! Why did someone have to recognise the small indiscript circuitry.

  6. Dallas says:

    Um, don’t think so

  7. RASTERMAN says:

    It would have been much more realistic if they had the transmitter device connected to the 30-pin dock connector which could support video out.

    For the receiver, a breadboard with a complicated collection of components, a small antennae array, and a battery would have made this hoax more difficult to debunk while lending a bit of, “hmmm” I wonder…

    Not bad on the video editing though.

    Cheers!

    —RASTER

  8. mentor972 says:

    LOL, After Effects works wonders again.

  9. Ah_Yea says:

    This guy has WAAYYY too much time to burn.

  10. sargasso_c says:

    You mean, it isn’t real!?

  11. skunkman62 says:

    why is this garbage on here?

  12. interglacial says:

    Ten’s of thousands of people killed by one of the World’s largest natural disasters; hundreds of thousands displaced; multiple reactors undergoing partial or full meltdown; an uncontained fire at a huge nuclear storage facility; but stop the press… someone has made a video with an iPhone.
    Ha ha, after watching the Charlie Brooker rant this is priceless.

  13. Buzz Mega says:

    Hoax.

    What the perpetrators forgot to account for is that processing of a digital image takes TIME. Only a frame or two, but no TV, monitor or especially large digital display will be in absolutely perfect sync with the live feed.

    But when the display is seen with the live-feeding iPhone display in the foreground, the two images are in absolute sync. Meaning that the large image must be an effect, not an actual interpretation of the iPhone image.

    There are other, less obvious characteristics that give it away, too.

    The amount of frame smear during the fast zoom up to the large display doesn’t match the elongated images of other light-emitting sources in the same frame.

    Now tell me about how the iPhone feeds video into its earphone jack, Jack.

    Punqued!

  14. chuck says:

    He’s foreign-looking, walking around Times Square, doing something odd – he must be a terrorist. Tase him, then send him to Gitmo.

  15. McCullough says:

    #14. “He’s foreign-looking, walking around Times Square, doing something odd – he must be a terrorist.”

    Or a New Yawker.

  16. BubbaRay says:

    Without a direct connection to the HDMI input, there’s no way. The HDMI circuitry has no capability to tune RF signals. And different TVs handle HDMI input differently to produce a picture.

    Fail.

  17. Zybch is annoyingly pissed off says:

    For those saying that you can’t do video out using the 3.5mm jack on an iPhone, of course you can. I have some AV cables specifically for that purpose. However that still doesn’t mean this isn’t as fake as compassionate conservatism or the bible.

  18. Zybch is annoyingly pissed off says:

    Also, isn’t this from the same guy who claimed to be able to do the same thing at a train station a little while ago. That video got debunked by exactly the same points as above as well.

  19. deowll says:

    For once I agree with Dallas. I don’t think so. The computers controlling those screens are most likely inside a building somewhere with at most a box outside that is wired to it.

    Sure we can now do that sort of thing wirelessly but I doubt if the stuff now in place was done that way for many reasons.

  20. chrismo says:

    I apreciate the gag, but those times square video walls are not the same pixel aspect as the iphone. Even if they did get a signal, it would likely fill the screen and stretch the signal.

  21. jman says:

    Our company installs electronic message centers so no, this is impossible. Some are RF controlled some are network controlled, all have specialized software for communication so there’s nothing on an iPhone that can program a sign. They usually have preprogrammed content that is on a scheduler program that runs the ads at the right time. You have to be hardwired in with a fiber optic line to do live video feed on most boards.

    Not to mention that you’d have to have the software, the IP address, the passwords, etc. to get into the system. If I knew all those things i could control that board here from my desk theoretically though

  22. Kelvington says:

    #13 you are 100% correct, plus here is the other thing I noticed.

    At 1:30 he holds the balloon up to the big screen, but he only changes the top part of a singular video display, if this was real, it should have either taken over the whole display or double the image of him on both the top and bottom.

    Looks like the program Mocha was used here.

  23. keaneo says:

    Suckers!

  24. lemonsquareunicorn says:

    lmfao i have done this tons of times everyone is like wtf? but it only lasts a couple seconds sadly…still fun tho.


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