VGA Adapter says: "This accessory is not supported by ipad."

I used the infamous Apple VGA adapter for nearly three weeks on a Samsung LCD mirroring EVERYTHING I had in my Ipad2 and out of a sudden, just the other day I got the dreaded ""This accesory is not supported by Ipad" message.

😠 It ruined my daily work from then on. Well the Accesory happens to be the original Apple Ipad to VGA adapter, it is a costly accesory, it no longer works AT ALL and I am quite p***ed.

When is Apple going to provide a solution to this? Has anybody found a solution that does not involve buying this piece of junk again, or spending more $$$ on the aslternative, the AV HDMI adapter (which I fear may fail as well)? If anyone has come up with a solution, I will be glad to hear it. Thanx!

I purchased the AV HDMI adapter provided by Apple and guess what? IT DID NOT WORK either. As soon as i hooked it up, the dreadful message was thrown at my face: "This accessory not supported by Ipad". I then connected the charger to it suspecting it might be a current issue, and that did not fix anything, but it does charge. Still no image on any of the LCD devices I hooked it into, and I am using pretty good HDMI cables, I even tried 2 new good ones to no avail. This has been an ongoing frustration for the past few days. If someone's been through this mess and has come up with a solution, please let me know. My Ipad2 is next to useless if I cannot mirror it as I used to!

Yes; same here. A brand new Ipad (just swapped by Apple because the HDMI output on the last one stopped working after 3 minutes) and a brand new HDMI adaptor from the same Apple shop.

http://www.zen74158.zen.co.uk/ipad-misc/this-accessory-is-not-supported-by-ipad. png

Outrageous.

It also causes the Ipad to be very unreliable. The wifi connection slows down to about 1% of its normal speed, making the device useless for Iplayer etc.

For everyones information: The IOS 5 update brought my Ipad2 back to being able to mirror its contents via VGA or HDMI, albeit the dreaded message will still appear when you connect either of these accesosories. I just fumble a bit with connecting and disconnecting the accessory until the image appears in the display. It has been my suspicion that the immediate previous update to iOS5 was the cause of our headaches.(4.3.3, i think, as this was not happening with 4.3.2). So if any of you are experiencing this problem, try updating to iOS5 (if you haven't done so yet, which would be, well...sad) and update your new Ipad as soon as you get it, to iOS5. The message will still pop up from time to time but disconnecting and connecting the accessory back again may pull the trick. Also, I switch on the Ipad first and then the LCD next once properly connected and I find no problems, I don't know if there's any relevance to doing so, but, the bottom line is that it is working now.

Finally, with the new iOS5 you can forget about VGA/HDMI cables and costly accesories and, instead, mirror the Ipad's contents to your display or TV by way of WiFi using an AppleTV connected to your display using HDMI. I tried this as soon as I upgraded my Ipad to iOS5 and was flawless. This, to the best of my knowledge, works only with Ipad2. It's pretty cool. Cheers to all.

Message was edited by: ProfessorKev

The 'not supported' message appears only if the Ipad is powered up (I mean a cold start) with the adapter plugged in.

Otherwise it is never seen.

Whether the HDMI output works, and whether the Iplayer app is affected by its presence, seems to depend on when the adapter is plugged in, but I cannot see an obvious pattern to it.

It's obvious Apple have not tested this. I've had two Ipad2s, both IOS5, both doing this.

When it works it is great, but most of the time it is unusable.

Update:

Been to the "genius bar" in the local apple shop.

The error message appears on *all* Ipad2s with IOS5, and obviously all the Apple HDMI cables do it.

It doesn't appear on an Ipad2 with IOS4.x.

The staff (a young girl of about 20) didn't want to get into it, because the overall thing evidently worked, despite the Ipad saying it does not recognise the cable. They could not reproduce the Iplayer running very very slowly problem. I will probably just give up on this piece of non-functionality. It could be my 5m HDMI cable; the shop's one was 1m long and their wifi is probably very powerful.

Is there any way to use the IOS5 feature whereby you stream video (screen mirror if you like) to a display device using wifi, not HDMI, with something other than the Apple TV? We have a big 1080P TV which is HDMI in only, no ethernet even, so we would need something that acts as a wifi device and has an HDMI output.

As always the shop was heaving with people with duff stuff. The man next to me brought in a Macbook Pro which had had been continuously breaking. He just had the DVD drive replaced and now there was something else. Another chap brought in an Imac, with the time machine box, and looked like he was going for a refund on the whole lot (got fed up with the constant failures). It doesn't suprise me; Apple have to rapidly build millions of these things in the few weeks before each new product launch, so the Foxconns suicide factory must be working flat out, and QA probably slips here and there.

Hello:

Well, nice. However, I must disagree, because when I first discovered this issue I was in iOS4, and the video signal stopped working. It got fixed with iOS5, although the message still appears. But as long as I can get the signal out, that's fine by me.

I don't know of any other device - than the AppleTV - that can mirror the Ipad.But i'm sure the geeks will come up with something.

I have done more tests today, using different HDMI cables, and different apps.

The problem is actually quite complicated.

If the Ipad is switched on with the HDMI adapter already connected, that error message appears, and there is never any video output. Never. No way to get it to work, short of unplugging the HDMI adapter and power cycling the Ipad.

If the Ipad is switched on and the HDMI adapter is plugged in sometime after that, and one goes straight to Iplayer, and does nothing else, then it works. I do notice a 1 or 2 bars drop in the wifi signal level though, compared to no HDMI adapter+cable connected, so there appears to be a reduction in the wifi signal due to the HDMI activity, even when no video is actually being played through the HDMI cable. So this looks like RF emissions from the HDMI output. I wonder if Apple ever did RF emissions tests on that HDMI adapter... (Conditions: Draytek 800 access point, latest 1.0.3 firmware, 5m away, 2m HDMI cable, Sony 1080P TV).

If one does the above and then tries other apps, it gets more complicated. Normal screen mirroring continues to work fine so you can view photos etc on the TV. But if you try video playback from non-Iplayer apps, e.g. Vimeo 720p (running in a browser), while the Iplayer app is in the background, the Ipad gets well confused. The wifi basically stops working, and never gets working again even if you close down all the other apps. The only way I found out of this is a power cycle of the Ipad *and* a power cycle of the wifi access point.

I had similar issues with other wifi access points (Draytek and Linksys) but back then I did not spend much time on it.

I think that, apart from anything else, the Ipad gets confused when one tries *video* playback from one app while another *video* app is in the background. That seems to screw up both the HDMI output (which on one occassion showed both a piece of the Ipad screen, and the video in the background) and the WIFI subsystem.

peterh337 wrote:

so the Foxconns suicide factory must be working flat out

You mean the factory where the rate of suicides is 4 per 100,000 vs the US avarage of 11 per 100,000?

Why not simply stick to your issues rather than trying to spread FUD?

ℹ

I have ipad 2 & netflix, in past had no problem hooking up to my HDMI TV using VGA cable, (input on TV set to AV), then just now I plugged in the VGA adaptor to my ipad to watch a movie & got the message "this accessory not supported". Got scared, but all you have to do when this happens is unplug it from ipad & plug it in again. No problem, the ipad screen is mirrored - with netflix anyway, but I'm sure it would be same with other video apps. Hope this helps!