hdmi to component or s video converter

Welcome to the Apple Community.

In terms of the Apple TV, you'd need a converter that was HDCP compliant and if your TV wasn't widescreen you'd also need it to scale video. To my knowledge there are no such converters that do both, I am unable to verify any converters that claim to be HDCP compliant but providing details of any that do would be prohibited under the terms of use for these forums as they effectively circumvent copy protection.

The HDfury3 is a good HDMI to Component Video converter.

It doesn't scale, it's not HDMI compliant and I'm not sure it should be mentioned under the Terms of Use for these communities.

It doesn't scale, it's not HDMI compliant

I found that it works perfectly to connect a HDMI DVD player to a Component Video projector. The picture is spectacular.

That doesn't mean it will for everyone.

I tried the HDFury with good results, to connect a new AppleTV to an older, but still very nice, plasma display that lacks HDMI inputs. Picture quality is as nice as any other video source (running at 720p).

There is a trick to setting it up, however. AppleTV comes out of the box set to "auto" video resolution, which means that it determines what resolution to use based on the device to which it is connected. HDFury is capable of 1080p, so the Apple TV wakes up in 1080p mode, and does not sync with my 720p monitor.

The fix for this is to have the AppleTV also connected to an audio amp so that you can hear its audio output. When it starts up it will offer the option (via audio) to turn on the "voice over" feature, which causes AppleTV to read the menus out loud. You can then navigate the menus with the remote control to the video resolution settings, and force that to 720p. Shazaam, the monitor syncs up and asks you to confirm the resolution setting. Then you can use the Settings menu to turn "voice over" off.