Last week while staying at the Marriott in Kansas City, I found this thing on my desk:

Maybe I’ve been staying in the wrong hotels, but I’ve never seen one of these before. It’s basically an A/V interface box that connects to the television in the room. The unit, which was sitting on the desk, had three sets of video inputs: HDMI, VGA, and composite. It also had RCA inputs for audio, along with an 1/8″ input jack. Anything plugged into this box got routed directly to the television.

Unfortunately, I came unprepared to give the box a serious testing. I thought I had a VGA cable in my backpack bag but didn’t, and my laptop doesn’t do HDMI-out or composite out. Also, if you’ll remember, I returned my iPod video out cables earlier this spring, so that was a no-go as well. I could definitely see connecting our small, portable DVD player to this box and letting the kids watch videos on the television vs. the unit’s small, 9″ screen, but I didn’t have the DVD player there for testing.

My official review of the input box is, “this looks like a neat thing that I was unaware existed and unprepared to test.” I guess I’ll throw a couple of spare video cables into my bag for the next time I run across one of these.