Nope.. Not to scare you, but for me it was the hardest part of the install...It took a lot of time to work the vents free..For you they may just slide out. You won't know until you do it.

There is no cutting required.. The trim plate just replaces the little "pocket" on the console..Then the control module snaps into the trim plate. Just take your time pulling apart the duct...

The only short cut I took is I didn't remove the whole console. I just snaked the wires around stuff and kept them down low so the console box and trim went back together without pinching anything. If I had it to do over again, I probably would pull apart the console...But to get the console out you still have to take the rear vents out first.

 

No cutting needed. you remove the lower pocket and there is a replacement trim piece that snaps in. Before you go throwing those instructions away, sit down and read them. It shows you graphically what has to come apart and what gets replaced.

It's really not that hard, and no no way to not remove the vent / duct unless you have hands the size of 3 year olds with the flexibility of gumby.

Take care,

George

 

Once again thanks to George and Jeff for all your help in answering my questions.

Cheers!

 

Just got mine today, three days after I ordered. Great service from Dan as many have mentioned already...

Got everything out of the box, and have basically been staring at the instructions (or lack thereof) for the last hour or so. Gonna go out in a bit and see what (if anything), I can do. Pretty good chance I'll be back in this thread soon asking for some help, as you guys seem to really know your stuff.

 

Okay well I've gotten everything connected to eachother, except for the "Y" harness. So for starters, what do I plug each of the three ends in to?

Also, besides disconnecting the battery, what else do I need to do? The instructions that came with it are practically useless to me, since I have no clue what the hell is going on in the pictures.

I have a 2000 S-type, so what will I need to remove to get the power? Do I even need to remove the armrest like (I think?) it tells me to in the manual.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

To give a visual of this to some of the people that know a whole lot more than me...

The "Y" harness


What I'm plugging the "Y" Harness in to


Now assuming I've got everything plugged in correct, I've now got two things that need to be plugged in to something in my car, I'm assuming.


So if someone could tell me where exactly I plug these two ends in to and/or what needs to be removed from the car to access that, that would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

OK, you've actually got it right from what I see. The filter is in the right spot and the Y splitter is hooked in correctly...

Now for the easy part. Pull out the console box as long as you have an axillary power plug in there (cigarette lighter jack). The Y harness acts as a splitter for the power going to that socket. All it does is split the power to go to both. It should make sense when you pull it out. If not, you'll notice that the power cable is long enough to feed all the way to the dash cigarette lighter. You'll have to make your own path since the pictures in the instruction are set up for a 2003 and newer car with the different dash.

Oh, BTW, does the control box mount in the rear of your console like it does on the newer cars? Or are you putting the control box in another location...

 

Alright, I'll go see if I can pull out the console box, hopefully it'll be pretty straightforward from there like you said.

And as far as the control box goes, I haven't really looked in to that too much yet. I just want to make sure I can get this thing to work by myself first, and then I'll figure that out. But I won't really be too picky with finding a place for it if it doesn't fit in the rear of the console (which I don't think it will since it's an older model)

Thanks for your reply too btw.

 

Okay, hit my first snag. Where exactly does the chord connected to the headrest go, once the headrest is put in the seat, and more importantly, how do I access it?

Would it kill the people who made these instructions to add a word or two every once in a while?

 

Alright, last update/cry for of the night, I need to sleep off my frustration now...

I put the passenger headrest all the way in the seat, which of course made the chord slide all the way down. After about ten minutes of pulling as hard as possible and finally prying with a screwdriver, I was able to get the back seat panel off. Probably won't be able to get it back on without some good ole duct tape, but that's the least of my concerns right now.

The chord is nowhere to be found. I don't see it looking inside of the seat, don't see it underneath the seat or anywhere else. Now the icing on the cake is that I can't get the headrest off without seriously risking damaging the chord, since it's snagged on something.

So I guess what I'd like to know, is where can my chord possibly be?

 

Ouch! Didn't you see the first posts in this thread? I didn't have removable seat backs so I sent a wire down the post hole to the bottom of the seat and used that to pull the wire for the screen through... But, since you have the seat back off, can you reach up into the seat and feel where the posts come through? I would think you could. The wire is probably hung up on the spring wires that run through the seat..

Just take your time and keep fiddling with it. I'm sure you'll get it. Oh, the instructions for any Jaguar accessories are like that. They are put together for multiple markets with different languages..So, they figured pictures were the way to go... I know, still frustrating though...

 

I did see the first page, but figured I'd be fine since my seats were removable, had no clue how tough it would be. I was able to reach up and find the wires though fortunately, like you said they must have been caught on something.

Finally done for now, still need to put the wires through the center console for the power, but I'll get to that later this week while I'm putting in my new radio.

Thanks for your help everyone, especially JOsworth for getting me through that last step. Couldn't of done it without you guys...

 

Yay... Glad you got it!

No problem on the help, that's what this place is for!

 

Success! I just got my rear video system installed today with the help of my lovely wife. I used the coaxial cable technique without any problems and also used the rear power point instead of pulling my entire center console apart.

I do have one suggestion though if you're going to use the rear power point. After you remove the interior armrest section (where the cupholders are), you'll notice that there's a silver bracket underneath that the two torx screws screw into. You cannot have any cables ABOVE this bracket or else the cupholder section will not fit back in. So take your time to route all your cables underneath this bracket. At the rear of the console, there is an area, just in front of the vents where you can jam in some of your cables.

All in all it was a fairly straight forward install. I did, however, hate sliding around on those bloody leather seats when I was trying to get leverage during the install.

Now I'm just fighting with the SD card and video formats.

 

Congrats on the system. I thought one of us early on mentioned routing the wires under there.

On the video formats.... What type card are you using.. George clued me in to get a regular SD card, NOT a SDHC. Even if you keep the card size down to 2g, the reader will not be able to handle the SDHC format.

I followed that suggestion, and picked up a couple 2G SD cards and it worked perfectly....Actuall can't wait to mess with the components I have to build the "custom" system for the mini-van!

 

I must have missed that in one of the posts. Lol! Devil's in the details sometimes.

As far as the SD cards, I'm using a standard 2GB SD card and not the SDHC. I've got them formatted to Fat32 on my Windows system. Most, if not all, of my videos are in XVID avi format which is supported by the system. The problem I have is that only a few of the movies I have play on the system which is weird as they're all XVID. What I'm wondering is if there is an older codec on the system and all my movies are in a newer XVID codec, therefore aren't being recognized... It's a bit frustrating really.

I've noticed another couple things that I'm a bit disappointed with - the first is the headsets. There's a constant static style noise on them, kind of like a cross between a humm and the sound of the ocean. It's noticeable over the sound of the movies. The other thing is that the video playback isn't all that great from the SD card. Mine tends to get lego-blocky and jumps a fair bit. I haven't tried running an external DVD player through the external inputs yet. We'll probably play most of our movies this way as we have a huge library of kids movies on DVD.

Thoughts anyone?

 

Before the picture police are on me, here are some pics of my install :

 

As I was about to pull my badge out!

Looks good man! How's the car running?

Take care,

George

 

LOL! Thanks George! Anytime I want to post a pic of my S-type I have to clean it though - gotta keep an eye out for that Rick character. He's always looking for the dust bunnies on my ride. Especially now that I've pointed out a few on his!

As for the car, she's riding like a dream. I'm just stumped about what came off my engine. I've purposefully parked her in the same spot on the driveway, but I haven't had a single drop come off of her. I'm going to book a date with my mechanic to have her on the hoist shortly to I can really have a good look.

My kids are happy though with the new video system! Almost makes me want to be a passenger once and a while....nah! Who am I kidding......

 

Yea, mine were like that a bit as well when I hooked mine up. We ended up switching between headsets and monitors with the A/B switch. It seems that one set would like one monitor over another. Also, I switched out the batteries that came with the set and it also seemed to help.

I didn't mess with the card reader that much so I can't really speak to one codec to another. We used a DVD player mostly and it worked well.