I installed a boss audio BE920WCPA head unit today. I retained steering wheel controls and everything works great. I have a factory rear view camera in the rear view mirror. I searched all over the internet and found my way to pull the panels at the passenger a pillar and unplug the harness that feeds up to the rear view mirror. I tapped in a female rca plug (positive rca wire to white/green stipe and rca shield wire to the brown/purple stripe) I then ran a male to male rca cable (connected to female rca plug off the rear view mirror harness to the back of the head unit’s dedicated rca plug for rear view camera)

Two questions I have now to complete this job:
1.) I have signal feed to both the rear view mirror and my head unit but it’s is now slightly glitchy at both view points. I can live with it but want to fix it. If I unplug the harness plug at the rear view mirror, it’s still same image quality on the head unit. (Someone mentioned the camera may not be good enough to support the signal feed to a larger screen?)

how can I fix the image quality? (Video posted)

2.) I have a rear view signal feed pigtail off the radio, I need to know where to connect it in the truck so that the head unit will switch over when truck is put into reverse.

 

You can’t fix it unless you can find a video signal converter that can go from differential video output to single ended video output.

The differential video uses a video + and video - that go opposite to each other (example if video + goes to 1v video - will go to -1v at the same time), single ended video only goes 0-1v to ground and doesn’t have an extra wire that goes the opposite way.

Note: the shield wire is attached to ground only at the camera end and is only used as a way to couple electrical interference to ground and away from the video wires, it’s not used at all for the actual video signalling or wiring, don’t try to use it as it won’t work.

The reason Ford went to differential video signalling is that it’s very resilient against electrical noise, what you have done inadvertently is shorted video - to ground (the new radio is doing this) and when that happens the opposite happens to the video signal and all the noise gets amplified into the video signal. I’ve seen some radio’s accept the video and show bars, screen tearing at the sides, dark shadows rolling and other radio’s won’t even accept the video signal and show nothing.

I have yet to find a video converter that will do this, you could always replace the camera with one that uses the regular yellow RCA plug and that would fix your problem.

 

thank you for the info. I appreciate it. I guess I’ll purchase a aftermarket camera with emblem for the tailgate and wore it up. I wonder if there is an aftermarket camera that can replace the oem one that can use the factory harness running to the front of the truck. Save me running new wire but I’m sure I’ll have to just wire in a new

 

what about this from crutchfield PAC RPA-VA1

 

That may work, I’ve never seen that before but that’s exactly what would be needed to make this work. Worth a try at $20

 

last question, where or how would this be installed. I can’t make out the wiring directions I see positive and negative wires and then video in and out (rca)

 

Installed the pac RPA-VA1 and it fixed the lines. Camera input is solid ams clear. Just wanted to update

 

Thanks for reporting back and letting us know it works, I’ll have to try one on my project truck one of these days to get rid of those lines also.