Requiring the use of an app, in order to use some kind of adapter cable? I must be getting old, feel like I've just crawled from under a rock... :-)
That would also mean this cable becomes useless the moment URL encoded in the QR disappears?
As for the app: even if it's total crap, if only 50% of cable-buyers proceed to install the app, that 50% is still gained as potentially spied-upon subjects. There's a new please-spy-on-me sucker born every day, so to speak.
Does it really matter? This isn’t a real product. It’s a scam product to trick people trying to buy a real Apple part and con them into the app’s clutches.
Part of me is looking forward to the time when a government activates a significant part of all the spyware/adware/backdoors/etc in the world as part of a cyberwar. COVID would be a child's game compared to that, but that disaster would at last make people understand how bad tech has become at this point.
Double points if the operation is started by another state/group that stole those backdoors.
The worst part of adult life is realizing you already live in a world where this happens. Regularly. And no-one bats an eye. And you try to maintain sanity by adding hypothesis (“But I mean, with the government giving the keys to…”) and all of the evil you can think of, also exists.
The official Apple HDMI adapter does the same thing with an SoC in there. The difference is native iOS support instead of a 3rd party app needed to support it.
I still find it hilarious that that’s how the old cable worked, the iPhone encoded an H.264 video stream and sent it to the dongle, which decoded it and sent it down HDMI.
Now that iPhones have USB-C they no longer need a custom adapter. A standard USB-C to HDMI cable is supposed to work. I believe.
Probably to work around a usb(lightning is usb2 based right?) link not fast enough to keep up with the phone graphics. However, I note that there are usb graphics card descriptors[1] and I assume usb graphics cards, that is, graphics over the normal usb data pins, not a display port pass through. These descriptors are what I would naively assume a usb to hdmi "adaptor" to be, a usb graphics card.
I am finding it hard to hunt down low level information on how these "adaptors" work. Does anyone know what type descriptors they use? and what a iphone does if you plug one in(I am assuming the lightning to usb physical connector is trivial)
update: I found these reverse engineering documents on synaptics displaylink chips. They appear to be a popular manufacturer of such dongles. And it looks like compression is needed there as well.
You’re right, Apple never moved lightning past USB-2 speeds. Still seems weird to do things the way they did, unless it was just to reuse some part they already had in another device, thus saving costs.
The need for compression is a good point. I hadn’t thought of that. But you’re right other existing parts should have worked if chosen, right?
Weird. Just such a fun day on Twitter when it was discovered that what we had all assumed was just a relatively simple adapter was a whole SoC running its own firmware doing this job.
Nope. I don’t know if it put itself in some kind of analog mode for composite. I can’t remember if that was a thing around the switch to lightning. But the cool hack has always been how the HDMI adapter worked.
I think I've come across this specific screen. In my case, this was its equivalent of "No Signal" screen, and the app was only needed to update the firmware if needed, not to connect. It seemed to exploit AirPlay somehow and therefore finicky unlike official dongles.
