It's not so much the decoding and memory as it is that the timing of the HDMI signal waveform at 4K/60fps is a bit too fast to read any portion of with an affor

It's not so much the decoding and memory as it is that the timing of the HDMI signal waveform at 4K/60fps is a bit too fast to read any portion of with an affordable FPGA. There are FPGAs with specialized DSP hardware that can probably do it, but the ones I know of require pricey IP core licenses and the chips themselves aren't terribly affordable. That's kinda what I'm asking about here, if there is a something like a specialized chip that can be used to capture single frames from an HDMI stream to act as a buffer, because yeah obviously you don't need most of the data and you only really need to update at a few Hz. The other option I've thought of is a chip to downsample the signal, as there are plenty of cheap FPGAs or even micros that can handle resolutions below 1080p. Again, I'm pretty sure such chips exist but I don't really know of them because this is just something I am interested in for fun.