The only difference between what you've described and what is going on in this adaptor is the inclusion of h264 decoding. The use of this is an argument that c

The only difference between what you've described and what is going on in this adaptor is the inclusion of h264 decoding. The use of this is an argument that can be had (personally I think it was a great play on Apple's part, see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308345 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308345) The rest of this is ancillary stuff. They aren't decoding h.264 on an ARM core, that's impossible for any significant bit rate, they are doing it with a purpose built bit of hardware, just as the HDMI encoding is done in a purpose built bit of hardware. Incidentally the encoding of HDMI is a mess, the spec is worth a read some time.