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It's very general question. I just want to understand if it's technically possible and why? Also to get some idea of what's the good starting point to investigate this topic.

So question is: Is it technically possible

  • Connect another device with HDMI-out to iPad with HDMI-in to USB-C adapter
  • Capture HDMI signal from the device
  • Render video from the device in iPad app

I guess that it was very limited in previous iOS version. But in iOS 16 there is a DriverKit now.

Can it be used to solve this problem?

pmdj
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NikR
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1 Answers1

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Short answer: yes.

Long answer:

Previously, this was possible for members of the MFi programme who designed their own MFi-compliant devices. It continues to be the only way to do it for iPhones and iPads which are not based on the M1 SoC.

On iPadOS 16+, on iPads with M1 (or in future, presumably, better) SoC, you can indeed drive near-arbitrary USB devices using a DriverKit extension. Note that there is currently no video capture API you can implement on iPadOS, so you cannot make the device available to any app through a standard interface - each app that uses the DriverKit driver will need to implement that driver's specific IOService user client API. (And the app providing the driver needs to be installed.)

If your capture device also captures audio, it should already be picked up automatically if it's a USB Audio Class compliant device; if it's not class-compliant, you can make it available as a system wide audio device using AudioDriverKit.

pmdj
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