Several comments on the Youtube page say it's fake, chiefly because the iPhone jack cannot output video.
Is this true? If so, is it possible he wrote an app with special drivers to pull this off?
Is this true? If so, is it possible he wrote an app with special drivers to pull this off?
The bit that makes it suspect to me is that the iPad already has a VGA output, and even then standard iPhone/iPod Touch has had a composite video output available via the dock connector forever. Since this hack is more about hardware than software, why would you create your own video encoding stack to use the headphone jack instead of just taking the video that already comes out the dock connector?
In order for this to work, the piece that goes next to the screens would have to output a signal that was stronger than the signal actually being fed to the screens to cause the internal circuitry to lock onto the new signal. Seems unlikely to happen in a device that appears to be powered by watch batteries.
I think that something like this is theoretically possible, but requires much different/larger hardware than what is shown in the videos. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
For a little while, the BBC did broadcasts of 30-line video using two AM radio frequencies (one for the video, one for the audio) that could be picked up by special recievers.
That doesn't mean this isn't fake, of course. And I'm not convinced that the jack would have decent bandwidth...
The second giveaway is that you definitely cannot get enough power out of the headphone jack to run any serious electronics, not to mention a transmitter that can apparently transmite hundreds of feet in a crowded place like Times Square.