Apple’s (News - Alert) digital AV adapter for the iPhone5 and iPad mini is mystifying a lot of techies. The techie crew from Coda and Unison developer Panic Inc.  were testing out the adaptor –an accessory which captures video from iOS devices, and stumbled upon facts that didn’t feel right.

They weren’t getting the maximum resolution capable with the adapter, it wasn’t 1080p and video signals did not seem expected.

The crew then wondered about the adapter’s function and had apprehensions that the adapter wasn’t sending pure-direct signals through HDMI. When they opened up the accessory, which is worth US$49, they were very surprised to find something akin to an ARM based SoC and it had 256 MB of RAM.

The crew put together their heads and reached the conclusion that the SoC was performing some sort of AirPlay (News - Alert) streaming from the device which was attached to the HDMI connector. It all resulted in the compression artifacts and other issues like input lag and quality. The available evidence was all pointing toward that analysis, but they weren’t sure.

They kept wondering about the approach that was taken instead of using a 30 pin digital AV which provided the direct output. The crew thought that possibly the lightning connector did not have enough pins to deliver quality video output. Another reason that was a possibility was Apple’s strategic decision to shift hardware-as much as possible outside iPhone5 and iPad mini to lessen the weight, avoid battery drainage and ultimately keeping the production cost down.

It certainly was a strange find by the tech analysts and either way people planning to output video from new iOS devices may want to know the details and should know the configuration.