Broadcom Crystal HD: hardware acceleration of A to Z HD video

I think many people know that HD (720p) H.264 video is so easy to watch on a netbook. The power of Intel Atom is simply not enough for decoding. I use my Acer Aspire One as a video player on business trips and long trips, and have also come across this. There are several ways to solve this problem:

transcode with lower resolution / bit rate
use software tricks
use hardware acceleration

The first method is too slow and humiliating (because it is typical for portable players like iPods, etc.).

The second is not universal and limited. I am aware of two ways - installing the CoreAVC codec and the Crystal Player buffer ahead of playback (see Setting up a netbook for maximum performance for HDTV ). In principle, this is a pretty decent solution for 720p. However, there are two big disadvantages: 100% processor utilization and complete failure in the case of 1080p.

The third seems to me the most "right." You can immediately buy a netbook with Nvidia ION- A universal solution that gives additional goodies like CUDA calculations and the ability to play 3D games (however, the pleasure on a small screen is doubtful). Unfortunately, Nvidia ION-powered netbooks appeared only recently and are still expensive. And what can you do if you already bought yourself a netbook without any “show-offs”?

There is a way out! It’s called Broadcom Crystal HD, and “speeding” it with your EEE PC or Aspire One is quite real and cheap.

Broadcom Corporation released a Crystal HD card with a Mini PCI Express interface a year ago, which provides hardware-accelerated playback of H.264 and MPEG 2.4 (and rumored to be Flash). The beauty is that the microcircuit can be inserted into a free PCIe netbook slot. Next, we will talk about how to get this miracle, how to configure it and how it works.

All of which will be discussed further below, if there are very crooked hands, it can lead to losses of both money and the netbook as a whole.

I will tell by my example. My configuration:
Acer Aspire One AOD 250 :
Intel Atom Single Core N270 (1.60 GHz / 512 KB / FSB 533), 10.1 "SD (1024x600), 2GB RAM
Windows 7 + Xubuntu 10.04 (beta)

What do we need

the presence of a free mini PCIe slot
about $ 30 on PayPal or already purchased Crystal HD
if you buy - a willingness to wait 2 months *
specific software for Windows
patience and strong nerves (of course)

* if Russian Post will still work

Link to mini PCIe from Wikipedia .

Usually a cheap netbook without Yota has a free slot for a 3G card, it is what you need. In my case, it was on the back side, to the left of the compartment for changing RAM. I know for sure that the old AOD150 also has a similar one, but there is no connector there (i.e. where to directly stick the board). If there is no slot, but you really want to insert the microcircuit, you can disassemble the netbook, replace the wifi card (which in the vast majority of cases with mini PCIe) with Crystal HD, and solve the problem with wireless Internet by buying a USB wifi dongle.

I bought a card on eBay. It is possible that it is being sold on some radio markets. I did not have time to run / find out, but there was money on PayPal.

The list of software I will describe further.

Get Crystal HD

We buy a chip on eBay. For example here . I bought 2 months ago, and she stood 23 bucks including delivery. Now, apparently, their supply is coming to an end, and they are much more expensive. I draw your attention to the fact that there are 3 varieties of the model - 70010 (old), 70012 (like mine), 70015 (the newest and coolest in features). 70012 works pretty well.
We wait about 2 months for it to be delivered (they sent me from Singapore).

Making iron work

When I joyfully inserted Crystal HD into my netbook, I broke off hard at first, because neither Windows 7 nor Xubuntu saw it. The team

lspci | grep Broadcom

showed a shish with oil. No need to be upset, friends! Perhaps, in this case, it’s not that the microcircuit was irradiated with something at the customs or with static on the plane, but corny in the old BIOS version of your netbook. Intuitively and at random, I reflashed the BIOS of my AOD250 from 1.06 to 1.27. Oh miracle! The card was determined,

lspci | grep Broadcom

issued

Multimedia controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM70012 Video Decoder [Crystal HD] (rev 01)

Windows 7, tried to install the driver on the Multimedia controller at boot, but, of course, nothing came of it. Go to the list of necessary software:

driver from Broadcom website
for playing MKV - Haali Media Splitter
for sound playback - AC3 Filter and CoreAAC
if you have Windows 7 - Windows 7 Preferred Filter Tweaker
for codec diagnostics - GraphStudio

Those who have CoreAVC + Haali Matroska (Media) Splitter (like mine) and those who have CCCPs, K-Lite Codec Packs, etc. - take everything to the root.
Download, install the driver (32-bit).
I note that it is in this sequence.

We deal with codecs

We put Haali Media Splitter (for MKV container). We put AC3Filter (for Dolby AC3) and CoreAAC (for AAC).

Maybe, of course, for some lucky ones after that everything will work right away, but I was clearly not among them. When I opened the first 720p mkv (h.264) Windows Media Player (and Media Player Classic Home Cinema, too), I got long-known brakes and 100% CPU. Hello, codec hell .
Having opened this file in GraphStudio (File-> Add Media file), I saw that the h.264 video stream is still decoded by the built-in Windows 7 codec. DirectShow filter from Broadcom stood. You can verify this by finding “Broadcom Video Decoder” in the list Graph-> Insert filter ...

Of course, the reboot did not change anything. Windows 7 Preferred Filter Tweaker comes to the rescue!
By launching it, we switch h.264 and MPEG2 from Microsoft to Broadcom. Apparently, in the future, the developers of this tool will add the declared support for Xvid, VC-1 and Divx for Broadcom, but at the time of writing this was not. Click Apply, in the next window we put daws everywhere (turn off all Microsoft codecs so that they do not interfere later). Voila! GraphEdit shows that Broadcom decodes h.264, sound - CoreAAC, Windows Media Player, etc. confidently displays video with sound.

Perhaps those who have Windows XP will not have such problems.

I still couldn’t get Broadcom to play Xvid, even collecting the “block diagram” in GraphEdit. Perhaps I missed something and you will succeed. For good reason, in Windows 7 Preferred Filter Tweaker, developers did not add Broadcom as an Xvid decoder. I was satisfied with installing the usual Xvid from xvid.org.

Setting up Crystal HD for Xubuntu pulls on a separate topic ...

Field test

... were run on Windows Media Player 12, a netbook screen and mains power.

Media	CPU load, avg	CPU load max	Quality
720p MKV (3216MB, 2:18) Video: AVC 1280x544 24.00fps Audio: AAC 48000Hz 6ch	thirty%	40%	Great
1080p MKV (8421MB, 1:43) AVC 1920x816 23.98fps Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz 6ch	thirty%	40%	Great

DWM (Aero effects) ate up to 15% of the CPU.
By “excellent” playback quality, I meant synchronizing the video with sound, the absence of lags and jerks, the color saturation, in general, the usual normal movie display. The operating time from a standard 3-cell battery was 2 hours in the case of 720p and 1 hour 55 minutes in the case of 1080p. Crystal HD is very hot (not just because it had a special thermal sticker that dissipates heat).

Update: I tested Crystal HD on an external monitor. Youtube . The verdict is “excellent.” The monitor was a SyncMaster 2223nw 1680x1050, 1080p video - fragment of film No. 2.

During normal work with a netbook, the card does not heat up at all and does not affect the battery life.

Total

Broadcom Crystal HD is suitable for solving the problem of playing high-definition video on netbooks with limited processor resources. It is relatively cheap and has no obvious disadvantages.

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