Broadcom Crystal HD

BCM70015 Mini PCIe card

Crystal HD is Broadcom's hardware semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) core that performs video decoding.[1]

Features

Crystal HD includes single chip high-definition advanced media processors BCM70012 (codenamed Link) and BCM70015 (codenamed Flea);[2] these chips are available on mini PCIe cards.[3][4]

The BCM970012 supports hardware decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG-2 and the BCM970015 additionally supports DivX 3.11, 4.1, 5.X, 6.X and Xvid.[3] VP8, VP9, Daala and HEVC are not supported.

Crystal HD is found in Intel Atom based machines,[5] such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 10[6] HP Slate 500 or ExoPC, ASUS Eee Keyboard.[citation needed]

The commercial relevancy of dedicated video decoding accelerators was ended by the launch of the Intel Core i-series, featuring an integrated GPU with hardware video decoding (formerly only widespreadly available in discrete GPUs).

Operating system support

The Crystal HD SIP core must be supported by a device driver, which provides the video interfaces. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example Media Player Classic or GStreamer, to access CrystalHD.

Linux

Broadcom published a Linux device driver under GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.[7] Broadcom also published application and library source code on a royalty-free basis under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1

Crystal HD can be accessed through the Video Acceleration API interface via an experimental driver (however, it cannot be recovered from the linked archive).[8][unreliable source?] A GStreamer plugin is available.[9]

Crystal HD support is available in FFmpeg and MPlayer when compiled with the corresponding option.[10][11]

It could be added to first generation Apple TV when OSMC is installed,[12] although support was dropped in 2017.[13]

Microsoft Windows

Broadcom published a device driver for Microsoft Windows that provides accelerated DirectShow renderers filters.[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Featured Product - Crystal HD Solution | Broadcom". www.broadcom.com. Archived from the original on 20 April 2015. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
  2. ^ Release Notes Users.htm bundled with Windows driver
  3. ^ a b "Broadcom Crystal HD in Kodi/XCMC wiki". XBMC/Kodi. Archived from the original on 2019-03-09. Retrieved 2021-01-11.
  4. ^ "Kodi On Chromecast". 21 October 2017. Thursday, 9 November 2017
  5. ^ Sebayang, Andreas. "Broadcom: Crystal-HD-Chip für Pine-Trail-Netbook-Plattform". Golem.de. Retrieved 2021-03-03.
  6. ^ "Видеоакселератор Broadcom Crystal HD меряется силами с NVIDIA Ion". www.ferra.ru (in Russian). Retrieved 2021-03-03.
  7. ^ a b "Crystal HD device driver". Archived from the original on 2015-05-09.
  8. ^ "Crystalhd-video - Gitorious". Archived from the original on 2012-11-02. Retrieved 2014-06-28.
  9. ^ "Debian -- Error".
  10. ^ "Broadcom Crystal HD Support For MPlayer, FFmpeg - Phoronix". Phoronix. Retrieved 2021-03-03.
  11. ^ "Wubble : Philip Langdale's ramblings on possibly interesting topics".
  12. ^ "How to install the CrystalHD Video Decoder".
  13. ^ "Saying goodbye to Apple TV". OSMC. 24 September 2017. Retrieved 2021-03-03.