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Crystal HD Decoder Boards

Broadcom BCM970012 and BCM970015 Crystal HD card boards can be installed in the Apple TV’s mini-PCIe slot as a replacement for the Broadcom BCM4321 wireless card. These boards enable OpenELEC to decode H.264 video content using a dedicated hardware decoder chip instead of software decoding H.264 using the main system CPU. The standard Apple TV box will handle software-decoding of SD and standard profile 720p content but the 1GHz CPU chokes on higher profile 720p and all 1080p content unless you spend many (many) hours painstakingly re-encoding videos with tools like Handbrake. Even then the CPU is typically running at 90-100% during playback and you can expect dropped frames and stuttering during fast panning shots. With a BCM970015 Crystal HD decoder card installed and decoding offloaded from the system CPU the Apple TV is capable of playing all but the most challenging of 1080p content with the system CPU load peaking around 45-50%. (continue reading…)

Below are my network streaming settings:

1. MSI Wind Nettop Atom 330 server running Ubuntu Server (Lucid) and MiniDLNA
2. LG 42LE5400 TV that can run media from MiniDLNA (no subtitles)
3. LG BD570 Bluray player that can run media from MiniDLNA (no subtitles) and SMB/CIFS (subtitles work) (continue reading…)

The 2nd generation Apple TV is selling faster than imagined and offers features seemingly impossible for the 1st gen ATV, but with a minimal ~$50 investment and some simple hacks you can turn Apple’s old “hobby” into something quite special: a HDTV appliance running XBMC (and Boxee). Note that Netflix streaming is technologically possible, but not available at the time of this post. (continue reading…)

A key component for great HDTV using a PC tuner is the decoder. Microsoft Media Center video decoder and audio decoder compliant software is used by most HDTV PC tuner applications.

What are decoders and why do you need them? Currently, all HDTV/digital broadcasts are compressed in what is called the MPEG-2 format. That means what you receive via cable, satellite or over the air is not ready for your monitor/HDTV. The signal first needs to be decompressed to the original format and that’s where decoders come in.

HD TV Decoders come in two flavors, hardware and software. A hardware decoder is basically a computer chip whose sole purpose is to decompress MPEG-2 data. All cable and set-top box digital/HDTV tuners use hardware decoding. A software decoder is just a computer application that runs somewhere on your PC (we’ll get to that “where” in a second) and does the same thing as the hardware decoder, decompresses MPEG-2 data. (continue reading…)