Broadcom Crystal HD Support For MPlayer, FFmpeg

[Rabauke]

Well, in your articles you always mention as much as you can
* what you did last week
* which similar hardware you covered beforehand
* after half a page you come up with significant news belonging to the headline
* what you will test in the future

To my mind you should start focusing on the significant part only.
In the beginning you are talking about Nvidia again. This is the part where I got confused. Leave that part out since it hasn't anything to do with that topic. Instead you could have written that it's an independent chip. THIS belongs to the news.

Just my humble opinion...

[Sadako]

In Michael's defense, the vast majority of people who know of this hw decoder are aware of the only form factor it's available in, and the brief mention of nvidia is valid, as this is only real competitor to nvidia when it comes to hw decode on linux...

Anyways, this is fantastic, lake of support within mplayer was the only thing stopping me from getting one of these for my core2solo netbook (that and money, ~60 EUR on ebay...).

Anyone know if this would cure video tearing on an i965, or is the actual screen rendering still down to the gpu?

[pingufunkybeat]

Well that has been doable with a vdpau card for quite a while now (at much lower cpu usage rates).

Not with open source drivers, it wasn't.

This alone makes it relevant.

[brent]

@deanjo

You can halve your numbers. Video (in most cases) uses the YV12 color space, which is 12bpp. I don't expect PCI-E to be a limiting factor at all.

[deanjo]

@deanjo

You can halve your numbers. Video (in most cases) uses the YV12 color space, which is 12bpp. I don't expect PCI-E to be a limiting factor at all.

Right, I forgot that x264 is currently limited to YV12.

[BlackStar]

What is the power consumption of these parts?

[deanjo]

What is the power consumption of these parts?

About 30mW @ idle, 500mW watching 720P and about 1 Watt on 1080P material.

[djselbeck]

About 30mW @ idle, 500mW watching 720P and about 1 Watt on 1080P material.

In the crystalhd-development google group an broadcom employer told this:

Quite a bit especially on the 70012. When it is active (i.e. FW is loaded and running) it can consume as much as 1.3W whereas it drops to around 300mW when placed into idle.

On the 70015, not so dramatic a difference - from around 300mW down to 100mW.

And I don't get it. What's the point of the discussion if PCIe is fast enough. It works very well with 1920x1080p@24fps. I've it running for about a year now on an hp mini 5101 with an 1,6GHz atom processor. It even works for high bitrate stuff like the Avatar bluray with h264 bitrates about 40mbps.

[deanjo]

Typo on the 30mW, should have been 300mW. From talking with the XBMC devs it looks like the max that the Broadcom HD can handle is 40mbps. When it encounters bit rates higher then that it will drop frames despite it not running into a cpu limitation.

[djselbeck]

Yes thats right, but I don't think it is a problem because the maximum video bitrate for bluray videos is also 40mbps .