Broadcom CrystalHD Decoder card

[Red_Machine]

I'm planning to use my old Dell Studio Hybrid as a HTPC, but it doesn't play high-def video very well. I remember when I bought it, there was an option for an HD decoder card and I've looked into getting one of these for it. There are two that I can use in my system, the BCM70012 and the BCM70015. The 12 is about half the price of the 15, so I'm just wondering which would be best for my Hybrid in terms of performance. The 12 I found on eBay is actually a Dell OEM card that would have been available for the system if I'd bought it direct at the time, so perhaps that would be better compatibility-wise given that the 15 is fairly newer.

Anyone who's used these got any advice for me?

 

[Disparia]

http://kodi.wiki/view/Broadcom Crystal HD
http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/

Seems like its a newer model that adds Flash and DivX support and it more power efficient.

I haven't used one so I can't speak to support or give hands-on advice. But they're both cheap at Amazon (at least for me in the states) so if it were me I'd be buying the 15.

 

[dhdude]

I bought a 15 for my Latitude E6400 a few months back but found driver support to be rubbish, Kodi/XBMC and modern Linux Distros have stopped supporting it. AFAIK there aren't any drivers for any Windows newer than Win7 either, so I've seen it as a bit of a waste of money to be honest :/

 

[Red_Machine]

Well I'd be using either Vista or 7 on it, I'm not a fan of Linux to be honest. So there's no issue with driver support for me.

 

[dhdude]

Ah should be fine then I must admit I hadn't got around to testing it on 7, I look forward to hearing how you get on with it if you get one! May be motivation to put 7 back on my E6400 if all goes well! I read that the 15 is definitely the better buy if you can get one. I think I paid around £15 for mine new a few months back.

 

[Red_Machine]

I just ordered the 15, so I'll report back once I've gotten everything up and running.

 

[Nomad986]

Does the card decode Youtube HD videos too?

 

[Red_Machine]

I got the card and installed a fresh copy of 7 x64 on the Studio Hybrid. I couldn't get it to work properly with VLC, my usual player, but I read that Media Player Classic HC had native support for it, so I installed that instead and now I get buttery smooth playback on 1080p videos. With regards to YouTube, the specs for the card say that it supports native Flash Player 10.x accelleration, however it seems that does not extend to the current version of Flash Player; it does not even attempt to use it, just running in software mode on the CPU. That's not much of an issue, though, as I don't plan on using it to watch much YouTube videos anyway.