Crystal HD is the

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

's hardware SIP core that performs

video decoding A video decoder is an electronic circuit, often contained within a single integrated circuit chip, that converts base-band analog video signals to digital video. Video decoders commonly allow programmable control over video characteristics such ...

Product description

Crystal HD has been available as single chip high-definition advanced media processors BCM70012 (codenamed Link) and BCM70015 (codenamed Flea); these chips are found on mini PCIe cards for purchase. The BCM970012 supports hardware decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC,

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

WMV9 Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

and

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic video coding format, coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of Lossy compression, lossy video compression and ...

and the BCM970015 additionally supports DivX 3.11, 4.1, 5.X, 6.X and

Xvid Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi mas ...

VP8 VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008. Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Goo ...

VP9 VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google. VP9 is the successor to VP8 and competes mainly with MPEG's High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). At first, VP9 was mainly used on Google's video platform YouTube. ...

Daala Daala is a video coding format under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation under the lead of Timothy B. Terriberry mainly sponsored by the Mozilla Corporation. Like Theora and Opus, Daala is available free of any royalties and its reference imp ...

and

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compari ...

are not supported. Broadcom Crystal HD is found in

Intel Atom Intel Atom is the brand name for a line of IA-32 and x86-64 instruction set ultra-low-voltage processors by Intel Corporation designed to reduce electric consumption and power dissipation in comparison with ordinary processors of the Intel Cor ...

based machines, such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 10

HP Slate 500 The HP Slate 500 is a multi-touch capable Windows 7 tablet computer that was announced at CES 2010 and launched on 22 October 2010. History The Slate 500 began as an e-reader concept, but after further study of the uses for such devices, HP re ...

or ExoPC,

ASUS Eee Keyboard Asus Eee is a family of products by AsusTek Computer Inc. The product family began with the release of the Eee PC subnotebook in 2007; since then, the product family has diversified into a number of PC form factors. According to the company, th ...

. The commercial relevancy of dedicated video decoding accelerators has been eclipsed by the launch of the Intel Core i-series, featuring an integrated GPU with hardware video decoding (formerly only widespreadly available in

discrete GPU A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...

s); nevertheless, a small number of enthusiasts maintaining and upgrading their older computers, especially for

HTPC A home theater PC (HTPC) or media center computer is a technological convergence, convergent device that combines some or all the capabilities of a personal computer with a software application that focuses on video, photo, audio playback, and ...

use, kept a number of cards circulating in the used market.

Operating system support

The Crystal HD SIP core needs to be supported by the

device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and ot ...

, which provides the videos interfaces. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example

Media Player Classic Media Player Classic (MPC), Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), and Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) are a family of free and open-source, compact, lightweight, and customizable media players for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft ...

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, ...

, to access the CrystalHD hardware and make use of it.

Linux

Broadcom has published a device driver for Linux under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

(GPL) version 2. Broadcom also published application and library source code on a

royalty-free Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standard ...

basis under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL), version 2.1 Crystal HD can be accessed through the

Video Acceleration API Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is an open source application programming interface that allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing uni ...

interface via an experimental driver (however, it cannot be recovered from the linked archive). There is a

plugin available. There is support for Broadcom Crystal HD available in

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

and MPlayer when compiled with the corresponding option. It can be added to the first generation

Apple TV An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

when OSMC is installed, although support was dropped in 2017.

Microsoft Windows

Broadcom has published a device driver for Microsoft Windows which provides accelerated

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ear ...

renderers filters.

References

{{reflist Broadcom Video acceleration Video compression and decompression ASIC

Product description

Operating system support

Linux

Microsoft Windows

See also

Related Broadcom technologies

References