I’d be interested to hear about your experience with this. Do drivers exist for Windows OS older than XP? If your running XP is this a better solution than running a (semi) modern pci gpu (like 8400gs) ?

Ohhh.. that's hilarious.

Pretty sure drivers for OS older than XP would not exist. Why would they?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaotiOp45dg

Yes it is much stronger than a 8600 becasue the crystal HD will offload the decoding from the CPU.
Probably XP unless I could get the driver to install on 2000, which I haven't tried
it will work in Media Center Classic , but it works a lot better in potplayer.
Using newmoon (aka palemoon for XP) found on msfn it should be possible to instal Youtube 2 Player plugin to make all youtube videos play in potplayer and use the card to tdo all the heavy lifting.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaotiOp45dg

To see if its possible and becasue I can.

BinaryDemon wrote:

I’d be interested to hear about your experience with this. Do drivers exist for Windows OS older than XP? If your running XP is this a better solution than running a (semi) modern pci gpu (like 8400gs) ?

Yeah but PCI GPUs have driver issues we tried once with a HD4350 and a 8400GS.. and it didnt work very well at all.

But if you have PCI-X and a PCIe Adapter...

If you are interested, you can get the LGPL includes for development from the archived downloads page:
http://web.archive.org/web/20161119003441/htt … port/crystal-hd

The newer version of the card is lower power, is faster, and supports more formats:
https://kodi.wiki/view/Broadcom_Crystal_HD

I would think the GPU would be more flexible with supported codex and overall a better experience. There might have been Win98/2k support for this Broadcom chip, still googling.

A Tualatin 1.4 may actually be able to pull it off in software, barely.

Video for CPUs - The Software Decode Reference Thread&

You can download the linux driver source code from here:
https://www.touslesdrivers.com/index.php?v_pa … 23&v_code=26930 - 2009-12-29 version.
https://www.touslesdrivers.com/index.php?v_pa … 613&v_langue=en - 2010-07-03 version.
http://web.archive.org/web/20111116171134/htt … ort/crystal_hd/ -2010 -07-03 version.

The 2010 release looks to be the newest Linux source code release.
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Broadcom_Crystal_HD

So if you were real ambitious, you might be able to port it over to Windows 9x.

Thanks all for your interest.

I had that PCI-E to PCI adapter for some time now laying around, the rest was about 15 dollars More to come. Ill post results soon.

Testing on this. I removed 1 CPU, so it is single core.
1ghz PIII
Geforce 440MX
SBLIVE
1GB ram
Broadcom Chrystal HD

matze79 wrote:

Yeah but PCI GPUs have driver issues we tried once with a HD4350 and a 8400GS.. and it didnt work very well at all.

But if you have PCI-X and a PCIe Adapter...

There is a PCI version of GeForce 210, maybe that would work? The normal PCIe version has accelerated video decoding (even in Windows 2000 w/ extended kernel or unofficial drivers)

BTW, love the stacked adaptors... interested to see what the result is.

You'll need the hardware video decoding but I predict that IF you get the video to decode without stressing the CPU, you will only just barely be able to play 1080p video.

If the CPU has to do the decoding then you have no chance.

If you use an easily decodable format like MPEG-2 then you might be in better shape but of course YouTube is H.264 or MPEG4 or others.

My PIII-S at 1.63GHz can do 720p H.264 (5.5mbps, level 4.1) in software using CoreAVC and MPC-HC. CPU usage ranges between 65-90%. I'm pretty sure that if I installed a video card with hardware 264 decoding it would easily handle 1080p.

Warlord wrote:

I had that PCI-E to PCI adapter for some time now laying around...

I enjoy reading about these type of wacky projects which push the limits of any given platform. Looking forward to the results. Might be a good idea to test it across a few Windows versions if there are working drivers, e.g. Win9x, W2K, XP, & Win7. Must you use a particular player for the decoder to work properly? Will it decode through the browser, or must you use a stand-alone player like VLC or media player classic be needed? Was also wondering if there was another PCIe decoder card which might be better supported? I'm having trouble finding a working link to download the XP drivers for this decoder. I've considered adding a video decoder card to my Opteron 185 system for some time, but haven't researched it.

matze79 wrote:

But if you have PCI-X and a PCIe Adapter...

Second that! Has anyone been able to find these PCI-X to PCIe adapters at reasonable price?
I have a PIII motherboard which actually functions with the Matrox Parhelia PCI-X card, but the difference in 3D performance when the card was plugged into the 32-bit PCI slot vs. that of the 64-bit PCI slot was unremarkable. Matrox Parhelia 256 PCI-X Performance

Standard Def Steve wrote:

My PIII-S at 1.63GHz can do 720p H.264 (5.5mbps, level 4.1) in software using CoreAVC and MPC-HC. CPU usage ranges between 65-90%. I'm pretty sure that if I installed a video card with hardware 264 decoding it would easily handle 1080p.

Are there any AGP cards with decent H264 decoding? Off the top of my mind the ATI HD3000/HD400 AGP series cards could do this, I suppose? And IIRC you need HD4000 for YouTube acceleration regardless.

That won't ever work. Unlike with a vide card that does the decoding, using this Crystal HD decoder means that the decoded video data must travel back over the bus to the video card in order to be displayed. Do the math. PCI is not fast enough for this in 1080. You would need >300 MB/s, with standard PCI only doing 133 MB/s at 33 MHz (faster variants were not used on consumer mainboards).

It depends on what you are watching.
For example with a PCI TNT2 you can reach 1920x1024 with a good fps.
https://books.google.it/books?id=EAIAAAAAMBAJ … olution&f=false

mrgreen wrote:

It depends on what you are watching.
For example with a PCI TNT2 you can reach 1920x1024 with a good fps.

Err... no. Read my post again, please. These are two completely unrelated things and we are not talking about 3D rendering performance. The problem is raw video data that must be transferred back over the PCI bus after the Crystal HD did the decoding. "What you watch" makes no difference, since it's raw video data. A decoded frame in 1080 has 6 MB, no matter what it shows.

I once tried playing DVDs on an AMD X5 @ 160 MHz using a RealMagic DVD decoder card and ran into the same issues. If the bus is not fast enough, you're out of luck.

I have a Creative DXR2 DVD decoder card which I noted played fine on a Cyrix 5x86-120 with SCSI DVD-ROM drive. Used only 20% CPU usage in NT4 and 44% usage in Windows 98SE. Re: DVD hardware decoder cards