I don't think you'll need it if you've got any video cards considered alright in a Core2 machine GF8000 series up had decoders as did Radeon HD series from 6x00 at least but think it had weaker form in earlier HD series. Even intel G4x series onboard vid has it.

So here's the Nvidia version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo
and here's the ATI/AMD version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder
and Intel onboard, video codec capabilities in last column, you see the AVC starting with eagle lake chipsets... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_g … rocessing_units

Can they work? Yes, they probably can. Will they work well? Probably not, as they never did work well. They can't handle anything more than the most basic video decoding of older formats, commonly used for video downloads ten years ago, with no good performance for streaming usage. They would only be useful on a very old 2-4 core system from the mid-2000s, with a GPU that pre-dates 2012 or so, and a free PCIe x1 slot. Even then, you'd have to be using SSDs to push the video files and a good pile of RAM to make the card perform at a useful level.

Only need a bit over a megabyte a second to feed 4K video. Can push that over USB 1.1, a 10Mbit network card, or any P54 era EIDE hard disk (provided it's big enough) so SSD not required.... and if it uses a heck of a lot more than that, it's not compressed and you don't need a decoder.

According to the most recent info I was able to dig up, the cards are completely non-functional under the latest Windows and Linux software options and all software support has been removed. The hardware was originally tied to Adobe Flash and required it to stream videos, while media players required specific support for the hardware decoder, which is no longer present in current builds of any software you could think of using. The only way you can fully use these cards, is to run a system with older software that worked with the cards when they were available, unless someone cooks up new drivers to work with current software.

Thank you for the answers. The idea was to use it along with the X4500 (GMA4500 basic) iGPU that doesn't have any HD decoding support for what I understand of the G41 chipset instead of using the GT610 or the Geforce 210 PCI I have as the only newer video cards I own. The CPU software decoding itself can easily decode both 720p or 1080p H264 video up to 30% of the dual core factory 3,33Ghz/8GB DDR3 and SSD on SATAII. I know the GT610 gpu already have most of the DXVA2/VDPAU decoding features but nowdays still useless on the web for example since they are mostly VP9 codec and soon AV1 for what I understand. So beside a better WDDM1.3 driver (but heavier on the system compared imho to the simpler iGPU driver) I don't find many differences of using the GMA4500 iGPU vs these low end newer PCI-E GPU when both can't make use of their video engine decoders when used in the browser and I suppose the mainboard will last longer without a vga at all for the power demand on the bus. Certainly even these lowest end old PCI-E video cards are faster than this G41 Express iGPU but at the end not fast enough anyway compared to the added 40W at least of the mainboard bus. For retrogaming the GMA4500 seems to still work very good. At least until I'll find something that's worth installing and possibly brand new with some complete support like a GT1030 that also should have VP9 decoding offloading the cpu from the task.
I remember having these Broadcom card whith the early netbooks and it wasn't a bad decoder into netbooks and 1080p video would decode easily even with the oldest N270 Atom so it looked like a nice PCI-E x1 usage as a "multimedia boost" to the onboard GPU. I always found great multimedia specific hardware like the Real Magic cards so it'd have been a nice idea. I read that the latest model supported VP9 codec and that was quite interesting if it could have been possible to connect it to the browser. I know for example Media Player Classic while discontinued should support the card but probably only that app.

I read somewhere that the broadcom decoder can be put in the first ATV(1) in oder to upgrade from 720p to Full-HD.

Also I suppose its power demand must be very low for the task. If I remember correctly the old smartphone Nokia N8 had a similar chip doing both video decoding and GPU acceleration! Wouldn't it be nice to have such compact card as a GPU accelerator.. 😁 Nowdays Radeon cards even the oldest ones has high prices, most NV cards too but at the end I was thinking which alternative brand solution I might try. Just to have something that is not the obvious common config that mostly would search for. It would be great to find one of those latest S3 PCI-E cards.. 😁
Sure one thing that is true, the difference from a WDDM 1.1 vs 1.3 driver can be seen how much smoother the GUI and any apps would graphically work but modern config seems so standardized like there's no choice at all. Even on board GPU seems to be more interesting even if much slower.