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jbeard4
Asked: 2010-11-06 14:20:08 +0800 CST

What is the state-of-the-art for using Broadcom Crystal hardware?

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I just bought a Dell Mini 1012, which comes with a Broadcom Crystal media accelerator chip. I'd like to know what is the current state-of-the-art with regard to using this hardware on Ubuntu? What I mean by this is, what is the best way to install drivers to make use of this hardware, and what media players currently support it? I've read that XBMC currently does, but what about gstreamer?

Ideally, I'd like to find a solution so that I can accelerate Flash videos using the device. It seems like one strategy may be to download Flash videos to the hard drive and play them with an external, Crystal-enabled media player, and so that seems like one option, but I'm wondering if any of the free flash alternatives (Gnash and Lightspark) support hardware acceleration of flash video using the Crystal API?

It seems like there is a lot of information about all of this on the web, but it's not consolidated, and seems like a rapidly moving target, so any insight anyone may have into this would be appreciated.

hardware-acceleration video broadcom

4 Answers

  1. i tried crystalHD on ubuntu 12.04 and 11.10. both ubuntu versions` having problem with totem, playback is so choppy on mp4 format. i installed indicator to make sure crystalHD is running, yes it is! removing the gstreamer crystalHD plugin will make totem play the mp4 smoothly. But playing 1080p youtube/streaming sites with crystalhd is flawless. i hope anyone can point why totem is not friendly with crystalhd in some cases.

    installed lastest crystalHD from git..

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  2. The driver for BCM lives in linux-firmware-nonfree. Install that! It should cover you for GStreamer-using media players. Totem, the default video player in Gnome+Ubuntu is GStreamer-based.

    You might need to run sudo modprobe crystalhd now to load the driver (it should do this automatically on the next boot).

    If that doesn't work, you could build the modules yourself. It's not hard and it's fairly well documented. Download the zip from their support page and read through the readme.

    I confess I don't know the status of other media players. I did think mplayer and xine had both made progress but I could be wrong.

    As for Flash, even if Adobe were shouting support from the rooftops, I wouldn't believe it until I'd seen it.

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  3. As of tonight, i've been able to succesfully have hardware acceleration in Flash Player (youtube 1080p videos running smoothly). I've detailed my instructions here:

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  4. I have got it up and running very well on AO532h with Ubuntu Natty. I had to compile from a git snapshot though from here: http://git.wilsonet.com/crystalhd.git/ (I used 2011-01-23 one). Acceleration with Flash (10,2,154,18) works without problems, as well as in totem (GStreamer).

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