[meatshake]

As per the blog on the front page, I see they are talking about a broadcom video decoder.

I looked it up on ebay and it's already on there! Or it's been on there for sometime and it's just been keeping quiet..

BroadCom BCM970010 BCM970012NB Mini PCI-e HD Decoder - eBay TV Cards, PC Cards, Laptop Accessories, Computers. (end time 12-Jun-09 17:39:58 AEST)

Eitherway, does anybody know how it works? Will it need extra drivers to be taken advantage of?

Also has anybody tried soldering on the extra mini pcie port on the mini 9's that didnt come with wwan? This looks interesting and it could make a worthy upgrade for the mini 9. Now if only it hdmi too..

[Insane Mini9]

i believe that the extra port on out mini's won't work with it. but i'm not 100% sure as i've not tried it

[holmes4]

People have soldered a socket onto the WWAN solder pads, but the Mini 9 wires this for USB only - it is not a full MiniPCIe socket.

[bjd223]

EDIT: I got The correct version of Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre from HP's site, and it is working waaaayyy better. I can stream 1080p now from my media server at ~15% CPU on the MINI! The playback is amazing, and the picture looks good on the Minis limited resolution. The system doesn't seem to run any hotter with the card, as the CPU is now at about 55c when 1080p is playing back, instead of like 85c without the card. This is all on Windows 7. TMT is working much better than Media Player Classic HTE.

I bought the card and it works fine in the WIFI slot. It is hard finding applications that can take advantage of the HW decoder, but when you do it works AMAZING. I can play 720P and 1080P with no dropped frames. If I stream 1080P over the network CPU goes to aboiut 60% with flawless playback.

I can confirm that this works on Windows XP, I will try it on Windows 7 when I install it.

Also Adobe has commited to making their Flash player use the Broadcom card. They say it should be ready in Q1 of 2010.

The obvious drawback is no WIFI card, which I am going to get either a USB N adapter and install it inside the MINI, or try to get one to work in the second PCie slot (which I have not soldered in yet.)

The hardest part is finding the driver, I used the HP Mini 1000 110 Driver.

I am currently testing different applications like Windows Media Player Classic Home Theatre Edition, Arcsoft TotalMedia 3.5. etc.

[Keyone]

Has there been any updates on this? I have been wanting to get one, but only for Flash acceleration (not just Flash video, but games, etc). I don't really use the Mini for HD video other than Flash...

[bjd223]

Originally Posted by Keyone

Has there been any updates on this? I have been wanting to get one, but only for Flash acceleration (not just Flash video, but games, etc). I don't really use the Mini for HD video other than Flash...

Yeah the new 10.1 Flash update uses the Crystal HD decoder card. It still needs a little work but I can playback HD youtube videos with little issue. As they work on it more I hope the playback gets even better.

I doubt there will ever be a way to accelerate a gaming locally. There is an application that can stream a game to the mini, which I heard works pretty good. You might want to check that out.

[Keyone]

Originally Posted by bjd223

Yeah the new 10.1 Flash update uses the Crystal HD decoder card. It still needs a little work but I can playback HD youtube videos with little issue. As they work on it more I hope the playback gets even better.

I doubt there will ever be a way to accelerate a gaming locally. There is an application that can stream a game to the mini, which I heard works pretty good. You might want to check that out.

Thanks for your input.

Oh, but I was referring to other Flash content besides H.264 encoded HD video. Let's say a website (like Nike.com's lame Flash catalog) is all based on Flash (or a Facebook Flash game), will this "hardware acceleration" accelerate such Flash content as well?

[bjd223]

Originally Posted by Keyone

Thanks for your input.

Oh, but I was referring to other Flash content besides H.264 encoded HD video. Let's say a website (like Nike.com's lame Flash catalog) is all based on Flash (or a Facebook Flash game), will this "hardware acceleration" accelerate such Flash content as well?

Ohh I don't know exactly what is offloaded to the GPU in the new version of Flash. It might be only video.

[safemode]

only h264 decoding and possibly other mpeg type codecs . All the other crap that is involved with flash is not offloaded.

Note: This other crap makes up a huge portion of the total cpu usage flash uses. It's part of the reason why 480p is less playable in a window in flash than 720p fullscreen in a real media player.

Note2: even when playing video that is supported in flash, scaling and actually rendering to the screen is still done in software like flash likes to do. So you still have to use the cpu to flip frames in the framebuffer. Real media players will use the gpu's overlay (or equiv. texture buffer setup) to do the work of scaling video to the screen. This means window or fullscreen doesn't effect cpu usage on real media players, but obviously does in flash. The addon card has nothing to do with this.

Basically, if you use the addon card with a real media player, you can play back even 1080p h264. If you use the addon card with flash, you might be able to play back 720p with only minor skips.