Quote:
Originally Posted by MukiEX
I was just looking at Broadcom's Crystal HD chip, which seems awesome but brings about two rather important questions. Once again, sorry for the hijack, as this is barely relevant but I'm not sure it warrants its own topic.
- Are there any netbooks on the market that have a real spare mini-PCIE slot? Using a USB wifi adapter on a notebook looks... dirty. Conversely, it'd be nice if Broadcom updated CrystalHD with a wifi chip and possibly got it into some existing netbook models. It's easily worth $50-100 price premium (compared to ION's ~$150)
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There are lots of netbook models with secondary Mini-PCIe slots that can be used for a Broadcom Crystal HD card. However, many of these netbooks only have the pads on the motherboard, and do not actually have the physical slot soldered on (so you'd have to do a little modding).
Netbooks that I know have an open and ready-to-use Mini-PCIe slot that works for more than just a WWAN radio are: HP Mini 110, HP Mini 210 and the Samsung N120.
There are many more netbooks with free Mini-PCIe slots, but like I said, you often have to do some soldering. I know that both the Asus eee PC 901 and 1000HE can be modified to turn the WWAN radio slot into a fully-functional Mini-PCIe slot.
ION is of course much more capable, but you can easily adapt a Samsung N120 for HD video playback with minimal cost, by picking up a used or refurbished N120, then buying a Broadcom card off ebay for $20.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MukiEX
- To anyone who's tried it (synaesthetic?): I've read it can't handle "Killa Sampla" (my vaguely definitive video accel. standard), but is this due to format limitations (macroblocks, doesn't accelerate at all) or performance limitations on the chip? (plays slowly, choppy). 1080p H.264 over XBMC on any OS for an extra $30-50 is pretty sweet any which way you cut it.
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According to Terracode's test with a Broadcom accelerator in an Acer Aspire One, it can handle the "Planet Earth" 1080p clip, which is a pretty intensive bit of imagery to render, in the L5.1 profile with 16 reference frames.
It can handle a lot, but I don't really see the point in playing back 1080p Blu-ray rips on a netbook with a 9" or 10" screen. I can understand wanting 720p playback, since many fansub groups
only release 720p encodes, but 1080p is a ways away before it becomes the standard.