CrystalHD OSX

The other day I finally broke down and ordered a CrystalHD decoder chip. The CrystalHD is a hardware decoder than can decode h.264/AVC, VC1 and Mpeg2 in hardware. It plugs into a PCI-Express 1x slot. You can install it on an older mac mini or an apple tv. I have to say the results were fantastic. With some higher bitrate shows my mini would skip. But no longer with this magnificent little chip. I would recommend it for anyone who is on older hardware and doesn’t want to pay to upgrade their cpu or system in general.

One thing to note is that in order to get it to work with the latest version of osx I had to compile it from source. You can download the source here. If you are installing in osx skip the “install instructions (kext driver)” section and just enter the following into the terminal. this will let the kext load after each reboot.

sudo cp -r BroadcomCrystalHD.kext /System/Library/Extensions/
sudo -S chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
sudo -S chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

One thing I would like to see if it would ever be possible to use this with FFMPEG. Imagine having the CrystalHD decode the frames and have ffmpeg encode them in another format. This would increase transcoding times significantly since most of the computer resources would be freed. I wonder if any one has tried it out.