Crystal HD is Broadcom's hardware semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) core that performs video decoding. [1]
Crystal HD includes single chip high-definition advanced media processors BCM70012 (codenamed Link) and BCM70015 (codenamed Flea); [2] these chips are available on mini PCIe cards. [3] [4]
The BCM970012 supports hardware decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG-2 and the BCM970015 additionally supports DivX 3.11, 4.1, 5.X, 6.X and Xvid. [3] VP8, VP9, Daala and HEVC are not supported.
Crystal HD is found in Intel Atom based machines, [5] such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 [6] HP Slate 500 or ExoPC, ASUS Eee Keyboard.[ citation needed ]
The commercial relevancy of dedicated video decoding accelerators was ended by the launch of the Intel Core i-series, featuring an integrated GPU with hardware video decoding (formerly only widespreadly available in discrete GPUs).
The Crystal HD SIP core must be supported by a device driver, which provides the video interfaces. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example Media Player Classic or GStreamer, to access CrystalHD.
Broadcom published a Linux device driver under GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. [7] Broadcom also published application and library source code on a royalty-free basis under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1
Crystal HD can be accessed through the Video Acceleration API interface via an experimental driver (however, it cannot be recovered from the linked archive). [8] [ unreliable source? ] A GStreamer plugin is available. [9]
Crystal HD support is available in FFmpeg and MPlayer when compiled with the corresponding option. [10] [11]
It could be added to first generation Apple TV when OSMC is installed, [12] although support was dropped in 2017. [13]
Broadcom published a device driver for Microsoft Windows that provides accelerated DirectShow renderers filters. [7]
MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using DJGPP is also available. Versions for the Wii Homebrew Channel and Amazon Kindle have also been developed.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed to accelerate computer graphics and image processing. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, and exports them in another. The formats and processes can be changed in a plug and play fashion.
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A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
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The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.
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Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is an open source application programming interface that allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing unit (GPU). It is implemented by the free and open-source library libva, combined with a hardware-specific driver, usually provided together with the GPU driver.
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X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA), designed by AMD Graphics for its Radeon GPU and APU, is an arbitrary extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System on Linux operating-systems. XvBA API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are currently motion compensation (MC) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), and variable-length decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), WMV3, and VC-1 encoded video.
Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.
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High Efficiency Video Coding implementations and products covers the implementations and products of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).
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