Broadcom BCM70015 Crystal HD PCI Express Mini Card Video/Audio Hardware DecoderHardware Decoder for Apple TV 1080p(TBS7015 )

I added this to an old Dell laptop (D830). It was unable to play h.264 HD content before. Using the video card it was stuttery and unwatchable. Using the software decoder it couldn't even begin to keep up. With the Crystal HD I get perfect playback with about 20% processor usage. The Linux driver support is good. I am running MythTV on openSuse 12.3. I had to rebuild MythTV from source to incorporate support. But with just a little bit of effort my $75 laptop is playing h.264 1080i HD content.

This thing works great in my old Apple TV 1. I'm able to stream and play 1080p video without any hiccups, although the Apple TV 1 can only output 720p via HDMI, this is a limitation of ATV 1 and not the Crystal HD card. So why use this? Because I have a lot of 1080p video and now I don't need to worry about whether or not the ATV 1 can play it, now it plays everything.BTW, I run OpenELEC on my ATV 1 and the results are great. In one of the menus, it acknowledges that the Crystal HD is installed and being used to decode AVC/H.264.Highly recommended for owners of the ATV 1.

After a ton of research, I decided to pick this card up to make my Apple TV 1 useful. I read forum after forum, watched YouTube videos and consulted friends who were into modifying electronics. Seemed like it couldn't go wrong!I got the card in as per the instructions easily. I put XBMC on my ATV1 with little effort. Then the 1080p test went all kinds of wrong. Anything I tried to play that was 720p or higher, had major pixelation and stuttering. I tried with the Crystal HD acceleration on and off in the XBMC settings. It actually worked much better with the setting turned off. So with the card installed, and the setting for using the card's abilities turned on, playback was 100 times worse than if I'd just left my ATV1 alone.I hit the forums again and tried to find people with the same problems I was having...and there are a lot of us out there! Many people suggest changing audio settings and other "fixes", but none of them worked for me. I finally found a thread of people who suggested that if you had any pixelation, you just had a bad card. Most of these customers returned them for new ones and that solved the issue.I have done that with Amazon, and am awaiting my new card. On the bright side, returning something to Amazon was incredibly easy!

works well for decoding video when you can find a video player that takes advantage of its hardware acceleration. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't get VLC to use this for decoding video. I like the configuration options in VLC for aspect ratio and image quality/brightness/tint etc.I finally tried GOMplayer, which if you google it you'll see is the most recommended player for this card/codec combo.GOMplayer is a very good player and is pretty good substitute for VLC for playing videos on a Netbook. I used this on an acer one pro. It worked well under GOMplayer, I played back a video that stuttered on a p4 3ghz dual core system with an ATI video card, and it played without stuttering on this card. Without this card the video wouldn't play, only the audio - on the netbook. With this card and GOMplayer, it played quite well. (netbook was plugged into wall power so the cpu wouldn't do power throttling)I would however advise, that a Raspberry PI 2, will play the video even better, and isn't much more expensive than this card, which is what I eventually settled on for running video into my projector. Of course the PI requires, a few amenities to get it up and running, like a power supply, a micro sd card, an O/S image and a bit of tweaking to get everything functioning properly.The broadcom card is a great bit of engineering and I wish the codec was supported better. Perhaps if the Broadcom folks donated a few of these cards to the programmers at VLC and gave them a little engineering help in embedding the code to utilize the codec properly, it might make this card much more popular. Its a great solution for netbooks as long as you are happy with GOMplayer (which can be downloaded for free from the developers website) - google gomplayer or GOM Labs.https://player.gomlab.com/I am not affiliated with any of the companies or products mention herein and I paid for everything out of my hard earned and meager salary as spaghetti wrangler on small pasta ranch in the Macaroni Hills.

The product WORKED great until it kept freezing up my system. I installed it on an Apple TV 1st Gen along with Cyrstalbuntu 2.0. The first couple of weeks I had it, it ate up all the media I threw at it and wanted more. Now even when I play an SD movie, the picture will freeze up and will need the Apple TV to be rebooted. I turned off the Broadcom chip within the system menu to find out now that the movies will no longer freeze. I did everything to troubleshoot only to find out it was a faulty Broadcom BCM70015 Chip.

I've got an older Acer Aspire One computer. I thought this might breathe some new life into it. If you are running Windows you will probably have better luck that I did. I had it running Windows XP for a while, it did OK. After I switched to Ubuntu, I discovered that there are some issues with getting the system to work with the driver correctly. I was never satisfied with the performance I got on Linux. And yes, I did put more than a token effort into it, I really did my homework, my research, and tried every solution or tip I could find... just couldn't get it performing to my satisfaction. You'll have better luck sticking with a Windows flavor with this, I'm sure.

Apple TV gen 1 and they worked impeccably though you should remember that you'll need to make provisions to replace the WiFi capability since it's built into the original card but not this. No worries. There are plenty of cheap, efficient solutions available. This was easy to configure and streamed 1080P with no chatter or other issues. Recommended.