[APPLETV] Hardware Decoder for Apple TV? If comes true sounds very nice! @Davilla...

[dan1son]

Originally Posted by dublus

Okay, now I'm more confused than ever (no big surprise ). The thing that will be compiled if the steps you outlined are accomplished correctly - it would be useful for the windows box it was compiled on? Something else? Please enlighten me because I happen to have both VS2003 and VS2008 and have access to a clever friend or two.

@reaven - As for what I consider a "good" price for an ATV, the 40gig ones are going on ebay for between $90 and $150 so I am naturally looking for one for $90 or less .

I thought he made it perfectly clear he won't be giving you a how-to compile guide. I'm sure if you scour the development sections you can find guides on how to compile a Windows GL build. Follow those steps for the crystalhd branch with broadcom header files in place (again read past posts) and you should be able to get it working.

Highly experimental builds tend to be unstable, unfinished, and sometimes quite quirky. Unless you have experience building large apps in Visual Studio, I'd stay away and wait for the official release. There's no reason to assume this is vaporware.

EDIT: Sorry I just noticed you replied to me... it's possible you didn't read Davilla's response before posting. Sorry if I was harsh...

[mr.b]

Originally Posted by dublus

Meanwhile, the hunt for a good price on an ATV has been my "hobby".

pardon the detour, but you guys might like this.

I'll share my secret to getting a good deal on ebay - its worked for years and I even created a service around it a long time ago (now defunct). So, search on ebay for what you want, use advanced search abilities to weed out the crap, click on the buy-it-now tab, fill in some target upper and lower price limits, update the results, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the RSS link:

for apple tv mine would look something like this:
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?LH_BIN=1...nternal&_rss=1

(I didn't spend lots of time refining that search, but you could possibly add some negatives to weed out the drive-only auctions)

now, find your fave RSS notification service or script (notifications app on the iphone works brilliantly), and plug that in so that you get notified when someone posts a new buy-it-now auction matching your query. I have picked up several ATVs @ around $100 over time this way -- works for anything else you want to snag too and I like it better than trying to snipe stuff...

[A600]

Originally Posted by dan1son

If I had a windy's box with a mini pci-e card (or even full pci-e slot with adapter), I would have probably gone through the steps already... unfortunately I don't. My Windy's boxes are all quite out dated.

I'm eagerly waiting for the CrystalHD card and the pcie-1x converter to arrive so I compiled the latest SVN version of the DX and GL builds and they seem to work but, of course, I get the message: "ERROR: CrystalHD: Failed to open Broadcom Crystal HD"

[davilla]

Originally Posted by A600

I'm eagerly waiting for the CrystalHD card and the pcie-1x converter to arrive so I compiled the latest SVN version of the DX and GL builds and they seem to work but, of course, I get the message: "ERROR: CrystalHD: Failed to open Broadcom Crystal HD"

Hahaha, silly guy, no crystal hd installed, of course you will get "Failed to open Broadcom Crystal HD".

If you do have the card installed and have verified that arcsoft works (driver/lib installed correctly), then place a copy of the dll and firmware under the xbmc root.

[A600]

Originally Posted by davilla

Hahaha, silly guy, no crystal hd installed, of course you will get "Failed to open Broadcom Crystal HD".

I own it but don't have it I hope the Hong Kong and Taiwan mail services bring me soon the card and adapter.

[Peteo]

Originally Posted by reaven

really, what you mean by good price ?

I got my used 160 gig apple tv from craigslist for $120!
You should check there, you can usually talk down the price. Plus you can ask them to show it to you running to make sure it works.

[Scott R]

davilla, I came up with another idea for how this could turn out to be a really huge deal. Perhaps you guys are working on an XBMC for TiVo port? I believe they're using a Broadcom chip.

[tangent1138]

Davilla--
I'm curious, once the new version of XBMC is out which do you think would be better at rendering 1080p content: a discrete video chipset like Nvidia 9400m/ Nvidia ion or the Broadcom Crystal HD card?

[davilla]

Originally Posted by tangent1138

Davilla--
I'm curious, once the new version of XBMC is out which do you think would be better at rendering 1080p content: a discrete video chipset like Nvidia 9400m/ Nvidia ion or the Broadcom Crystal HD card?

Ion takes less CPU, it does not have to move the decoded video into the GPU, it's already there as video decoding takes place in the GPU.

An nvidia chipset needs a pci/pci-e slot or is on-board. If you don't have that (like the AppleTV) then Broadcom Crystal HD card in a mini pci-e slot might be all you can do.

As to your question, the Broadcom Crystal HD card does not do rendering, it does hardware video decoding. Maybe you want to rephrase your question

[kjgarrison]

I can't help but wonder how much farther along in the project davilla would be if he didn't get so many pesky questions.

Or maybe I should say if he didn't bother to answer so many.