10.1” Refurbished HP Mini 110-1125NR $260 + Free Shipping
$259.99
Thursday, June 17, 2010
When I got my HP Mini 110, one of the first things I wanted to do was install my Broadcom Crystal HD Decoder (Broadcom BCM70012) mini PCI-e card that I had laying around gathering dust.
HP provides a manual for taking apart your netbook, and for the most part it is very straightforward, however I do point out some areas that you’ll need to be aware of in the first half of the video as I talk about taking the HP Mini 110 apart.
Didn’t have much time to show Flash 10.1 / 1080p playback but 1080p playback of non-flash videos works well, like we’ve seen before, using ArcSoft TotalMedia, the OEM version only available from HP. It’s still only available for Windows XP and I had some errors pop up during the install but it works fine playing videos. Depending on your video, you’ll need to hunt down codecs. I see that there is support for the Broadcom card with XBMC (along with one or two other players), not out of the box however. I was only successful with ArcSoft TotalMedia.
I’ve seen some feedback with Flash 10.1 working with the Broadcom card with Flash 10.1 pre-release but at least with Beta 2, as far as my tests go, I can’t get any sort of hardware accelerated Flash 10.1. Will have to wait until later Flash 10.1 releases.
Overall, a little disappointed with the state of the Broadcom card - very little support for for it, still, and Flash 10.1 working.
I am amazed with the screen on the HP Mini 110 - the matte coating is unlike anything I’ve seen before on a laptop / netbook (you get it on desktop LCDs though). It looks very similar to the one of the Sony Vaio X. There’s no texture or softening of the image like you get with the usual matte displays, and combine that with the 1366 x 768 display. This is my favourite netbook display to date.
Stuff you’ll need:
Flash 10.1 (currently Beta 2)
Broadcom Crystal HD Decoder mini-PCIe card (BCM70012) $25 on eBay.
Disassembly guide for HP Mini 110 (courtesy of MyHPMini)
Broadcom HD Video Decorder drivers - more recent than HP’s drivers.
ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre HP OEM version. - Windows XP - I don’t see any Windows 7 version.
Some Crystal HD news, XBMC has officially announced support for it with cross platform Windows/OSX/Linux.
That should give it a shot in the arm as the code is open source other players may adapt it for their own use.
http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broadcom-crystal-hd-its-magic/
However its nightly builds only no stable release and the latest official 9.11 release only just came out so might be a while before another new release with Crystal HD. Still the Crystal HD card is starting to actually get used so maybe more makers will include it in their netbooks.
Also noticed over in XBMC forums this page which claims Crystal HD support for MPC-HC! along with a driver link.
They must have enabled DXVA support under Windows because the latest build of MPC-HC was last released in August.
http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/
how can i make the wireless switch work again.
turns blue when i turn on but then turns amber and stays that way?
Can you tell something about the power consumption of the Broadcom mini PCI-e card ?
Will it have a significant influence on the batterie life or is batterie life not much influenced while i am working on my netbook in Office etc.. while having the broadcom unused but plugged in
Maybe a little late, but I have had the card working in Windows Media Player and Media Player Classic Home Cinema without any problems since I have it.
It is important however to install the driver, reinstall DirectX, and enable hardware support in both progams (internal VC1/H264 DXVA decoders in MPC:HC).
Flash is a different matter, I only installed the broadcom driver and had it working in XP. But haven’t had any luck since I upgraded to 7.
Broadcom in a MSI wind U210 with no improvement. Took several trys to get the device manager to recognize but seems to be in there every reboot now. The next version of flash 10.1 should support it-thats all I use to stream videos anyway.
Hi guys
I bought Broadcom Crystal HD for my HP Mini 210 netbook. I received it this morning and still haven’t understand it. I put it in my machine, and i installed its driver which was downloaded from broadcom.com. Now i can’t see any changes…. i mean there is no difference with playing HD videos. its still struggling with 720 and 1080 movies which is in my HDD. I tried HD videos from Youtube as well, but same as before. I went to device manager and checked if its installed properly but its properly installed. What should I do?? How do i know if its working???
You need specific software for the Crystal HD to work in particular development builds of MPC-HC, XBMC or Flash 10.1
The current officially available versions do not support the Crystal HD.
Try a development build of MPC-HC from here svn-1883
http://xvidvideo.ru/media-player-classic-home-cinema-x86-x64/
A version of Arcsoft’s Total Theatre for HP netbooks with Crystal HD support is also available
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp43501-44000/sp43732.exe