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]