Difference in Crystal HD boards?

[jdmpike]

I have just acquired a 1st generation Apple TV and would like to put a Broadcom Crystal HD card in for high definition video acceleration.

An amazon search shows two variants:
- HB-VD904
- HB-VD920

The only difference to me appears to be form factor, but I wanted to make sure either of these should work with the first generation ATV for HD video playback.

Side note: anyone know an external wireless card that will work with this platform?

[chewitt]

There are two different broadcom H.264 chips in circulation; BCM70012 and the newer BCM70015. It looks like the HB partcodes map to those so the HB-VD920/BCM70015 based card is the better of the two, but boh of them will make a huge difference. An eBay search on the broadcom chipset numbers usually gives plenty of results B)

[jdmpike]

I found the treasure trove of Broadcom Crystal HD cards after making the original post.

I hope the chipset on the Broadcom BCM70012 BCM970012 BCM70010 Crystal HD Decoder cards work well, even for 1080p. I just made an offer for several for all 1st gen ATV's I plan to pick up off of Craigslist.

Chewitt, I have read many of your other posts - what external usb wifi chipset do you prefer once you have removed the wifi?

[chewitt]

I've tried 150/300 MB/s (single vs. double antenna) versions of a "Sitecom" branded product using a realtek 8188SU chipset which offers 2.4GHz 802.11n. Both cards are rock-solid for all SD and 720p content I have but they don't give enough bandwidth for larger 1080p blu-ray rips (e.g. files 8GB+ in size) and you see "buffering.." during playback.

I also have a Netgear WNDA3200 80211.n 2.4/5GHz card which uses the ath9k driver and in 5GHz mode I get higher throughput and 1080p playback is fine - although this card is a dual mode WLAN+Memory device and I have issues with it flipping back into "flash stick" mode during playback which renders it majorly unreliable. Without a second card to test with I have no way to figure out whether it's a hardware fault in one card or something in the OS that triggers the mode-switch.

Other things to consider with my setup - the NAS is an Apple TimeCapsule with a second hard drive connected to the external USB port and I'm sharing over SMB so it's not the speediest platform to serve content from, even with the ATV sited 1.5m from the router. I'd expect things to improve a little with a proper NAS sharing over NFS.

So, I can't make a specific recommendation but if you need 1080p streaming from a NAS you definitely need a 5GHz-capable card and equivalent router. If you're storing content on the local hard drive and you only need WLAN for scraping you should be okay with almost anything - the Linux kernel supports all the major WLAN chipsets these days so adding support in OE is mostly a case of uncommenting lines in the kernel config file so it's included in the next dev release.