Broadcom brings out new Crystal HD Solution for netbooks

The Crystal HD Solution should make effortless HD video playback possible in netbooks

We get HD-ready netbooks today anyway. But Broadcom’s focus here is to provide a low cost, low power, but equally advanced HD video playback to the netbooks. The objective is to make these low-powered systems handle demanding multimedia easily but without raising the cost factor too much. The BCM70015 single chip Crystal HD enhanced media accelerator encompasses H.264 and VC-1 video compression which the company claims will provide near flawless HD streaming.

"Netbooks have grown in popularity in part because they are easily transportable. Broadcom’s low power and low cost Crystal HD technology will allow netbook owners, for the first time, to use their netbooks as portable multimedia playback devices on which they can experience HD video anytime, anywhere", says Dan Eiref, Vice President & General Manager, Broadcom’s Consumer Electronics Line of Business

The scope of this technology extends out to Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Windows Media Player 12 (which comes as a default player with Win 7) and in general the PC/x86 applications. Supported formats include H.264/AVC, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV9, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid and AVS.

Naren Shankar, also of the consumer electronics division, demonstrated this technology on a netbook with standard configurations like N270 and 10-inch panel. The HP Mini 110 comes with the Broadcom HD technology, and it was compared with another netbook without it. 1080P video was demonstrated on both the systems and the one without it plays video really sloppily with a CPU usage of more than 90% at times! The HP Mini 110, on the other hand, plays full framerates with about 20% of CPU usage.

The question here remains of how it will cope with the ION and the CULV processors. But definitely this little chip can add a lot of spice to your netbook.