Crystal HD w/ 3.1.6 drivers - Nice

I picked up my Broadcom Crystal HD board about a month ago, and promptly installed it in my AAO-D250. The driver software was updated last week to version 3.1.6, which has greatly expanded (for me) the number of videos I have that will play through the card.

I thought it was going to be a bit silly to have this board in my AAO, but honestly, it is a really nice upgrade. It plays h.264, mpeg-2, wmv, flash (10.1 beta) and a few others with very fluid motion and much less CPU. Most videos will play just fine with WMP, but for things like .mkv files you need to use Media Player Classic (which also works great). Also works with youtube flash videos if you have the beta flash installed.

Take a look at the main page ( http://www.aspireoneuser.com ) at the video for the new AAO that has the NVidia chip in it. My AAO-D250 will play that exact same video in WMP with about 45% cpu usage. If I turn Aero off, even less. Very cool upgrade!

 

i've had success with more videos, but with media player classic, it's no longer used with some files... including some of my mkv's.

 

Broadcom has newer drivers 3.3.0

http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/

 

some files that previously played now lock up the machine using 3.3.0 on win7 using media player classic or tmt3 (hp variant)

 

I skipped 3.1.6 and went straight to 3.3.0

Seems to be playing fine, Should I go to 3.1.6 ?

 

Don't use MPC or Total Media, but with WMP11/Win7, playback of videos is still good here. compatibility with flash video playback is better with 10.1 b3. the previous release before 3.3.0 (3.2.x?) gave me some playback issues when I upgraded from flash 10.1 b2 to b3.