Is it compatible? Would it be worth it? Crystal HD

Hello.

The main computer I use with Haiku is a 2008 Dell Studio Hybrid 140g.

Haiku runs incredibly well except when I try to play videos. Both online and offline.

Checking the documentation of the computer I learnt that it has an e-SATA port that accepts the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder that was a solution for hardware decoding before the advent of the i core Intel processors.

In saying that. I also learnt that support for those cards were dropped by windows sometime during the win 10 lifetime and Linux (Ubuntu) included it in the kernel for some time as well but no more.

The other problem being that video playing software and browsers also stopped supporting it so even if one of such cards is present, it does not do any encoding so it is not utilised in modern Win, Linux systems.

Can someone tell me if these decoders are compatible with Haiku? Would it be worth making it compatible?

I mean, they are cheap enough and used in some mobile computers of that vintage. Although there maybe are so few that are that old that it may not be worth it.

It isn’t a deal breaker as most times I can play videos from my mobile phone anyway.

Kind regards.

There is no media decoding acceleration support in Haiku at all, currently.

If someone did bring VA API or similar to Haiku it might be possible to port the Linux driver, but neither would be easy.

With a modern PC, playing videos should be fluid anyway except perhaps with high resolutions. Without acceleration, things that matters are CPU power, RAM available and drive speed but, for internet vids the main problem is often connexion speed.

@cian Understood. It isn’t necessary. I can love without it.

@Starcrasher That’s the thing. It isn’t precisely a modern PC. It is a 2008 machine. If I try to play videos with the browser, CPU usage goes to 100% in both cores.

The system currently has 8Gb of DDR2 667mhz RAM and a Samsung 870 evo SATA SSD.

The integrated graphics in these systems was a 128MB (shared) Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip. It bogs down playing videos on either operative system.

It only gets better if ran on windows 7 with an old version of a player (vlc, xbmp) from before the Broadcom decoder was deprecated.