Upgrading 1st gen AppleTV to play Full HD
This morning I installed the Broadcom CrystalHD BCM70012 Mini PCIe card into my AppleTV. I had to take out the WiFi card that was in the slot, but as my home is fully wired I couldn’t care less. The card is a hardware decoder that can process AVC, VC-1 and MPEG (yes, also mkv/h264’s from shady places…) up to 1080p. The 1Ghz processor in the AppleTV is not powerful enough to do this, it can only handle 720p low profile h264 files (which is typically not the kind that floats around the Internet ;)).
Currently only SVN builds of XBMC support the CrystalHD, but as Boxee is based on XBMC it will probably support it in the future! I’ve only tested 720p so far as I don’t have any 1080p files (and it’s all my tv can show anyway).
The next thing I would like to try out is installing Crystalbuntu on the AppleTV, maybe later.
