Best way to load Crystal HD drivers in Ubuntu?
#1
I've installed a Crystal HD PCIe card in an older (white core duo) iMac running Lucid 10.04. I downloaded the drivers from Broadcom's site and couldn't find a readme so I started googling. I found some CrystalHD libraries in Synaptic, but it appears that I still need the actual drivers.

I found this thread and attempted to follow atbrandt's steps to build the installer, but when I get to step 4 and attempt to ./configure I get the following:

Quote:matt@MagicMac:~/Downloads/crystalhd/driver/linux$ ./configure
checking for ld... ld
configure: creating ./config.status
.in'ig.status: error: cannot find input file: `

As you can probably already tell, I'm kind of a Linux idiot and don't know what I'm doing. So my questions are either 1) Am I doing something wrong or 2) is there a better way to load up these drivers, since that post is from January? My goal is to get the CrystalHD stuff working in the following apps in this order 1) XBMC 2) Boxee 3)MythTV (When they announce native support).

Thanks in advance and always I apologize for my ignorance.

EDIT: Wow, it's been a while since I've logged on here, ignore the specs in my sig.
Mac: White iMac Core Duo, Radeon mobility X1300 128MB video, Broadcom CrystalHD Mini PCIe OS X 10.5.6
PC: Mythbuntu 10.10, Dual-core Pentium 2.0GHZ, 2GB RAM, GeForce 9400 PCIe
TV: 60" Sharp Aquos connected via HDMI
...And a launch day Boxee Box!
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#2
jerkychew Wrote:I've installed a Crystal HD PCIe card in an older (white core duo) iMac running Lucid 10.04. I downloaded the drivers from Broadcom's site and couldn't find a readme so I started googling. I found some CrystalHD libraries in Synaptic, but it appears that I still need the actual drivers.

I found this thread and attempted to follow atbrandt's steps to build the installer, but when I get to step 4 and attempt to ./configure I get the following:



As you can probably already tell, I'm kind of a Linux idiot and don't know what I'm doing. So my questions are either 1) Am I doing something wrong or 2) is there a better way to load up these drivers, since that post is from January? My goal is to get the CrystalHD stuff working in the following apps in this order 1) XBMC 2) Boxee 3)MythTV (When they announce native support).

Thanks in advance and always I apologize for my ignorance.

EDIT: Wow, it's been a while since I've logged on here, ignore the specs in my sig.

see http://code.google.com/p/crystalhd-for-osx/ it contains both osx and linux driver/lib.

use the 1.0.3 tag, do NOT use trunk.
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#3
Thanks davilla, that worked. It took me a REALLY long time to figure out what you meant by using 1.0.3 and not trunk. I went around in circles for a really long time on that page until I figured out how to pull from http://crystalhd-for-osx.googlecode.com/...osx-1.0.3/ - I understand that this is still under heavy development so I didn't want to bother you guys with basic svn 101 questions.

I ran into a couple issues which I'll detail here in case others get stuck.

First, XBMC wouldn't load. It complained about not having OpenGL drivers loaded and gave a lot of missing GLX errors in the logs - My Ubuntu was an upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 and I thought that perhaps the drivers broke during the upgrade. Since xorg.conf apparently is no more I had a heck of a time figuring out what was loaded and what wasn't. Long story short, I have an ATI x1300 and I had installed mythbuntu-control-centre to make the box a MythTV frontend, and for some reason mythbuntu likes to load in NVidia drivers and the Nvidia control panel. Once I removed them via Synaptic, XBMC was able to load.

Second, it looks like SVN XBMC does away with 'scripts' and it's up to the script author to rewrite their code. I had planned on using Mythbox to playback H.264 content from my Myth server, but since Mythbox is a script, it won't work for me.

Finally, I had a bit of tearing on playback and CPU usage was higher than, say, VDPAU on my Dell laptop - I'd say that each core averaged around 40-60% usage for XBMC while trying to play back an 1080p MKV of the Star Trek movie. I'm chalking this up to running SVN code (I'm assuming a lot of debugging was turned on) on top of bleeding edge hardware whose drivers are still under heavy development. I just wanted to mention this in case it's something the devs would like to know about.

Pretty cool tech, and I look forward to seeing it mature! Thanks for the help and all the effort the devs have put in thus far.
Mac: White iMac Core Duo, Radeon mobility X1300 128MB video, Broadcom CrystalHD Mini PCIe OS X 10.5.6
PC: Mythbuntu 10.10, Dual-core Pentium 2.0GHZ, 2GB RAM, GeForce 9400 PCIe
TV: 60" Sharp Aquos connected via HDMI
...And a launch day Boxee Box!
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#4
jerkychew Wrote:Finally, I had a bit of tearing on playback and CPU usage was higher than, say, VDPAU on my Dell laptop - I'd say that each core averaged around 40-60% usage for XBMC while trying to play back an 1080p MKV of the Star Trek movie. I'm chalking this up to running SVN code (I'm assuming a lot of debugging was turned on) on top of bleeding edge hardware whose drivers are still under heavy development. I just wanted to mention this in case it's something the devs would like to know about.

"tearing on playback", turn on "vsync always".

"each core averaged around 40-60% usage for XBMC while trying to play back an 1080p MKV of the Star Trek movie" does not sound like it's using crystalhd. Type 'o' to bring up the codec OSD. If you see ff-xxxx, it's using ffmepg for decode, chd-xxx, crystalhd. This is also indicated in xbmc.log

Last, svn trunk at crystalhd-for-osx is stable again at r114. Both bcm70012 and bcm70015 support is present and as always both osx and linux driver/libs are present in that tree. Note that 64-bit linux might be problematic, still pursuing issues with that.
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#5
davilla Wrote:"tearing on playback", turn on "vsync always".
The closest I could find was "sync playback to display
" which I've enabled and so far seems to have helped although there is still stuttering during action scenes.

Quote:"each core averaged around 40-60% usage for XBMC while trying to play back an 1080p MKV of the Star Trek movie" does not sound like it's using crystalhd. Type 'o' to bring up the codec OSD. If you see ff-xxxx, it's using ffmepg for decode, chd-xxx, crystalhd. This is also indicated in xbmc.log

Neat, I didn't know about o, I'll use it for my testing. I see "dc:chd-h264" so I assume that's CrystalHD. The full output of that line is:

D(Video:h264, yuv420p, 1920x800) P(vq:91%, dc:chd-h264, Mb/s:6.74, drop:286, pc:24)

Not sure what the yuv420p means. xbmc.bin is usring 52% cpu at the moment so it sounds like something may be wrong?

One thing of note is that the display on this imac only outputs 1440 x 900 while O tells me that the res of Star Trek is 1920x800. Just wanted to mention that in case there's an issue with downscaling the image.

If I attempt to seek via the right arrow, the image freezes and a million of the following show up in the logs: 12:33:52 T:2501950320 M:1742995456 DEBUG: CrystalHD: DtsProcOutput returned BC_STS_ERR_USAGE.

Not sure if it's a new bug or a known issue, I can test further if you want to throw some scenarios at me.

Quote:Last, svn trunk at crystalhd-for-osx is stable again at r114. Both bcm70012 and bcm70015 support is present and as always both osx and linux driver/libs are present in that tree. Note that 64-bit linux might be problematic, still pursuing issues with that.

32-bit Ubuntu here. I should have mentioned that.
Mac: White iMac Core Duo, Radeon mobility X1300 128MB video, Broadcom CrystalHD Mini PCIe OS X 10.5.6
PC: Mythbuntu 10.10, Dual-core Pentium 2.0GHZ, 2GB RAM, GeForce 9400 PCIe
TV: 60" Sharp Aquos connected via HDMI
...And a launch day Boxee Box!
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#6
I just updated to the latest SVN and playback is MUCH smoother. XBMC.bin is using a total of 51% CPU and the playback of the same MKV is super smooth. Excellent work!
Mac: White iMac Core Duo, Radeon mobility X1300 128MB video, Broadcom CrystalHD Mini PCIe OS X 10.5.6
PC: Mythbuntu 10.10, Dual-core Pentium 2.0GHZ, 2GB RAM, GeForce 9400 PCIe
TV: 60" Sharp Aquos connected via HDMI
...And a launch day Boxee Box!
Reply

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Best way to load Crystal HD drivers in Ubuntu?0