[mythtv-users] Broadcom HD card and mini PCIe to PCI adapter working

[Frank Merrill]

For those who have a system that has no mini-PCIe slot, but still want
to test the Broadcom Crystal HD Decoder card:

Although decoding via a Crystal HD is not yet available in MythTV, I
went ahead and obtained a Broadcom BCM70012 mini-PCIe decoder to test
with.
I actually don't have any machine that has a mini-PCIe slot, so I
decided to try an adapter.
I finally found one at a reasonable price ($14 USD), previous ones I
found were $25 USD or more:

http://www.titanwirelessonline.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=RB-11E

I have installed the Crystal HD Card into the adapter, and then
installed the adapter into a PCIe X1 slot, and it is seen just fine by
the machine:

Partial output of lspci:
02:00.0 Multimedia controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM70012 Video
Decoder [Crystal HD] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device 2612
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 27
	Memory at f89f0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
	Memory at f8400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]

I then used Jarods git site to pull down the driver and firmware,
compiled it, and it also loads fine.
http://git.wilsonet.com/crystalhd.git/

It compiled and installed fine, and the firmware loaded ok, and also
does so after a reboot.

Again, since MythTV can't yet use this decoder, I am currently
testing it with the still-in-development integration work being done
by Scott Davilla for XBMC.

The primary purpose of this message is just to indicate that the card
will be able to be used fine on motherboards that at least have a PCIe
X1 slot, even if they have no mini-PCIe slot.
I may also take the HD card on this adapter and plug it into another
adapter (a PCIe X1 to PCI) to see if it can be made to work in just a
PCI slot, but without looking at the numbers, I'd guess the PCI bus
would be a limiting factor.

Frank