Broadcom Crystal HD Driver?

[Andropov]

Is there any driver to use Broadcom Crystal HD Driver on a PowerPC Mac? Currently I have a Dual 1.8Ghz G5, although I'm planning to buy a Quad.

However, I wonder if it's possible to use the Broadcom Crystal HD card. I'll need a PCI to PCIe adapter (it should have enough bandwidth even over a 32-bit PCI bus) and a PCIe to Mini PCIe adapter. And when I move to a Quad, I'd be able to use the PCIe to Mini PCIe adapter too (without the PCI to PCIe one). It'd also be interesting in a Quad because although it can play FullHD videos flawlessly, that takes a lot of CPU power (so a lot of heat, fans spinning up, more electricity used, will slow down things if you're doing something else at the same time...etc).

What do you think? It's possible to use the Broadcom Crystal HD drivers under Mac OS X PPC?

 

[ihuman:D]

I think there's a driver for 10.4.X (That's what the ATV1 runs on)

 

[Andropov]

I think there's a driver for 10.4.X (That's what the ATV1 runs on)

The AppleTV 1 has a Pentium M processor, so the driver is probably x86.

I found that. It has some drivers, although none of them seems to be PPC compatible (all show i386 as supported architectures).

 

[Andropov]

I contacted the developer of the port (the original Broadcom driver was Linux only) and he says the driver is Intel only (although he also says that it could be ported, but he's not interested in doing it). Maybe someone else can do it, the source code is just there...

 

[ihuman:D]

Apparently it also improves the performance of Flash video.

 

[Andropov]

Yes, it's pretty much like adding a 5th processor just for video playback purposes. It'd play FullHD content flawlessly using only a few cycles of the G5 processor.