CrystalHD version and performance

Help and Support Apple TV
1

I installed the latest OSMC on a USB stick on an old ATV1 that was sitting around unused and have it up and running as a media player candidate for the spare bedroom. It has a CrystalHD card but I’m not sure which version. Is there a way to tell the version via SSH?

I usually play 720p H264 videos and have confirmed that video decode uses the CHD driver. Assuming I have the older BCM70012 CrystalHD, would I see any improvements by upgrading to the newer BCM70015 one?

Thanks.

2

Type
dmesg | grep bcm700*

3 
sudo apt-get install pciutils
lspci | grep Crystal
4

Thanks much.

I have a BCM70012.

5

I notice several hundred frames dropping at the front of a movie followed by smooth playback and am wondering if a CHD upgrade would help. The files are on a local server running over a wired network so the network isn’t the issue.

6

Won’t help

This is a limitation of the current CHD implementation.

7

Thanks for the insight.

Would running off the HDD instead of the USB stick help with performance?

8

yes :wink:

9

It will be slower than using the internal drive

10

While I have not tried using the hard drive, I switched to a very fast Sandisk Extreme USB stick and that seems to have helped significantly though I don’t have any numbers to share.

11

I would say that it’s conceivable that a high-performance USB stick would be faster than the old spinner in the Apple TV.

12

Re-reading this post, I realised I may have appeared to contradict myself.

A cheapo-USB2.0 stick will be slower than the internal disk.
An ‘extreme’ or good USB 3.0 stick, despite the aTV only being USB 2.0, will likely perform better than the internal disk, particularly on 4K speeds.

There is also the option of CF-> IDE cards which perform well, but the outlay on such peripherals is often pointless on such an old piece of hardware.

Sam