Hardware HD Decoder In A Netbook

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGEeTSJiy8g]

[banzai] wasn’t happy with the performance he was getting out of his Samsung netbook. He decided it was time to do something about it. He noticed that Dell and HP both sell an optional HD decoder card for their netbooks. After a short search, he found one on ebay for only $24. He had to give up his internal wireless, but he doesn’t mind using a USB wireless dongle. Sure this isn’t horribly complicated, but he has information here that might help smooth out the process.

[via OlivierDole]

22 thoughts on “Hardware HD Decoder In A Netbook

  1. Why bother to post if you dont bother to read the whole article?
    Would this save battery life (for other things than just hd playback?)
    This makes me want to solder that second mini pcie slot on my acer aspire one.
    Anyone tried on win7 yet?

  2. I’m still researching how to get – if possible – a second mini-pcie slot on my aspire one for this exact reason… I’m considering stacking a second molex connector and using a switch somehow to go between wireless and HD playback, since I don’t often use both at once… but really don’t want to use a usb dongle…

    I’ll do a writeup on that if I ever figure it out, obviously.

  3. Maybe a netbook wasn’t the best platform to purchase if his goal was playback of HD content, especially if he has to lose WiFi to do it.

    Don’t really get what he was trying to do here, why would anyone use a netbook to playback 1080p content? The screen isn’t up to standards, and if you are going to hook it up to an external monitor/TV, you might as well just build a HTPC (around something with more power than a netbook).

    If he had soldered in the headers for the second mini-PCI slot then at least he would have had his 1080p playback (for whatever reason) without crippling the rest of the machine’s functionality.

  4. Hate to be the one to say this, but installing a card into your laptop, and using it for its intended purpose is not a hack.

    Check it out guys, I just totally hacked my computer by installing a video card! Now it plays games faster, what an awesome hack, right?

  5. LOL, Transformers 2.

    I could install my OS to a good USB flash drive with a high number of write cycles, swap out my SSD and put one of these in my eeepc900. Could be nice for streaming HQ video.

  6. This looks very interesting. It looks like there is r soon will be support for this card on the Apple TV.

    On my old MythtTV box I was getting about 20 fps with 1080i video from my HD Cable box. I could buy one of these little cards and a mini-pci to full pci card and put it in my Mythtv box! Well if I ever get HD cable again.

  7. I think if you need a separate card just to process HD video you should:

    1. Buy a real laptop without the silly half-assed netbook specs.

    2. Buy a TV and Blu-Ray player and watch something in HD for real.

    There’s always YouTube-quality HD for the netbookers.

  8. I’ve done the exact same thing with my netbook.

    But I soldered the empty mini pci-e connector in, and used a mini pci-e wifi card that uses the usb interface on the connector. This way I don’t have to use a dongle.

    The link to the card is on my name.

  9. I don’t understand why you’d want this but it’s an interesting hack and appears to work well.

    Personally I got away from TV hardware mixing with my PCs when pages stopped taking forever to load!

  10. The atom processor in these netbooks are pretty low-powered. Trying to play an HDTV clip, even 720p chokes most of them. Hulu or YoutubeHD does the same thing. Adobe Flash will support these hardware decoders next year, so this mod will give you smooth Hulu, which is what I was aiming for.

    Also, since some netbooks have HDMI, this will allow you to output 1080p content smoothly as well.

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