Thursday, April 22, 2010

Netbook Hack For Smooth HD Videos

One obvious drawback of the Atom based netbooks that they cannot play back HD video smoothly. Actually they cannot play back any higher bitrate video without framedrops/slideshow effect. It is even worse with flash videos which use more resources compared to a normal .avi container ones.

With a small hack the solution is here! You cannot squeeze out any more power from those weak Atom processors, but you can snap in a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator card (BCM970012) to a PCI Express Mini Card slot.

Unfortunately there are few netbooks out there with an empty PCI-E Mini Card Slot, but you can sacrifice your WLAN card and can replace it for example with an Edimax EW-7711UTn miniature USB stick:

The whole replacement process in an MSI Wind is detailed at tech.icrontic

It seems that at the moment these cards are backordered, and you can find them on the ebay only around $100 - 4 times higher than the usual price.

Edit (10/08/2011)
The card is available again for around $30!

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