Posted on Monday, January 25 2010 @ 21:32 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Engadget had the opportunity to test one of those new Dell Mini 10 netbooks that come with a Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator chip to accelerate HD video. The software support isn't optimal though, HD video acceleration only works in Windows Media Player and to enable Adobe Flash acceleration you need to download Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta 3. Blu-ray doesn't work either as Windows Media Player doesn't support this feature. More info
at Engadget.
As for downloaded HD content, a 1080p WMV video of dolphins and the Iron Man 2 trailer from Apple's site played smoothly in Windows Media Player 11 -- something we'd hoped Pine Trail netbooks would do on their own. However, because Broadcom only supports Windows Media Player, that same MOV was like watching a slide-show in QuickTime. We're pretty happy we figured that out before we went and purchased Iron Man in HD from iTunes. In turn, because Windows Media Player 11 doesn't support Blu-ray playback, and Broadcom's other software partners haven't released players yet (we're told ArcSoft is working on one), playing a Blu-ray disc if you happen to have an external drive isn't an option at the moment.
