Hi All. After reading davilla's blog post and reading this entire thread, I installed my bcm970012... just wanted to report my setup and results:
I have 2 Mac Mini 1.6 Core Duo machines with both Leopard and Windows 7 installed on both. One Mac Mini is connected to my Sony 46" 1080p TV with a DVI to HDMI cable and the other to another 1080p TV with the same type of cable. Like some others, I too read davilla's blog entry "Broadcom Crystal HD, It`s Magic." and ended up buying the bcm970012 from logicsupply with the high hopes that I'd just be able to pop it in and experience 1080p glory. So, I ordered 2 cards with DHL next day shipping to Canada and the total was USD 140.70( which ended up being $145 on my CC). It indeed came in the next day but there was a COD charge of $13.74 (taxes). I quickly opened up my Mac Mini and removed the wireless card and antenna and put the bcm970012 card in. If you've upgraded the RAM in your MAC Mini yourself, you can easily do this as it requires the same amount of work to get to the Mini PCIe card as it does to get to the RAM.
So, the card is in and I close up my mac mini and boot into windows 7. Win7 says it can't install the drivers automatically (can't remember the exact pop up baloon). I download the newest driver. (Go
http://www.broadcom.com/support/license...._3.3.0.zip and accept the licence that pops up and download the zip file).
Unzip the file and run setup.exe in either the 32bit or 64bit folder depending on your OS. Go through the install and then make sure it's installed properly. I did this by going to Device Manager -> Sound, Video and game controllers -> and here I found "Broadcom CrystalHD Video Decoder". Next step was to install the latest nightly build (as already mentioned, I don't believe you need to upgrade to the latest build, but I did). I went
http://mirrors.xbmc.org/nightlies/win32/ and downloaded the latest xbmc-r28256-trunk.exe . I made a backup of my userdata folder and installed the new build over the existing build. I launched XBMC -> Settings ->Videos -> Playback -> Changed Render Method to "Broadcom Crystal HD" . I then tried to play a 1080p mkv file (this file used to use almost 100% CPU and skip most frames in this setup) and click on "O" to see my CPU usage. WOW!! My little old 1.6GHz mac mini was playing this 1080p mkv with no skipped frames (besides the 10 it skipped right in the beginning) and utilizing avg 30% CPU usage. I had indeed received the Holy Grail of XBMC on a Mac Mini easily able to run 1080p.
There's only one "problem" I found. When in the menus of XBMC, there would be flashing/flickering (I'm using Transparency!). I had had this problem before and it was fixed by going in to Settings -> System -> Video Output and selecting "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen". (My "Display" is set to "1920x1080 @ 60.00 - Full Screen"). So I proceed to make this change and everything seems fine except when I go back to play that same 1080p mkv file, it's now skipping frames like a mofo... still using only 30% CPU but skipping several frames/sec. As it turns out, with "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" enabled, I get skipping of frames on 1080p files (tried 3). So, now what I plan on doing (cause I really dislike the flickering) is leave the "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" enabled most of the time and disable it when I need to play a 1080p file. I'm just soooo happy it worked that I don't mind this small inconvenience for the moment.
Thought I'd report my results and perhaps help some others with a similar setup make their decision. I'm certainly not sorry I took a $145 gamble... the results are MAGNIFICENT!!!
I've been reading the XBMC forums for a while now and it's saved my skin many times. I've just never had anything useful to add until now. I just wanted to give a shout out to the XBMC team. Your software was the decision behind me going completely digital in my video library and networking my condo so I could access my library via XBMC from anywhere. I couldn't be more sincere when I say THANK YOU!