How-to: Installing a Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70012) into a nc2400/2510p

Usual notice: USE THE FOLLOWING GUIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Crystal HD and nc2400

This is the easiest part of the guide. I could put the same Broadcom Crystal HD card into the nc2400 without any problems. I tested the Crystal HD with youtube+XBMC and it worked flawlessly. Eg. 720p movie was played with XBMC at ~12 % CPU load, youtube played HD movies flawlessly, but 720p still generated ~25 %, 1080p ~50 % CPU load. I don't know why the BIOS whitelisting did not block the card, it worked nicely. The downside of the nc2400 is the missing WWAN socket. It is needed to use WLAN usb adapter to have wireless network.

Crystal HD and 2510p

Prerequisites:
1. Broadcom Crystal HD card
2. WLAN usb adapter or a WLAN mPCIe card compatible with the WWAN slot (e.g Ralink RT2571WF chipset based cards)
3. Working WLAN card in the WLAN mPCIe socket
4. Installing modded bios (it is required if you want to put WLAN card in the WWAN slot what is not whitelisted)
5. Buy DiY eGPU Setup 1.x

Theoretical knowledge: The 2510p and newer HP laptops have whitelist of acceptable mPCIe cards for the WLAN/WWAN slots and there is an additional check to verify if the card in the slot is an actual WLAN card. The modded BIOS can eliminate the whitelist check, but the additional check remains. When the Broadcom card is not recognized as WLAN card in the mPCIe socket, it is disabled in boot time. The DiY eGPU Setup helps to activate the disabled mPCIe slot with the Broadcom card, continue the boot to Windows and enjoying the accelerated HD playback.

My setup:
- 2510p laptop
- Windows XP Home
- Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70012)
- Advent 8115 Wireless Card for the WWAN slot (RT2571WF chipset)
(- A WLAN card what is on the BIOS whitelist, but it is not needed anymore when the setup is done.)

Note: It should be possible to use the Broadcom card with similar steps for Windows Vista/7. And most likely, the same or similar steps will work with other HP laptop models.

VERY IMPORTANT! VERY IMPORTANT!
Put non-conductive scotch tape on the Broadcom and the WWAN card sides if they are not covered: This is extremely important because the 2510p's cover has some kind of metal on the inner side. When I put the Broadcom/WWAN card without tape into my laptop, the card did not work and the hard disk was not recognized for some time. I had to detach the cards from the mPCIe slot and reattach later. Luckily, the cards/hard drive/motherboard were not damaged. It was a stupid thing to forget.
VERY IMPORTANT! VERY IMPORTANT!

Install DiY eGPU Setup:
- Buy
- Download
- Extract to C:\eGPU directory
- Run setup-disk-image.bat
- After restarting the computer there is a "DIY eGPU Setup" item in the Windows boot menu

Use DiY eGPU Setup to overcome the BIOS limitations:
- Switch off the laptop
- Put a working WLAN card in the WLAN socket, the WWAN port is empty
- Switch on the laptop
- Start DiY eGPU Setup from the boot menu
- Select the "menu-based setup" in the new menu
- Go to the mPCIe menu -> Save ports -> Select WLAN socket
- Go the root of the menu and choose Reboot and switch off the laptop.
- Replace the WLAN card with Broadcom
- Switch on the laptop
- Start the menu-based setup again as described above
- Go to the mPCIe menu -> Restore ports -> Select WLAN socket and the Broadcom card should be recognized and seen on the Status window
- Go to the mPCIe menu -> Save ports -> Select the socket with the Broadcom card again
- If everything has worked fine, add the permanent anti-whitelisting to the setup.bat with the following steps, don't forget to change the hw ID to your Broadcom card (in my case 14e4:1612):

- Save the setup.bat
- Restart the computer

Daily use of the anti-whitelisting:
- Switch on the laptop
- Start DiY eGPU Setup from the boot menu
- Select the "automated startup using setup.bat" in the new menu
- Start Windows or other operating system from the boot menu

Using a WLAN card in the WWAN socket (optional):
- It is pretty straightforward, however, I had an issue in Windows XP. The driver of the WWAN card should be installed first before placing the card in the WWAN socket, otherwise the Windows is not able to install the driver and the WLAN/WWAN card as unknown device blocks the integrated Intel ethernet device.
- So install WLAN/WWAN driver -> switch off the laptop -> place the WLAN card in the WWAN socket -> switch on the laptop
- I had to install for my RT2571WF based WLAN/WWAN card from the Ralink home page -> USB (RT257x/RT2671/RT520x) driver

Fix the XBMC:
Somehow the XBMC looks for some registration entries what can be missing after the installation of the Broadcom drivers. If the Crystal HD works with Adobe Flash, but it is not recognized in XBMC, download and put the following keys into your Windows registry:

http://sgy-net.com/70015/file/bcm70015forWin7.reg

Installation under Linux

Experiences

I have Ubuntu Natty (32 bit) on my 2510p, but I tried Ubuntu Oneiric (64 bit) with the same experiences. Precise or other user-space crystalhd kernel module/firmware/library versions do not work with the Flash Player 11.x versions. I get instant crash of the flash plug-in or fallback to software rendering on 32 and 64 bit as well.

DiY eGPU Setup 1.x

Check the Windows related part of the guide how to make the Crystal HD work in 2510p with DiY eGPU Setup, the same procedure should be done: saving the mPCIe state with a working WLAN card+update setup.bat.

- Copy or extract the DiY eGPU Setup files into the directory /boot/eGPU. Very important: To boot into the eGPU Setup, the eGPU-Setup-110b5.img file must be allocated on the hard drive in continuous space (no fragmentation). I found on the internet that it can not be done with ext4fs, however, I was able to do it by making 15 copies of this file and trying to map them in grub4dos command line mode. E.g "map /1.img (hd3)". When the image file is fragmented, the grub4dos shows an error message about it. To boot into grub4dos command line, just specify a wrong menu.lst location by editing the eGPU Setup's grub2 menu item options. So make many copies of the eGPU-Setup-110b5.img file, try them until finding a suitable and move the right file into /boot/eGPU.
- To set the permanent menu item to the grub2 bootloader, add these lines to the /etc/grub.d/10_linux:

Before the submenu definition lines:

- To initial update the grub2, execute (change the blue hard drive device into your own HDD dev node):

Driver

- Clone a git repository git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/crystalhd.git, generate the debian packages and install them. Remove the old crystalhd kernel driver and reload the new.
- Downgrade the flash player version manually to 10.3 ( flash-player-10.3.183.7-0.2.1.i586.rpm). Copy libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer.
- Using OverrideGPUValidation=0 in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg, otherwise the fullscreen video playback does not work and black screen appears in this mode. So:

- Installing the CrystalHD indicator. I slightly modified with fixed icons+polling interval to 3 seconds. It can be downloaded from here. The indicator icon shows the actual status of the Crystal HD card and right-click on the icon provides a popup menu to turn on/off the card.
- To fix the permissions of the /dev/crystalhd dev node permanently, create a one-line file (20-crystalhd.rules) into /etc/udev/rules.d:

- When the crystalhd kernel driver is loaded when going to suspend, it is needed to reinit again after resume. Put the following file (80_crystalhd) into the /etc/pm/sleep.d:

Other notes

Results:
- XBMC: works.
- Adobe Flash Player 10.3: works.

When the laptop is suspended while the Crystal HD accelerates a Flash video, the Crystal HD card is not usable until the next reboot. Thus it is adviced to switch off the Crystal HD card via the indicator normally since it consumes some power and gives a lower risk to go suspend during playback. (E.g the Adobe Flash Player opens the 360p and 480p streams with the Crystal HD card, but it does not make any sense and results no help in the lower CPU consumption.)

Enjoy!

Special thanks to nando! Without him, it could not be accomplished.