Broadcom’s cheap and cheerful CrystalHD card, which can found in many netbooks, laptops and desktops, offers real-time hardware-accelerated decoding of HD video content – including HD flash – at up-to 1080p.
Broadcom provide a set of Linux drivers for the device are readily available there is no noticeable way to tell whether the driver has been triggered by a video etc.
Enter Indicator-CrystalHD – a handy panel-based controller for controlling and monitoring the use of CrystalHD in Ubuntu. It is able to relay the current ‘state’ (‘Disabled, Working, Error, etc) of the driver, as well as letting you enable and disable it with one click.
The indicator requires version v3.10.0 (0.9.30) of the CrystalHD Linux driver (which can only be manually installed at present, see step-by-step guide here) and whilst it’s designed to work in Ubuntu it can also be used under LXDE and XFCE desktops too.
The applet can be downloaded from the project page @ code.google.com/p/indicator-crystalhd/
Marcel S