In one of my last articles on ION I talked about XBMC being one of the best applications for the platform. It delivers a better UI for watching downloaded content than Windows Media Center does, and the Linux version has full hardware acceleration support for ION. Oh, and it’s free.

Last week it got even better. The next major version of XBMC, codenamed Camelot, came out with a whole bunch of new features. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but it definitely looks cool.

And today it just got incredible. Thanks to the efforts of Scott Davilla, the XBMC developers and Broadcom there’s now full support for the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder (BCM970012) in all versions of XBMC. The code has been merged into XBMC as of this morning and will be available in the next release of the project.

The Crystal HD chip is currently available on mini PCIe cards, and is expected to make its way to ExpressCard and PCIe x1 cards in the future. This is huge because many netbooks, nettops and existing devices like the AppleTV or Mac Mini have at least one mini PCIe slot. A $69 mini PCIe card (or $25 on eBay) with the Crystal HD chip on it plus the next version of XBMC can enable full 1080p playback on any of these machines that would otherwise not be able to play high def video. Not to mention that you can get some of these devices second hand or refurbished for much less than the cost of a new ION system.

It’s extra sweet because the driver is open source, so we can expect to see it more than just XBMC. The next official release of XBMC is likely some time away, but support has already been added to the SVN release.