Im guessing that a good video card isn't needed. And probably not multi core processing either. As long as it's over 2GHz and has over 500MB of RAM?
Fyi:
My friend and I have a computer that we're using for entertainment in our living room. And we've been watching lots of stuff on Hulu and other similar sites. It works pretty good but seems to suffer when playing flash videos. Sometimes no full screen is possible with out a low frame rate. Every flash video consumes the processor at 100%. We would use one of the better computers but those are for work. I wanted to go to the used computer part place and buy exactly what the Adobe piggy Flash player wants. I think I can pull this off under $20 if I strip the old machine.
Adobe is planning on shipping a GPU accelerated flash player in about 6 months, but it will require a directx 10 GPU to work (even if it is a low-end one, think GeForce 9600 or GeForce GT 220). Otherwise flash (or more accurately the h264 video used in hulu) still needs a decent CPU to decode smoothly.
Just a note that decoding 720p h264 video requires something equal to or faster than a 2.4 GHz AMD Athlon 64. Any retail Core 2 Duo you can buy these days will do the trick, they can even decode full 1080p blu-ray content and there are some pretty nice SFF systems out there that fit into a living room without looking out of place too.
I bought a Mac Mini and dual boot Windows 7 and Snow Leopard on it. They start at 599. Where I work we are an Apple partner and the word is next week new (cheaper?) models will be released. Obviously you can self build a system for much cheaper than what Apple provides.
The one I customized has an Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB of DDR3 1066, 120GB SATA HDD and an nVidia 9400M. I paired it with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and it is a fantastic addition to our 46 inch Samsung LCD TV in the living room. We use it for Hulu mainly. Seriously considering getting rid of our Cable TV service because of this.
Krom wrote:Adobe is planning on shipping a GPU accelerated flash player in about 6 months, but it will require a directx 10 GPU to work
Awwww bummer. I'm not going back to windows.
JMEaT wrote:We use it for Hulu mainly. Seriously considering getting rid of our Cable TV service because of this.
x2 We already ditched cable when we figured out all the shows we watch are either on hulu (The important stuff like science/history shows), southparkstudios.com, and cartoonnetwork.com (We love 'Foster's Home')
The problem is that you need to be using either the nvidia binary blob drivers or something where your \"client glx vendor string\" isn't \"SGI\" due to flash's brokenness. (see glxinfo for your client glx version string)
I wonder if there isn't some way to just replace the string somewhere in some library to trick flash into working correctly.
edit: This would seem to suggest that replacing the string is trivial, but I suspect whether it tricks flash into working correctly would require some experimentation:
