What are the minimum mobile PC specs for Flash HD video?

"Each site uses a slightly different flash player (generally custom) though they all use similar encoding and bitrates. You will find that at the margin, some laptops will play most sites but not all due to 'extra' stuff the flash player is attempting to do beyond the audio/video.

However, online HD flash video generally consists of low bitrate h.264 encoding, and compared to compressing it, decompressing it is relatively painless, especially since they are generally encoding to about 720p 12-24 frames/second.

Any computer with a 2+GHz single core or 1.6ghz dual core that's not bogged down with any other processes (background virus scan, web browsing, etc) should handle web HD video just fine.

Going further, if you want to decode real HD (ATSC tuner, blu-ray, torrents, etc) then you really need something better than 2+GHz dual core.

You'll also find that in the lower end machines the integrated graphics and low memory will get in the way. You may need a slightly faster processor and memory bus (and more memory) to compensate if your machine doesn't have dedicated video memory.

-Adam"