Hulu Has A Desktop Client For Linux

http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop-linux

by tsally • 17 years ago

20 13 17 years ago

eggoa• 17 years ago

I just tried it on my wimpy celeron laptop running Ubuntu. The desktop client maxes out my CPU and drops frames, while Hulu shows run smoothly in firefox (with some cycles to spare).

So, for me anyway, it's actually worse than normal Hulu.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

None of my Linux boxes can do full-screen HD Hulu without blockiness and jerky video. This includes all major video cards (very recent ATI 4850 and nVidia 9xxx, as well as older Intel onboard, ATI 3200 onboard), and both 32 and 64 bit builds of Flash. I'll give the desktop player a try, but I'm not holding out hope of being able to use it for actual big screen viewing. I sometimes watch shows in a window while working, and that works fine on all of my Linux boxes. But full screen remains useless.

bitwize• 17 years ago

Hulu shows run smoothly in firefox (with some cycles to spare).

That is, when Flash Player 10 isn't segfaulting and taking all of Firefox with it.

s3graham• 17 years ago

I really recommend http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel both for speed and so that if Flash crashes it's mostly only killing itself.

zacgarrett• 17 years ago

I just tried to play the office on high with my desktop system and it was unwatchable due to how choppy it is. On this same system I play 1080p content with mplayer without an issue.

AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 810 Processor 4gb ram

vsync• 17 years ago

I've seen this same thing on several Windows machines.

liuliu• 17 years ago

I disappointed to see that the Linux version requires Flash. The Flash plugin performance are terrible on Linux. Hulu should do better than wrapping Flash to a exec. The VLC codebase is good to start with.

joubert• 17 years ago

I think using Flash is fine.

What I have a bigger problem with is that Hulu content cannot be viewed outside the US - so when you travel you can't watch a quick movie or TV show (unless you proxy it).

chancho• 17 years ago

US cable TV has never been viewable outside of North America+, and that you pay for. Why is it all of a sudden a problem that you can't watch your shows when you're traveling?

(+unless a provider in another country happens to carry the same shows.)

dangrover• 17 years ago

Do you not need Flash to view the Hulu website? Am I missing something?

colonelxc• 17 years ago

Yes, Linux flash performance sucks (when it works at all), so it would be great to have a native Linux client that didn't bring with it all the inefficiencies of flash for something as simple as playing videos.

Hulu Has A Desktop Client For Linux

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