Hulu Desktop Open For Business – NetBooks Need Not Apply
Posted on 01 June 2009, at 10:34 am, by Dan Cohen
Hulu’s new desktop application for both Mac and Windows computers is nothing short of fantastic. It works great on both my iMac and my MacBook, offering stutter-free movies and television shows.
It’s not all happy-time, however. We’ll get into that, but first let’s take a quick look at the new application.
The Picture-
All I can say is WOW! The image is clear as can be and is offered without even the slightest stutter. It is easily resized, allowing it to sit in the corner while you do other work or go fullscreen and use every pixel of you screen. Best of all, I have yet to see the slightest indication that audio and video are ever out of sync with one another.
The Controls-
On a Mac, the application can be controlled by both the keyboard and the white remote. On a Windows machine the Windows Media Player remote stands in for the white Mac one.
And controlling the application is simple. As they explains-
The Price-
The price can’t be beat… that is unless you have an issue with “FREE”.
The Downside-
As noted in the beginning, it isn’t entirely pretty. The site explains the requirements for running the software.
Unfortunately, they aren’t kidding. The application NEEDS an Intel Core Duo 1.8GGz and 2 GB of RAM in order to run on a machine with Windows XP. When I tried it on my HP2140 it was nothing short of sad… the screen stuttered non-stop when it ran at all.
It’s a shame, since the Hulu Desktop would have helped turn netbooks into fantastic portable media devices.
Hulu: just another reason the netbook revolution might be shortlived!.
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June 1st, 2009 at 11:09 am
Hehe … I think there has been a slow realization that a netbook isn’t going to pack XPS-power into a just-barely-bigger-than-PDA size. Perhaps the upcoming Lenovo S12 will do better with this stuff, but it will still be marginal at best. Maybe the next generation …
As for Hulu, I showed it to my wife and she gladly had her brains turned to mush watching an episode of Fringe we’d missed. The Mac version runs wonderfully … now I just have to pipe it over HDMI to the big-screen.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I’ve been running it on my R2Hv, I changed the quality to low and let it buffer for a few minutes and I’m good to go. Watching Rescue Me now, may be a XP thing working on Vista.