Hulu Desktop (Mac and PC clients) | Hacker News Reader

Hulu Desktop (Mac and PC clients)

hulu.com

46 pointsblazamos27 comments

Probably the real reason they put up such a fight against Boxee.

Agree - and if/when they do a deal to put Hulu on the Apple TV, then the Apple TV would be a much more compelling product.

I like Boxee, but I don't think I would use it if Apple TV provided an easy way to add custom 'websites/channels' e.g. Hulu.

Boxee is on Apple TV if you hack it. It did have working Hulu support in the last April 2009 build (currently Hulu isn't working for me on it, as of about 2 weeks ago - they might have broke it again, and Boxee is semi-slow at releasing updates for their Apple TV build).

The interface is a bit clunky (due to an underpowered Apple TV). It works and it does give you this "Oh, that's cool!" feeling, but it's not quite there yet. If the interface was sped up more (especially when you're navigating the menu's while a video is playing in the background), I'd love it. Comedy Central and TED video's stream wonderfully! :)

Out of the box though, Apple TV is nearly useless unless you buy lots of content off of iTunes for it.

Interesting note, it does NOT require an Intel processor. The site went live with that in the requirements copy, but in truth it's just a suggested minimum in terms of processing power.

I and @hulusupport hashed this out via twitter today and the copy should be changed to reflect this soon.

http://www.hulu.com/labs/

Other features added today:

-- Video Panel Designer for clip embedding

-- Recommendations

-- Time-Based Browsing

What an enormous waste -- why bother distributing a desktop app if you're going to stick with Flash? Taking the browser out of the mix doesn't solve anything except direct access to a remote control.

The video rendering would be a full order of magnitude more efficient if it wasn't blitted through Adobe's craptacular runtime firs, all just to get some measly overlays.

It's a bit weird to downplay direct access to a remote control in a set-top application.

"Taking the browser out of the mix doesn't solve anything except direct access to a remote control."

Can you name a more important feature for a TV application?

I would think reliable playback trumps using a remote control. Nothing ruins my video experiences more than stuttering playback. If you told me I would never get a remote control in exchange for consistently buttery framerates, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

It'll be interesting to see how this works. As a user I'm a fan of thick clients, but it's an unanswered question whether and when thick clients are a valuable companion product for a web app. This is another data point to that question.

(I guess Twitter is another example of a place where thick clients have a clear place alongside the standard web thin client, but that's somewhat different in that these thick clients are, if I'm not mistaken, produced by third parties rather than Twitter.)

In this case, the value added seems to be the ability to use a remote.

Browsers should probably eventually have some way of detecting and using specialty hardware on the host. It's a pretty apparent limitation right now.

Not to mention the fact that it runs independently from your browser tab. I know that Chrome already has separate processes for each tab but no other browser has that yet and sandboxing a video player in its own application is great for stability.

Despite being Air based, do you think the os x performance will be any better? I hate flash mostly because it performs horribly on os x.

I'm trying it right now, running my usual computer-dick test of running a lot of stuff at once. There's no lag so far.

compared to? Subjectively, hulu's flash works much better than netflix' sliverlight.

Not AIR. Is actually a native app (OSX / Win) used as a Flash wrapper.

Try using Safari. It plays Flash much, much better than Firefox.

"Hulu Desktop will work with Apple and Windows Media Center remotes."

Very exciting! I will have to try this when I get home.

Does it buffer better than the Flash application? Their buffering is utter crap, and I have a 12MBit ADSL2 connection.

Does anyone have any idea of the timetable for allowing access to Hulu from outside the US? I'd love to try it.

Just checked it out and think it's a great idea but it's UI in how it lists shows is hard to see from far away on my 42" LCD.

I think the UI should mimic what is seen on Hulu which has larger thumbnails.

Pretty cool to see this though!

Mac and Windows at any rate.

That's nice. Now let's see an official client for set-top boxes, and maybe phones.

It's very buggy, by the way. Crashes within 30 seconds every time I use it.

Isn't this the same thing Joost did, only in reverse? Why go with a desktop client?

I wonder if they are moving towards the <video> tag.

Not enough Restrictions Management in the <video> tag, so this won't happen. Clearly, without DRM, I am going to pirate low-rez Hulu feeds instead of the un-DRM'd over-the-air HDTV stream. Right...

Did hulu have "labs" before this? heheh

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