Hulu Has A Desktop Client For Linux | Hacker News Reader

Hulu Has A Desktop Client For Linux

hulu.com

20 pointstsally13 comments

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.

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

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.

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).

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.)

SBS in Sydney carries The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and independent radio station carries Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and a few NPR shows .. not to mention the best, most authentic roots reggae show you ever heard!

That's just it. The content owners don't want to lose that revenue stream from regional networks by giving it away for free (ad supported) For now the regional networks/providers are willing to pay more than ad revenue can generate. This is one of the areas Hulu could succeed with a paid subscription model.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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