Hands-on: Hulu Desktop for Linux beta a big resource hog

“Hulu Desktop was only available for Windows and Mac OS X when
it launched in May. This week, the popular streaming video service
has finally brought its experimental desktop player to the Linux
platform. Installation packages are available for download from the
Hulu Labs website.

“I tested Hulu Desktop on Ubuntu 9.04 with Flash 10 on my
quad-core desktop computer. The program is built almost entirely
with Flash and obviously doesn’t use any native widget frameworks.
Adobe’s Flash implementation for Linux is lousy, so I began my
tests with relatively low expectations. As expected, Hulu Desktop
is extremely resource intensive on the Linux platform. It uses
significantly more memory and processor power than Totem when
playing full-screen video content. Aside from occasional
stuttering, video playback performance was adequate when I was not
running any other resource-intensive tasks in the background.”

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