When watching Netflix movies, CPU utilization and heat are not an issue. The instant I start watching Hulu shows (through the browser or the new Hulu Desktop), the temp goes through the roof and my fans start running like crazy. I hope it's true), and it's CPU utilization is through the roof. Flash cannot make use of multiple cores (I hear that is changing in future releases. While Flash may look good because of the H.264 support, it is a horrible technology. I had numerous issues with the Hulu Desktop. It makes a lot of sense to have an app that can be controlled via IR remote instead of the wireless keyboard we had been using.

That said, I'm glad to see Hulu Desktop out.

If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight). The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video.Īside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system.

Hulu desktop windows 7