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

Hulu desktop got a lot of press recently, but quietly under the radar was their support of the Linux platform–kudos to Hulu folks for this one, as Linux is often ignored and forgotten with stuff like this (*cough* Blu-ray *cough*). Looks like aside from the memory intensity, it’s still a pretty useful app.

Ars Technica

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.