Does hulu use somekind of encryption in it's streams?

[romulus]

It clocks my PC. My pc is old but freaking hulu clocks my pc worse than Medeviel War 2. That's ridicules, a video stream that shitty should not be clocking my pc like that. I should know, I've watched plenty of streamed porn of much better quality than hulu and it does not kick my PC's ass like that. Netflix does too, if I watch netflix streams on my XBOX I can stream HD (like I can with porn on my PC).

I'm not parnoid right? They do this to try get you to buy the DVDs or pay for some service right (fuck you netflix I am paying you ass)? Or am I suppose to buy that their codec is that much more procesor intensive (if that's the case they are still morons) or their site is just that much more busy?

 

[Mr. B]

Your PC could very well be inadequate. I have a laptop ca. 2005 (1ghz, 512mb) that can't handle Netflix streaming. even though I can play HD video locally.

 

[TEH BABA]

Holy shit i remember that technology.

 

[Drogo]

never mind

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It probably is a combination of your PC's age and the codec they use on Hulu. Newer PCs have hardware-accelerated video decoding, be it on the video card or provided by CPU extensions (but I think the former is more popular now). The video quality isn't really the issue, it's the level of compression.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

Be sure to talk bad about your crappy antique PC too.

Netflix looks just fine on a 3.0 Ghz single core processor with 1GB of ram, an X1950 Pro AGP card, and not running bandwidth or processor piggy apps like bittorrent concurrently.

 

[Yoda]

Hulu is just like any other piece of shit Flash based video stream. I don't think it's a particularly CPU intensive codec. Hell, I get ridiculous CPU usage with low res YouTube. If you try to scale any of that shit to fullscreen on a high resolution monitor it's game over. I'm sure Flash is using some horseshit software scaling even though you would think considering how deep it gets its dirty tendrils into Windows it could spring for some hardware acceleration like every other fucking video app in existence.

I just love how I can decode 1080p with very low CPU usage (with an assist from my video card, DVXA is it?), but a shitty 480x360 YouTube video will take over an entire core if I click the maximize button. Granted I only have a 3.5GHz-ish Pentium D, but come on, that should be able to handle this shit. I guess Adobe doesn't care about efficiency in Flash because processors just get more and more powerful, but I find it disgusting and would rather use my CPU cycles on something that actually needs them.

 

[romulus]

I got a Athlon XP 2400+ and a Radeon x1300, it should be able to handle HD video playback unless there is some inefficient codec running. I have streamed HD video from other sites and it looked beautiful (youtube HD). And how could I run anything else with my CPU at 100% because of hulu?

Hulu doesn't even show HD (that I know of), and I have gone to hulu on a newer PC and it did run and look better. So I guess you are right, it is probably a codec that would run better on newer tech.

It's just annoying (especially on netflix which is a paid service) to have to upgrade for video playback of all things.

Youtube hasn't bothered me much at least they allow you to buffer the whole video so you can pause and do other things while it downloads. With Youtube I can browse other sites while I wait.

I usually don't do other things while watching video. I sometimes do that while listening to shows on TV but when I watch something on the PC it's usually because I want to watch it not because there is nothing better on. In the last few years I have learned that I can't do many things at once on my PC anymore.

 

[Michael Chris]

Yeah the scaling problems with flash are pretty crazy. They do have HD (720), btw, for three things right now. The first episode of Legend of the Seeker (which looks STUNNING), an episode of Psych, and Dr. Horrible.