If you’re paying too much for cable or satellite TV service, Hulu’s free streaming movies and TV shows could help you to cut the cord. That’s because many of the shows that are on cable and satellite TV are also available on Hulu for free. Hulu also offers an inexpensive service called Hulu Plus, which provides complete seasons of TV series, such as Glee, The Office and Family Guy, including current episodes and some content in HD.
What is Hulu Desktop?
Hulu Desktop is a free downloadable application that allows you to watch Hulu movies and television episodes within a convenient interface. You can download Hulu Desktop directly from the Hulu website. A version is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. To use Hulu Desktop in Windows, you must have an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) processor, 2 gigabytes (GB) of memory and Windows XP or later. To use Hulu Desktop on a Mac, you must have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz processor, 2 GB of memory and Mac OS X version 10.4 or later. To run Hulu Desktop under Linux, you must have an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz processor, 2 GB of memory and Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 or later. You must have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. Hulu also recommends that you have a 2 megabit per second (Mbps) broadband Internet connection.
Setting Preferences
The best way to get a pleasant experience from using Hulu Desktop is to customize your preferences. To make the most of the preferences feature, you’ll need a Hulu account. Open Hulu Desktop, then log into your account and click on your name in the left navigation bar and select “Preferences.” Here, you can select whether you want Hulu Desktop to always be on top or to update automatically. If you’re hearing impaired or just want extra help hearing the dialogue, you can also select to use closed captioning. You can make the font size larger if you have trouble reading the text on the screen. You can also now integrate your Hulu Desktop with Hulu Plus by enabling the service within your preferences.
Also in the Preferences menu, you can choose whether Hulu Desktop should remember your login information. Choosing this option is helpful if you are on your personal computer and prefer not to repeatedly log in every 30 days. You can also choose your seek jump length, in intervals of 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. Once you’ve chosen a seek length, you can use the right and left arrow buttons on your keyboard (or the back and forward arrow buttons on your remote) to quickly seek through a movie or TV episode.
Your start options in the Preferences menu is another important setting to select. If you choose “Resume: Last Video,” then each time you open Hulu Desktop you’ll end up watching your last video wherever you left off the last time you closed the application. If you choose “Menu: Most Popular,” you’ll see whatever video is most popular when Hulu Desktop opens. If these options are annoying, choose “Menu: Queue,” to see videos in your queue when you open Hulu Desktop. Also, if you don’t want to automatically play videos every time you open Hulu Desktop, choose “Stop Auto-Play” from the Preferences menu, then select “Yes.”
While Hulu Desktop’s system requirements seem rather steep, you may still be able to use the program if your Internet connection speed is lower than 2 Mbps. You can do this by setting the video quality to “Auto”, “Low (480 Kbps)” or “Medium (700 Kbps)” in the preferences menu.
To watch Hulu videos in full screen, there’s no need to set it in your preferences. Instead, just maximize the program window to activate full screen mode.
The Hulu Queue
Unfortunately, there is no way to organize your Hulu queue in Hulu Desktop. This means that your queue will appear in the order the movies or TV episodes were added to your queue. If your queue is particularly large, this can make it impossible to navigate to the show you want to watch. The only solutions to this problem are to either keep your queue small, or to use the “Search” function to find the exact shows you want to watch when you want to watch them.
Using a Remote
Hulu Desktop is compatible with Windows Media Center and Apple remotes. If you’re using a remote with Hulu Desktop in Linux, you must use the LIRC open source package.
For more information on this topic, read How to Stream Netflix Movies and TV on an HDTV and Best Channels from the Roku Channel Store.
Sources:
“Hulu Labs: Hulu Desktop.” Hulu.com
“Hulu Desktop System Requirements” Hulu.com