Hulu on AIR, kind of

by Christina Warren Jun 16th 2008

Here at Download Squad, Hulu has become our favorite way to watch television online. With ever-expanding content choices, good quality and a nice interface, Hulu is almost as good as TV (as long as you live in the United States, that is). One of the few downsides is the need to use a browser to access content. Paul Yanez has created a program that aims to to solve that problem and make Hulu even better.

My Media Player is an Adobe AIR app that is designed to act as a Hulu portal of sorts. Launch the AIR app and you can choose from a categorized list of TV shows and movies available from Hulu. There is also a search function located within the player window so that you can find episodes or shows by title and also clips from Hulu.com

You can resize the application so that it can be docked to the side of the screen (if you want to watch a show while also doing some "real" work) and Paul designed the application to scale to fit a 30" monitor.

One of our favorite features of My Media Player is the ability to search for shows without stopping the program. Instead, the show continues playing in a small window in the left side of the application screen.

We really like the concept behind My Media Player and think it has terriffic potential, but there are a few issues that will probably keep us from using it as our primary method to access Hulu. Because My Media Player works by using the embedded versions of the programs from Hulu.com (Hulu.com allows you to embed all or part of a show onto your own webpage), the quality isn't as high as it is accessing the show directly from the web. And although we really like the ability to dock a Hulu playing window to the side of the screen in a small, unobtrusive size, we wish we had the ability to view the program in full screen. As it stands right now, expanding the window to cover our entire screen is both kludgy and unattractive, due to the aforementioned embedded version issue.

Still, if you want a way to watch shows without having to use your web browser, give My Media Player a shot.

Tags: adobe air, AdobeAir, hulu, streaming video, StreamingVideo

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

EnOne said 10:29AM on 6-17-2008

My only issue with Hulu is that they use the Adobe 9 which is currently only available to Windows and Mac. Linux, Wii, iPhone, and all other devices are all stuck on v7 until adobe releases the v9 SDK.

Christina Warren said 10:32AM on 6-17-2008

Yeah, hopefully once Flash 10 comes out of beta (the fact that the beta is available in several pre-compiled tar balls for different Linux distros is promising), the Linux issue will be fixed.

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