Hulu, the joint online video venture between NBC and News Corp, has given private beta testers a sneak peak at the high definition video that should soon be available on the net more ubiquitously now that Flash supports the H.264 video codec.
Hulu currently provides only nine trailers in high definition as a sampler, including ones for Jumper, 27 Dresses, Hitman, American Gangster, and Definitely, Maybe. Playback requires a connection of 2,400 kbps or higher, Flash Player 9.0.115.0, and a fast computer (at least 3 GHz for PCs and 1.83 GHz for Macs).
The quality of these samples is certainly impressive. Full-screen mode looks particularly sharper with H.264 than with the current video quality offered by Hulu for the bulk of this collection. However, the video does stagger more often as it struggles to buffer in time. Of course, you can pause the video and let things preload if you have a slow connection. The screenshot below shows what high definition video on Hulu looks like for me in full-screen (unfortunately, embedding has been turned off for these samples).
No word yet on when the rest of Hulu’s collection might become available in high definition. Perhaps we should all email them demanding “I want my HD PC.”
As we’ve mentioned before, announcements like these should have competitors like Joost worried because much more high definition video will eventually find its way into the browser and not require downloadable clients or BitTorrent.
For more on Hulu, which has yet to be publicly released, check out our initial review of the service.
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HD online is nothing new. vimeo.com/hd
hulu and especially joost are and will be playing catchup. Vimeo’s HD buffers faster too, probably their CDN choice.
“However, the video does stagger more often as it struggles to buffer in time.”
Get a better internet connection. I can stream high def with no prob here with Videotron business internet.
@1
Der… last I recall, Adobe made Flash and they chose to include HD. Saying Vimeo got there first is pointless, what actual worthwhile content can you find on Vimeo?
They’re not even targeting the same market? You actually think they’ll be deploying studio-made HD movies on Vimeo? Get real.
@3
I was talking about delivery not content. If you want HD content from studios just go to stage6.
@4
“hulu and especially joost are and will be playing catchup.”
Catchup to an also-ran video site that has barely any traffic and almost negligible amount of worthwhile content?
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
“I was talking about delivery not content. If you want HD content from studios just go to stage6.”
Maybe you should say what you mean.
Hulu’s ok, but they don’t have enough stuff. Cavenger.com is way better
Alaska
What I am saying is that hulu is shit, a huge disaster that will be fun to watch no matter what corporate rhetoric and slap on features they add.
The internet belongs to entrepreneurs, not old media. How much are they paying you anyways?
HGuide,
I’m saying it doesn’t matter who gives me my shows, as long as I can watch it. I couldn’t care less if they brand it hulu, DogshitThroughHoops, or crapio. I can watch old and new shows on hulu and I don’t even have an account. That’s what matters. Watching kids play stop-motion with their shoelaces in HD just doesn’t quite compare.
The Internet belongs to can give what people want. How many scene points is vimeo giving you for plugging them?
I’ve been using Hulu for a few weeks or so. I love the simple n’ clean design and it’s really convienient not having to wait for torrents to download. It’s much much better than the networks own sites flash players.
I’ve been trying out hulu beta and it’s great. Because of it, I very happily dropped my cable subscription. I get more than enough programming to fill my time and watch the shows I want to watch. They seem to ad more shows regularly. So I keep watching. I checked out the HD thing - pretty nice. Aside from the quality programming and selection one really exceptional thing about the hulu is the overall experience - clean and nice - not like your standard web offerings. And best of all it’s free. Who can complain about something that offers so much and is free. The addition of HD will make a great experience even better.
Okay, those last two are definitely plants.
nah, I’m not a plant. I seriously think Hulu does it’s job… provide my eyes with Heroes, Chuck, Office and Bionic Woman. I’ll take a job at Hulu though. Where is the company based?
Man, some of these post sound like NBC employees. Anyways, I don’t watch anything on HULU or NBC tv series. All shows got pretty boring…
Youtube excites 14-35 years old
i’ve been using hulu and i really like it, although i wish they would add more episodes already.
I’ve also been impressed by both the quality and the selection from Hulu. I wouldn’t call the service perfect, but most of my questions are about programming and not quality, which may explain why the other night, when I switched from watching something on Hulu to watching something else on Joost, I was kind of taken aback by the change.
If HULU worked on all the Game consoles like the Wii ,PS3 and Xbox they might win the online content war and thier war against piracy .
The HD on Hulu looks phenomenal! I can’t wait till my beta invite comes (if ever).
Does anyone else find it hilarious that all the companies are slowly, so slowly remembering why TV worked?
How long till we get back to tv.com which has all the shows in HD and each of the shows has it’s own ads which make money for the content producers?
Meh.
Until you can stream hulu to livingroom devices like the PS3, AppleTV and Xbox 360 it doesn’t seem very useful to me. And thats assuming I did live in the U.S.
Hulu is useless in malaysia. Can’t view even a single channel
Outside of the States, most shows cycle a year behind U.S. release, so Hulu is not available globally.
Not sure on the legality of this, but there is software available that bypasses the block by filtering your IP through a locale within the U.S.
I agree with tessa. They need to add more episodes now…
Hulu is great. The quality beats anything i’ve seen. The 15 sec commercials are fine b/c (1) They are nice commercials and (2) they have a timer. I can watch full episodes of The Office, I can EMBED FULL HIGH QUALITY EPISODES OF THE OFFICE…legally…free.
I can watch every single SNL digital shirt (except the Mahmoud one…) This site is awesome.
Hi,
Sorry to change the subject, but I’m looking for information about the USB Driver Software that comes with the Panasonic NV-GS200. Does anyone knows if it’s compatible to Macs? If not, is there a way to get around with it?
Your help will be much appreciated,
Luci
Did anyone noticed that ALL episodes and videos have RESTRICTIONS??? I live in Europe and NONE of the video are available. This is extremely lame, and ridicolous. I thought we were talking of the internet (which was known to be somehow global), not reviewing an ordinary tv channel. >:(
You can watch outside the US. Details are posted on my blog.
http://hulustuff.blogspot.com/