Windows 7: Hulu Desktop

I like Hulu Desktop. It presents some odd behavior though.

When run full screen on a second monitor, CPU usage is 50%+ Full screen on the primary monitor, CPU aproaches 50%. In fact, no matter which monitor it is playing in, changing the window size up and down has a direct corelation in CPU usage up and down.

It uses a lot RAM, also. 170MB+ while watching Sesame Street, and climbs rapidly and steadily to 263MB+ when I switched out to Psych (a random selection). Then, I switch to The Daily Show. Mem usage drops to 160 range and climbs back to 311+ when viewing the Daily Show. I suppose the RAM usage represents the buffered video.

I am experiencing similar issues with streaming video in an XP VM. I cannot stream that video source in Windows 7 due to a stream source limitation.

Am I dealing with codec issues?

Sesame Street?
I could not handle that program it had too steep a learning curve for me.

Sounds like the video card is not doing the work and your CPU is taking up the slack.

Depending on how each video is encoded and how many times it has been encoded it could make a big difference however hulu should have some standard that all videos have been encoded to. It's not like youtube which I would imagine could have issues due to the wide variety of videos that get uploaded but with hulu I think that they control a large portion of the video they stream.

I really don't think this is a codec issue or you would see issues during playback no matter what you tried such as streaming directly from the site or from other sites with video using the same codec for playback. I never tried hulu desktop but if it is an application that they provide it might have a memory leak in it or any number of odd bugs causing this.