The personal rants and musings of a conflicted irish norwegian american of some sort.
I signed up for HuluPlus tonght in the hopes of watching an ep or two of Castle on my new new Bluray Disk (BD) player. I paid the $8 for the month and setup the player… super easy. The vid starts loading and the interface is a bit clumsy. Hulu wrote an app to interoperate with the Sony built in stuff. So it’s not like the desktop at all but it should work. Keep in mind I only have 1.5Mbps DSL. It’s all I can get here. I find the ep of Castle and after the ad stuff it starts to buffer. On my PC I usually let a show start then pause it and get a snack or “something” to allow the buffer to fill. From there it’s smooth sailing. Well a “feature” of HuluPlus is that your video quality is upped from 480p (my usual setup on my Mac) to 720p. That’s a lot more bits!
The ep starts to play and and it goes about 30 seconds and stops to buffer. Hmmm.. Not good. I look for someplace in the Sony/Hulu interface to adjust the video quality. Nothing. I stop the vid and go back to my Mac and find in the Settings tab of my Hulu Profile I can set the “Playback Quality” to 720, 480, 360 or 288p. Non of those seem to have any affect on the experience via my BD player. Also interesting is that the video that eventually starts to play looks awesome! Broadcast HD quality. I google around and try to find out what’s going on and I can’t really find much.
Sidenote: It’s amazing that googling “Hulu Plus” produces so many responses about the “new Hulu Plus for $10/month” thing from last summer/fall. Wierd.
I figure I’m done trying by now and go ahead and send a message into support. This is always a last resort for me for some reason. I assume that the answer is out there somewhere. The actual message is lost in the web form memory hole of support.hulu.com but basically I explained my DSL speed, hardware and what is basically above in this post and wanted to know if the “Playback Quality” setting affected any of it. I also asked nicely that I not just get a form email with the system requirements (which are 3Mbps+ in case you are wondering) for HuluPlus. Here is the reply I got… in less than an hour… on a Sunday night.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for your writing in. Hulu’s system requirements are…
Just kidding! Unfortunately, the video quality settings that you are saving in your account settings page are solely based on your web viewing experience. You aren’t able to manually change the bitrate on Sony Blu-ray players at this time. The device selects the best quality for viewing via your internet speed. I would suggest plugging the device directly into your router if you are streaming over wifi to improve performance. I hope this helps!
If you have any other questions, let me know. Happy viewing.
Thanks,
Eric
Hulu Support
I thought the humor was spot on. I really did laugh. Not really loud or out so much but I L’d. In the end my beef is really with Qwest. But in the end end, (starting to sound like this post is about something else) what will matter more than anything else is, what speed will my new abode have.
