Advice on building a cheap Hulu PC?

We enjoy watching Hulu and typically connect one of our laptops up to the 48" plasma TV via HDMI cable. The problem is, in fullscreen mode the display is very choppy. If we run Hulu in a popup window and manually expand to about 95% of the screen size though, it works pretty well... However it's annoying to have borders on the screen as well as the video progress bar at the bottom.

The laptop I'm using is an MSI, Turion X2 @ 2.0Ghz, 3 GB RAM, GeForce 9400MGS (9100+9300 hybrid), running Windows 7 Home Premium. The 9300 is turned on of course. We have a fiber optic connection that downloads at 28 Mbps and uploads at 18 mbps. Hulu buffers extremely quickly, so it's not a streaming problem.

Note that if we're just using the 1366x768 laptop display in full screen mode, it also looks choppy, and again, when manually expanded to almost full screen it's very smooth.

Not sure what's going on here. Maybe the computer has to change the shape of the video as it plays it in full screen and that's causing the choppiness?

I'm considering building a cheap Hulu PC to stay permanently attached to the TV, using a beefier GPU in case that might be the problem.

Anyone have any advice?

Tricky.

Hulu (for anyone outside the USA, it's an online video streaming site) streams at a max 480p, which is probably 640x480 (possibly 704x480 if they're being wierd.) Almost seems a shame to subject your plassy to that...

Erm, that wasn't really advice, was it?

/sits back and waits for A/V guy to turn up.

Yeah the 480p isn't great, but it's more than watchable even on a large-ish TV. I live in Japan (US Air Base), where the base TV is 480p so I'm not missing anything. Or rather I don't know what I'm missing.

I live off-base though so I get this kick#$% Japanse ISP for only $48/month.

If no advice, does anyone have any suggestions for a desktop GPU that's a capable media player, but not too expensive? And also quiet?

GeForce 8500GT is okay. Cheap, cooled passively (really quiet), decent GPU. Not for modern games, mind you, but it should run even 720p without much trouble.

I have very limited experience with HULU (only used it 3x or so and didn't like it), but I suspect that the problem is either a setting with the HULU player, or due to your location. How were you able to connect to HULU? I have lived overseas before and things like Hulu, Netflix, etc wouldn't allow me to view anything without using a proxy, which was dicey at best. Also, how does it do with other streaming video online? Have you tried it with anything else?
In any case, the GPU and the other hardware on your laptop is more than capable of streaming 480p at a smooth rate, so the problem is either virus/outdated drivers, or not related to your laptop at all.

With that said, if you did decide to go with a HDPC, what's your budget, and do you need all the components for it, or just some?

Have you downloaded Flash 10.1 yet? Any nVidia card that supports CUDA will support Flash 10.1, and eat Hulu for lunch.

I have a computer with an AMD Athlon x2 cpu (I forget the actual model, but it's AM2) and an HD4850 video card connected to a 46" LCD TV. It has no problems playing video from YouTube (reg or HD) at full screen (1920x1080). However:
- I've never tried Hulu on this machine.
- I use the regular VGA connection (plus audio) since I couldn't get the HDMI to display without about a 1 inch black border around the picture. (Which was a minor p-off since I paid extra for a 4850 with HDMI output.)

So basically, I'd say any newish AMD (AM2, AM3 socket) with a mid-range video card such as a HD4670 should be reasonably cheap and work very well.

I have an Armed Forces Pacific ISP address, even though it's a Japanese ISP. Folks can't access our ISP if they live on-base however.

Netflix streaming doesn't work though because it says we're out of the country... Hulu used to not work when we had a normal Japanese ISP address for a few weeks, but then it worked when the Armed forces switch happened...

I'm almost certainly virus-free, per Malwarebytes, AVG, and a recent scan by Microsoft Security Essentials.

When connecting with HDMI we had a border too. The solution was to go into the Nvidia control panel and manually resize the screen.

VGA is one of those technologies that really shouldn't exist anymore. I'm not going to use it. I don't even think my TV has a VGA port.

Flash is required to use Hulu.

I have another laptop which plays Hulu full screen fine...

Dell XPS 1730, Core 2 Extreme @2.8 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, 8800M GTX w/SLI, Windows 7 Home Premium

And another that also has problems...

HP dm3, Turion Neo X2 @ 1.6 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Radeon 4330, Windows 7 Home Premium


It's weird like I said... if I play in a pop out window and manually expand the screen to be pretty much full screen it's fine (but annoying borders). But when I actually click full screen it looks like I'm getting about 10 fps.

Not Flash 10.1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboB...t=Combo.311567

Done.

THat's going to be my HTPC when I get my new apartment next year. Well, the parts will change because it's 6 months from now, but the concept will be the same.

I don't like that case, but the motherboard is great. Ion/Atom mobo so you can stream HD movies EASY. Micro ATX makes it real small so it won't look trashy in the living room. You can get some nice cases with really nice features, or just get a simple case and get dongles for the features you need (like if you want a remote).

If you are seriously considering building a HTPC let me know a price range and I can whip something up for you.

Flash 10.1 isn't required to use Hulu either

Ok, maybe I wasn't clear before. Let me clarify.

Overall your system is pretty weak. Flash is a grotesquely coded monstrosity, and as a result, you actually need a fairly decent system.

Flash is required to use Hulu, and Flash 10.1 has GPU acceleration in it. That means it will offload some of the stress to the GPU instead of the CPU, effectively spreading the burden. Flash 10.1 is far far better than its predecessors. That is a possible solution to your problem considering you have nVidia GPUs. The addition of the HD4330 system having problems only adds gunpowder to my already explosive argument.

That said, download and install it, then return here and tell me if it worked or didn't. I think I know a few workarounds for nVidia cards, considering my background, that we can try.

I .... said exactly that.

Unless you have flash 10.1 installed, that 9300 isn't doing anything for Hulu playback. Vanilla flash (v. 10.0.x), available from the main Adobe Flash Player website, can't do GPU offloading.

Link: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Well, that's big. I'll give it a shot.

Update: Flash 10.1 beta 2 installed and full screen works perfectly. Smooth as silk. I had no idea that vanilla flash 10 didn't support GPU usage. That's kind of sad.

Thanks everyone for their help.

Weak? Meh, it's a standard midrange laptop. It has one of those nice 16:9 ratio screens for movie watching and 2 speakers + mini subwoofer so it's great for watching movies. It's one of the few laptops I've seen that can actually fill a room with sound adequately (not great or course). I got it ~1 year ago from Newegg for about $600 which I think was a solid deal considering these things plus dual-core and a GPU.

Another update... It was working smooth as silk because I had it set at low res.

At regular resolution it's a little better I think, but not much. It's still choppy in full screen.

Check this out:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=1

Maybe it's not something that I can fix...