I’ve played a little with Hulu Desktop on my HTPC. Honestly, it performs worse than just running it through a browser (Firefox 3.0.10 in this case) and it has a clunkier user interface. Playback in HD (Hmm.. that’s an unfortunate acronym) was extremely jerky, not due to bandwidth issues, but rather because it was using huge amounts of processing power.

Maybe the next iteration will fix these problems. Or better yet, maybe they’ll relent and go back to allowing Boxee and others to use it.