- Image via CrunchBase
Hulu, the online movie streaming site, released a version of its Desktop software for linux.
Now, we’re Linux people, so we love that a company has released Linux software. But we can’t help but think back to how this affects Boxee. Hulu asked them to remove support, then unveiled their desktop app, and have now extended it to every OS Boxee supports, even going a step further, because they offer both Fedora and Ubuntu options in both 32 and 64 bit, where Boxee offers only Ubuntu 32.
Since we use Fedora 64, we’re pleased by this and will be testing the product and have a review soon. The lack of stability under Fedora and/or 64-bit has limited our use of Boxee, which is the point. We want to use Boxee regularly, but we can’t.
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Blogging… Hulu unveils Desktop for Linux – Another Shot at Boxee? http://bit.ly/4e23Z
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
You are probably correct that this is a direct attack on Boxee, but regardless users are going to jump on it. Personally I have been trying for over six months to get Boxee working correctly, and have never been successful. I’ve had multiple issues with sound not working with some codecs, and video freezes, or simply crashes the entire application. I even stayed with with the 32 bit version of Linux Mint just for Boxee, but in the end I gave up. So imagine how delighted I was to see Hulu Desktop in a 64 bit version, and huge smile I had on my face to see that it actually works with no issues.
Don’t get me wrong I’d love to see Boxee get their product working since is has so many cool features. Unfortunately for Boxee though like most users I’m going to go with what actually works.
@Lantesh, sorry this has been your experience. Boxee is currently supported on Ubuntu 32bit only, and this choice is out of necessity. While we have seen many requests for 64bit versions, as well as other Linux distros, we are unable, at this time to satisfy this demand, other than trying to point people to what other people have been able to accomplish.
Boxee is a complex bit of software, and officially supporting any other build, requires we actually build it, and test it. Currently we do that for Windows (three versions: XP, Vista, 7), OSX (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard), and Linux (Ubuntu 32bit), and for each of these, we also test a variety of hardware, more specifically, of the GPU side of things. For instance, under our Linux version, Boxee supports VDPAU on 9400+ NVidia GPUs. That has to be tested. ATI, Intel and NVidia each work in not so slight differences on depending on the OS and drivers, we also need to test that… And then there is audio, as you yourself commented, and the two popular audio infras on Linux (ALSA and PulseAudio).
I wish we could support EVERYTHING, but this is not a text editor (not to minimize the effort in testing that sort of software) – we interact with many, many, aspects of the OS, and support that on multiple platforms. We have to draw the line somewhere.
I mentioned Ubuntu 32bit, what I did not mention is that we actually build/test/support at any given time at least one revision back. So right now we do that for Jaunty and Intrepid, and before Jaunty was officially launched, we also supported Hardy.