DracoFelis
Premium
join:2003-06-15
| reply to frankdsl124c
Re: hulu
said by frankdsl124c  :Thanx 4 all the help. I found that Hulu seems to work best when all of the startup programs, especially the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are turned off. Of course then i'm in danger of getting my computer infected. Agreed. I personally wouldn't turn off the anti-virus for that reason. And that's especially true now that some malware authors have sometimes managed to use "ads" on legitimate web sites, as one way to try infecting PCs. So just because we presumably trust HULU, doesn't mean I would necessarily trust all the (3rd party) ads that HULU posts on their site. Because if the place HULU gets it's ads gets compromised, than those "ads" could try infecting your PC (at which point you would really want your anti-virus running)!
OTOH while I don't turn off my anti-virus in situations such as this, I have been known to use Task Manager to lower the priority of the anti-virus, so that the real time activities (such as the video) get better priority than the anti-virus itself. Seems to help a bit.
BTW: I forgot to mention one of the best "tricks" for good streaming video on low CPU machines. Lower your video resolution as much as you can get away with. For example, I've found that HULU at 800x600 screen resolution works fairly well. Remember that the CPU used is proportional to the amount of pixels drawn, NOT how big that is on the screen. So if you lower your screen resolution, you need to draw much fewer pixels to fill the same amount of the screen!
And that also means that a newer video card (that offloads more of the drawing of the video to the video card) might also speed things up for you. Remember, a large fraction of the CPU of rendering video, is the CPU needed to draw the video images in real time. And how fast that is, is not only dependent upon the speed of your CPU, it is also dependent upon the speed of your video card. |
