Adobe released its Media Player and it has a lot to offer and shows a lot of promise.  Likewise, it exhibits problems that I would have expected of beta software and still seems somewhat feature incomplete.

Adobe media player has a lot of content to offer, all of it can be watched for free with limited commercial interruption (very similar to NBC’s Hulu) but appears to be an alliance with CBS/Sony and select shows from Paramount.  Selections vary from MTV to CBS to HGTV and beyond, you will also find every single episode of the original Star Trek series which impressed me to no end.

The service is similar to Hulu but the full-screen mode is far superior.  There is so much content, no one person could ever get to all of it in a single article, you’ll just have to investigate all it has to offer for yourself and best of all, it requires no login (unlike Hulu).

There’s a lot to love but there’s a lot that can get in the way of that love, like having an argument with your first girlfriend, you know it’s going to happen and it’s never pretty.

Adobe did not see fit to include a "resume play" feature.  If the application decides to stop responding or quits unexpectedly, it does not "remember" where you left off so you must start watching from the beggining but fortunately the content will cache faster and you can skip over it; it’s still not as fast as a "resume" feature.

Speaking of the application crashing or failing to respond, this happens, a lot, at random and may happen several times in a single session, the only solution is to quit, restart and manually find the point where you last left off.

Also, if you like pausing your content, putting your computer to sleep or hibernate and coming back to it later, don’t plan on doing it with Adobe media player.  The content will simply go "missing."  That’s right, when it’s been offline for a while, it can no longer "find" the content you were watching even if it successfully reconnected to the network.  So, you have to go to the "Home" menu, find what you were watching and that’s right, start it over from the beginning.

None of these problems are present with other media players, online or off and it’s most certainly not a problem with Hulu which has the "resuming from where you last left off" feature down to the proverbial "T."

If Adobe were still testing its media player software as a beta, I could forgive some of these shortcomings but as it is, it’s final version 1.0 and I simply can’t.  The lack of a "resume" feature suggests its incomplete and its inability to find content after the computer has been hibernating or sleeping is almost an unforgivable sin.

Nice content but I’ve seen monkeys write better software, Windows Vista for one, Adobe might try borrowing some engineers from Microsoft, it certainly can’t do worse.  Technically Hulu is still in beta but it doesn’t "lose" content you were watching and has "resume play," how did Adobe miss the boat on that one?  This author can’t fathom the circumstances.

[UPDATE:]  I recieved an email from a reader who states that it is no longer necessary to login to Hulu to access content and he is absolutely correct about this.  However, that was an easy mistake to make on my part since whenever I visit Hulu I login to check my subscriptions and queue.  I had never tried accessing content on Hulu without logging in; doing so is pretty much pointless to me but nevertheless can be done.  I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 8:35 am under Software.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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