Online video site Hulu has launched a desktop application for Windows and OS X that allows you to find and watch Hulu videos without firing up a web browser.

Hulu has been fighting a battle with media center application Boxee for months. Boxee is a desktop application that lets people interact with media on their hard drives or the web using a big screen interface that makes a good case for sticking your computer next to your TV. But Hulu's content partners like Fox and NBC make a lot more money when you watch TV shows through old fashioned TV broadcasts instead of on the internet, so I wasn't surprised to see Hulu disable Boxee support. But I was rather surprised to see Hulu launch its own desktop client today.

Hulu Desktop beta is designed to let you navigate Hulu from your couch, and it works either with a mouse and keyboard or a Windows Media Center or Apple remote control. You can use the desktop client to search for videos or browse through media by category. Videos can be viewed in full screen mode, and when you use the navigation tools to find additional programming the video will continue playing in a small window.

If you link Hulu Desktop to your Hulu account you can access your personal information including your Hulu queue from the desktop client.

Hulu Desktop is one of the first tools launched as part of a new Hulu Labs, a new experimental section of Hulu. Other Labs tools include the ability to browser for programs by original air date, video recommendations based on your viewing history, and video panel widgets.

Update: Oh yeah, before you ask... Hulu Desktop won't work outside of the US any better than the web version of Hulu does.

TinyChat is a service that lets you create an instant web-based chatroom with a unique short URL that you can share with anyone you want to talk to at the drop of a hat. We've covered the service before, but today TinyChat rolled out two new features: video chat and support for screen sharing.

The screen sharing application is a bit rough around the edges. But when it works, the user that wants to share their screen with other participants clicks a button and a Java applet opens up that lets you broadcast your Windows, Linux, or OS X desktop to all participants in the conversation. One problem is that once you fire up the screen sharing application the only way to make it go away is to restart your browser and/or Java. You shouldn't have this problem if you're trying to view someone else's desktop, only if you're trying to share yours.

The video chat feature is much simpler to use. If you have a mic and/or camera plugged into your computer, you can talk to participants in the web chat face to face.

The basic service is available for free, but TinyChat also offers pro accounts with premium features like the ability to password protect and record chats. Pro members also have higher quality video. If you're using the free version you'll see a pop up asking you to sign up for a Pro account periodically. It's only supposed to pop up after 5 minutes and then again every half hour or so, but right now the nag screen appears every few minutes.

In addition to paid accounts, the folks behind TinyChat are hoping to market the application as a white box solution for web publishers looking for a way to integrate text and video chat with their web sites. For example, instead of just asking readers of a blog to leave comments, you can have them click a button to participate in a chat about a post without leaving your site.

Time is quickly running out for you to join the Screencast 4 Cash contest for a chance to win big by teaching others via screencast.

To be eligible, entries must be submitted by 11:59PM CST on Monday, June 1st. So far, creative contestants have uploaded screencasts on everything from using MAME to being a Google search ninja.

Just as before, entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit. The grand prize will be determined by a panel of judges including some of your favorite Download Squad bloggers.

Even if you're not the teaching kind, there's no excuse not to put on your own critics hat and vote for your favorites! Every vote puts a dime in the pocket of the Youth for Technology Foundation, so every click goes a little bit further in support of the geeks of tomorrow.

Skype 4.1 beta for Windows is out today, and it adds a few new features. Probably the biggest change is the addition of screen sharing technology. While Skype typically rolls out new features for its Windows client before adding them to Skype's other platforms, this feature has been available in Skype 2.8 beta for Mac for a while now.

When you're chatting with a Skype contact, you can now click a Share button in order stream your entire desktop or just a portion of your screen with your contact.

Skype 4.1 beta for Windows also allows you to import contacts from other services including Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo!, AOL, and LinkedIn. You can also send contacts to other Skype users and there's a birthday reminder feature.

The update also brings some bug fixes and audio and video improvements.

There are a lot of ways to download videos from YouTube, a lot of ways to convert those videos, and a lot of ways to download music from MySpace. I'm used to thinking of all that as requiring a few different apps or web-based tools, but Farkie does it all. Farkie aims to be the only downloader you need for videos, music, flash games and other media on websites, and it's even got a Firefox add-on.

To use Farkie, you just have to paste the URL of the page you want to download from into Farkie's form, and let it do the rest. You'll get a list of all the media on the page (and check boxes for file types, so you can filter if there's a lot there), and you can download any of the available files via links.

It can even convert YouTube videos for you, into wmv, m4v, mov, and a bunch of other formats.

Torrents have gained some infamy as a way for users to share resources and quickly download large files, but their potential as a way to watch streaming video is comparatively almost unknown. StreamTorrent is a Windows app that taps that potential to let you watch online TV, including HBO, the BBC, and plenty of sports channels. It works the same way torrent downloads work, with a collection of users "seeding" parts of the video to other users as they watch.

It might not be practical unless you've got a lot of people watching and seeding, but you could theoretically stream your own channel over StreamTorrent. Users would only have to search for it to connect. This could prove to be an affordable way of providing large video files when you don't have the cash to pony up for high bandwidth fees, and it can, at least in theory, stream to an unlimited number of users.

[via gHacks]

Yahoo! is shutting down online video editing site Jumpcut next month. This week the company rolled out a few tools allowing users to download their original video files and rendered projects from the site.

The easy part is download your "assets," which includes the original video clips, photos, audio, and other elements you uploaded to the site. Jumpcut is now offering users links for downloading these assets one at a time or in one large ZIP file.

If you want to save the videos that you've already mixed and edited, you'll need to download the JumpOut! movie renderer for Windows. This tool lets you navigate through your saved videos and select a movie that you want to render as a WMV file that you can save on your desktop.

The movie renderer takes a long time to work (about 5 times the length of a video's run time), and it's described as "experimental software" which means that you might run into some glitches. But right now, it's the only tool available that will let you save your edited videos.

You have until June 15th to download your assets and movies from the site.

We're hitting the home stretch in the MindBites Screencast 4 Cash contest! As I discussed last month, MindBites is holding a contest in conjunction with Techsmith's Jing Pro and Download Squad (that's us!). Entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit.

The deadline for entries was extended until June 1, so you still have time to enter in your own screencast. Have some awesome coding or web design skills you want to share? Share them with the world!

Right now, individuals can vote once per week, but starting June 2, you can also vote daily! Even better, for every vote cast, $0.10 will be donated to the Youth for Technology Foundation, which helps underprivileged kids get access and instruction to technology.

If you want to create a screencast but you're unsure of what software to use, peruse our past reviews and tests of web and client-based screencasting apps! Check out the contest page for all the rules and requirements, plus check out the entries that have been submitted thus far.

If you've got a great idea for a screencast, you have until June 1 to enter. Grant and I are two of the judges and we can't wait to see what else gets submitted!

People have been hacking together ways to watch streaming videos from Netflix using Windows Media Center since early last year. But now Microsoft and Netflix have rolled out an official Netflix application for Windows Vista Media Center.

In other words, Netflix subscribers can browse through the 12,000 streaming titles available in the Netflix "watch instantly" library and watch them from the comfort of a couch using Microsoft's 10 foot interface and a media center remote control.

Users can also manage their DVD rental queue from Windows Media Center. The feature is powered by Microsoft Silverlight, so you'll need to have that installed on your media center system. It won't work with Media Center Extenders, but you can continue to stream movies via an Xbox 360 if you have an Xbox LIVE Gold membership.

Computer World has published an article asking whether or not Adobe could be gearing up to open-source Flash. That's a question I discussed a while back with Adobe's Dave McAllister, and one that he's continually answered with "the Flash player is as open as I can get it right now."

While most of the inner workings of Flash are already open (The Flex SDK, Blaze DS, and ActionScript virtual machine) there continue to be cries for it to be fully open. Among the stumbling blocks preventing that are the proprietary codecs Adobe licenses (h.264 for video, HE-AAC for audio). "We will continue to open source the technologies that power Flash whenever we have the right to do it," McAllister told me.

Flash is by far the most dominant platform for delivering 80% of all web video and countless browser-based games. Computer World hypothesized that Microsoft's support of the OSS Moonlight project - which has brought Silverlight to Linux - may be putting the heat may be on Adobe to counter quickly.

Adobe sees things differently. Microsoft knows they can't close the gap without help, so getting behind a community effort like Moonlight "Open source can be used as a marketing tool and competitive weapon," McAllister explained. "Silverlight doesn't have the ecosystem that Flash does, so Microsoft is looking at different ways to compete," he continued.

We've been waiting for Sling Media to release an iPhone version of the SlingPlayer for a while now, and it looks like the wait is just about over. Engadget reports that the application will be available in the App Store early tomorrow morning for about $30.

For the unitiated, the SlingPlayer is an application that lets you watch live and pre-recorded TV on a computer or mobile device. The catch is that you'll need to have a Slingbox hooked up to your home entertainment system to stream that TV over the internet to your computer or phone. The good news is that while Sling Media had originally indicated that the iPhone version of the SlingPlayer would only work with the latest Slingboxes, it looks like most versions of the Slingbox should work.

What won't work is streaming TV over 3G connections. SlingPlayer for the iPhone will only work when you're connected to a WiFi network.

Popular open source media player VLC has almost hit version 1.0. The developers are in the process of pushing out a release candidate for version 1.0 of the cross-platform media player. There's little information about the latest version on the main VLC web site, but you can download the Windows version from FileHippo.

Here are just a few of the latest features:

• Instantaneous pausing
• Frame by frame playback
• Finer speed control
• New and fixed audio and video decoders
• On they fly zip file decompression and browsing
• On the fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression (ecept for on WIndows)
• Support for DVB-S and ATSC cards on Windows
• Experimental Blu-Ray disc and AVCHD folder support

There are also a number of interface improvements and other tweaks. And as always, VLC can open and play almost any multimedia file you care to throw at it.

VLC is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Yooouuutuuube is a fun web toy that turns a single YouTube video into a surreal grid made of copies of itself. It's a little difficult to explain without a visual, but the rows of the grid are slightly out of sync with one another, creating a ripple effect. One of the best demonstrations of how much fun Yooouuutuuube can be is this amazing Alice in Wonderland one that's been going around.

The options you can control include the frame size of the grid squares and the size of the rows and columns. While you're watching, there are pan, track and zoom controls that let you move over the whole bizarre like it was one screen. Even the lamest YouTube videos feel like art when you put them into Yooouuutuuube, but the best ones are absolutely delightful.

And before you ask: yes, it does work with the Dramatic Chipmunk.

Netflix has been a pioneer in the online retail space by providing automated recommendation services that can help you find items that you might like based on your previous video rentals, ratings, and other data. But for the past few years, Netflix has been trying to make its algorithm at least a little bit better through the Netflix Prize contest, which offers cash in exchange for significant improvements to the company's recommendation engine.

And apparently that bounty has been yielding positive results, because Netflix announced this week that it's changed the recommendation system based on improvements submitted through the Netflix Prize contest.

The new algorithm works better for users that rate movies. The system will now predict how many stars you would give movies that you havent' already watched, and that data will affect the movies that are displayed on different personalized sections of the Netflix web site, including the "Movies You'll Love" section.

[via AppScout]