Today Hulu gave their video player a much needed refresh that brings with it a slightly updated look and a bunch of new features. You can watch a brief guided tour about all the updates in the video embedded above, but I’ll run through some of them here. The base video player is now 720×404 pixels large, that’s 25% more surface area than the old player. When you’re watching a video and the mouse is at rest, the player is control-free, meaning on all-screen controls and menus are hidden from view. There are new player controls that are now streamlined across all videos: normal player, fullscreen player, pop-out player, and embedded player. New features include adaptive bitrate streaming (as your bandwith fluctuates, you can make it so the player chooses the resolution of the streaming video based on your current speed); ad volume normalization (the player analyzes the volume of your streaming video and normalizes the volume of the ad breaks to match what you’re watching); and seek hover preview (when you hover your mouse over any spot in the video, you will see a small thumbnail preview of what’s going on at that specific point in time). Scrub through the video above to learn about some other neat features. Overall, all the new features and the updated design combine to make a welcome, streamlined refresh of the Hulu video player. Now about bringing Hulu to mobile devices…