Hulu support?

[panamamike]

I'm not a fan of the PlayOn idea since it's a processor intensive setup. If I want to stream to multiple targets, the overhead might be too much.

Additionally, I want to view HD material, and PlayOn won't work without a gigabit hardwire connection. I want a one box solution, PlayOn is good for streaming SD material, but doesn't help for HD.

As for Hulu, I see there's a XBMC solution. Pretty cool, but then again, it's a playon setup which wouldn't address my want for HD content.

Mike

[SLR_65]

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good free (or low cost) Hulu downloader? And a converter to conver the flash video over to mpeg, avi, etc?

Thanks!

Steve

[johnsonx42]

orbit downloader used to be able to do it (or so I heard), but I never saw it work. I understand they got wise to it and blocked it a month or so before I gave it a try. If you could download the video, I'm not sure you'd even need to convert it as ffdshow can play flv, right? It would be awesome if there was a way to download the videos... they'd probably play alot smoother that way too.

Hulu's entire model depends on making absolutely sure people see the commercials, so you can bet they'll find a way to block any download method that becomes possible.

Hulu (or rather their content providers) don't even want people watching Hulu shows on their TV's; it's supposed to be strictly for watching on a computer screen with mouse at hand (ie, they don't want Hulu competing against the TV networks). They were forced to block Boxee from accessing Hulu for awhile, though I think Boxee has found a way around the block. I just discovered Zinc today (awesome, I set it up as an external task), but I worry it won't be long before they decide they have to block that too. Zinc appears to use Firefox, so I suppose they couldn't block Zinc without blocking all Firefox users.

[CornStopper]

For converting .flv files to avi I have used http://download.cnet.com/Pazera-Free-FLV...86669.html worked well for youtube stuff

[fshagan]

If you use Firefox, "FlashGot" will download flash movies as FLV files while you are viewing them. You can convert them to other formats using the freeware SUPER at http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html (its a front end for multiple freeware encoders, and works very well).