I’ve been home sick today and when not sleeping I’ve been working to upgrade the version of XBMC I have installed on my softmodded XBox. I had been running the last stable release, but running into the occasional problem. First off I’ll note that Nautilus 2.22.5.1 under Ubuntu 8.04.1, does a crappy job of working as an FTP client. That held me up for a while, but after switching over to using gFTP things went much smoother.
The side effect of Nautilus working so poorly was I had time to do a little googling. I’ve heard good things about the Hulu website for watching TV shows I’ve missed. Thing i I hate sitting at my computer for long periods of time when I’ve got a comfy couch1 and a much larger TV than computer monitor. So as I said, I started googling and looking for a XBMC/Hulu plugin and I did find one in the XBMC Forums.
Unfortunately the 0.2 release mentioned in the first post of that thread didn’t work so well for me and there were 38 pages in the thread. I did some more searching and found an article over at LifeHacker. The article seems to be talking about the same plugin but links to a newer release of it. I kept looking to see if there were anything else out there and found what appears to be the main site for the plugin, xbmc-hulu. That last site doesn’t provide a simple download, but you can use subversion to checkout the lastest copy of their plugin.
And that latest version is pure gold, which is to say I’ve not run into a single problem watching any videos via the plugin. Now I can sit back on the couch and watch Colbert Report, The Daily Show and all sorts of other good stuff that I don’t get with my cable TV package. If my sinuses clear up and this cold goes away, I could be really happy.
UPDATE: I appear to be getting quite a bit of traffic (for me anyway) on this post, so thanks for stopping by! Also I’ve finally read through the entire 40 pages (at the time of this writing) in the XBMC Forums thread about this plugin. From reading that thread, there appears to be a lot of confusion on where/how to get the plugin to work. So for the record, I’m running xbmc-hulu 1.0 (SVN copied checked out on 26 January 2009) on top of T3CH’s 2009-01-25 build of XBMC (rev17349) on an original XBox (softmodded using Mech Assault via ProductWiki’s instructions).
UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.
1 Someday I will have a comfy chair!