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!
I’m jealous. XBMC always looked pretty slick to me, but I’ve never had or gotten an old Xbox to try it out on. I love Hulu, so more media-center style apps supporting it is very good.
I do have an older PC lying around, and plan to throw Boxee (http://tinyurl.com/ccjqro) on it and put it behind my entertainment center as soon as a Windows version is released (I know, it’s out for Linux, but I have some driver issues on that box).
i know i’m a bit late now lol but you don’t need an Xbox to run XBMC anymore. it’s available for PC, Mac, Linux, and Apple TV as well now. i added some RAM to my old PC, a new 1.5TB Hard Drive, and a TV Tuner and it now serves as my media center.
i hope they send alerts to email from this site so you get this cause i don’t want anyone else to miss out on XBMC like i was before. i had tried MediaPortal before but my old PC couldn’t handle it, plus it didn’t look nearly as slick as XBMC with the MediaStream Skin on it (which looks absolutely amazing).
so yea, head on over to XMBC.org and download that bad boy!
Thanks but I’m well aware XBMC is available for other platforms. I just don’t have the spare cash to replace my XBox with a computer dedicated to being a media center. Besides XBMC on Xbox works just fine for most things, I was just excited that Hulu was working with XBMC (however briefly).
I’ve heard good things about Boxee but don’t have a spare PC to be trying it out on. And Boxee has one big advantage over XBMC on an original XBox, that being a faster CPU capable of handling HD content. Still an original XBox goes for about $50 these days, so they’re cheap to setup. If you decide to pick one up, let me know and maybe I can give you a hand with softmodding it.
XBMC Media Center also runs on Linux, Mac OS X (Tiger and Leopard), Windows (XP, Vista, and 7), and the Apple TV:
http://xbmc.org/download/
@XBMC: True but but buying a computer capable of running any of those OSes costs considerably more than a used XBox, especially if you purchase a computer powerful enough to handle HD content.
It requires some jumping through hoops, but XBMC now supports Hulu. Yes! http://is.gd/hlk9
Unfortunately for us people living outside the U.S. HULU doesn’t play for us. 🙁 Any other alternatives for watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?
The official websites for Colbert Report and Daily Show offer the ability to play full episodes. I’ve not really tried either out as their episode viewer crashes my browser (Firefox 3, Flash 9, Ubuntu) every time I try visiting those pages.
Also I’m located in the US, so I’m not too familiar with options to people outside it. Though there has been talk in the XBMC Forums about the Hulu plugin & users outside the US. You might want to check that thread out for more info.
Someone know what can I do to see NETFLIX and XBMC channels out of USA?
Any info?
I believe you’ll need to use a US-based proxy server so Netflix sees your network traffic coming from within the US. As I am in the US, I don’t do this and don’t have any other details on setting such a thing up. You might want to try checking out the XBMC forums to find more details.