Tag: tv

Hulu has caved into pressure from their content providers and changed their service so it will no longer work with Boxee. Unfortunately this also broke the XBMC-Hulu plugin.

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes.

From the Doing hard things post on the Hulu Blog.

Damn. Just damn.

I really liked watching The Daily Show & The Colbert Report on my TV. While those two shows are good, they are the only shows on Comedy Central which interest me. Then you factor in that cable companies do not allow subscribers to pick channels à la carte, so I’d have to double my cable bill just for those shows and maybe 2 other channels (each having no more than 3 shows of interest), I guess I’m done watching this stuff on TV1.

Plus I only had a single episode left to watch in Journeyman, which it turns out was really good. Though I stick by my initial assesstment of the first episode being a bit slow. Now I wish I’d given that a second chance before I rewatched all of John Doe, which had an interesting premise but really sucked.

1 At least for now. There is some talk on the XBMC Forums about continuing to work on the XBMC-Hulu plugin to get around Hulu’s changes

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!

Like most Americans I’ve been a bit more glued to my TV this week than usual due to the return of fresh programming for the fall. Here are a few quick impressions of the shows I watched this week.

Monday

  • Chuck: The producers/advertisers of this show are obviously targeting something very close to my demographic with this show. The first episode was nothing special, butit did amuse me. I suppose if this show is playing while I want to watch TV, I’ll watch it but it is nothing I would go out of my way to see.
  • Heroes: What a disappointment. I really enjoyed last season, but bringing back both of the Petrelli brothers in the season premier when last season’s finale showed them getting nuked cheapened the show immensely. I had been looking forward to this, but now I doubt I’ll be watching it.
  • Journeyman: Meh, this looks like a weak remake of Quantum Leap only significantly less interesting. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I gave up watching it 10 minutes in. It was just putting me to sleep.

Tuesday

  • NCIS: Yup, I’ll be watching this one all season long again. The season premier didn’t pull off any astounding changes to the show but did show off the writers’ ability to keep giving us what we want. Explosions, murder, mystery and action.
  • The Unit: First off whoever came up with the new intro clip to this show should be fired. It’s utterly horrible. That being said, like NCIS this show delivered. While the show is going a lot darker than before and looks like it will be spending this season mostly inside US borders; it looks good and was a solid hour of entertainment this event.

Wednesday

  • Bionic Woman: Surprisingly, I was impressed. I expected it to be considerably cheesier and crappier than it turned out to be. I didn’t much care for the main character but it was nice to see some actors from other shows I’ve liked.
  • Life: Heh, this was quite a bit of fun to watch this evening. Though the main character was excessively flakey for my taste and I’m not sure I’ll keep watching it given that it’s got the same timeslot as CSI: NY.

Thursday

  • Ugly Betty: This show is really more one I watch because my wife likes it and I fiddled around on my computer while it was on. What I caught of it was funny, but not enough to draw me back to the couch to watch it.
  • CSI: I had been looking forward to seeing this right up until it was on TV. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood, but I just didn’t care if the CSI member was going to live through the episode or not. Perhaps I’m getting a bit burned out on all these CSI shows.

Friday

  • Moonlight: Cheesy, vampire, detective show. A bit funny, a bit dark and worth watching if you happen to be home on a Friday night.

So there’s my quick thoughts on the premieres I’ve seen so far. Did I miss anything good?

WTF?!?!?  I’ve watched all 22 prior episodes for that <abbr title=”Piece Of Shit”>POS</abbr>?  Seriously, NBC what were you thinking?  You spent 22 episodes building up the confrontation between Peter and Sylar into a doomsday battle royale where the fate of the world or more acturately, the fate of the poor saps living in New York City lie in the balance.  And the best you can do is some minor telekinetics followed by a fist fight?  What a load of crap.

Oh and if Molly telling us about a man scarier than the Boogeyman (aka Sylar) was your idea of foreshadowing, then your idea of a pitching machine must be a M1 Abrams battle tank.  I know you want to build up some suspense to get people to come back for the next season, but this was entirely too heavy handed.

On the other hand, dropping Hiro into the past and that scene with Peter talking with his old (and let’s not forget dead patient) were good, interesting hooks.  Just having those bits and not the scary man would have been enough to draw people back.  I just don’t know if those 2 scenes were enough to draw me back next season after the craptacular ending you gave us for this season.

I just don’t know.

Dang nabbit! I was not picked for the final 10 and I didn’t win bumpkiss in the game. Ah well, maybe they’ll have another season of the game and I’ll do better then. Since my last entry about TH I received a couple more questions. Additionally as the game is over now, I don’t mind sharing my totally lame and incorrect guesses as to the final location of the treasure1.

@Stephen Y.: As you already found out, the correct answer to last week’s question was the Gutenberg Bible. I have to say I felt really proud of myself with that week’s question as it was the first time since watching the show where I was comfortable enough in my knowledge of the subject that I did not have to research the question before submitting the answer2.

@Jorge: Mind you it’s been many weeks since I did challenge #3, but as I recall it’s a matter of which way the wind is blowing (watch the clouds to determine this) and then of timing. For me, I had to wait for the ship to touch the raised chain and start it’s turn. While it was turning, I aimed for the right-hand side of the screen and fired. That allowed me to hit the ship by basically having them sail right into my canonball.

@Everybody else: Keep in mind that I only started watching TH/playing the online game with week 6. My guesses for the final location of the treasure were:

  1. Washington, D.C.
  2. Washington, D.C.
  3. Library of Congress
  4. Lincoln Memorial

As you were warned, my guess were all lame & inaccurate. I guess it is just as well that I didn’t get picked as one of the final 10 contests as the odds would have been against me winning. *shrug* Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

1 According to this post on the NBC message boards for Treasure Hunters, the correct final answer was Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
2 It didn’t hurt my ego that I also answered that question before my wife did either (also a first since I started watching the show).