Hulu Plugin Development Thread - Developers only!

I've updated the patch and the zip file, the episode lists for older seasons is working now.

It looks like they're also in the midst of changing their rss feed syntax, a few times I got some rss downloads that were completely different. A few minutes later they were back to the old format.

Fixed a few issues with unicode characters in some of the menus. Also updated the stream quality selector; it used to only let you choose from 3 levels but there are actually (at least) 6 in use: H264 Medium, 650K, and 400K, and Flash High, Medium and Low. H264 Medium is a 1Mbit stream and is the highest quality they offer now. They don't encode in Flash High any more (700kbit VP6) but there are still some old shows on their site that use it. Generally on new shows now I only see the 3 H264 streams and Flash Medium. It's been a long time since I've seen a stream using Flash Low.

Looks like I'll be setting up a new github repo or something for this soon.

New repo is hosted at http://gitorious.org/xbmc-hulu

Hi everybody,

I tried to make this usable on Xbox and current XBMC builds in general. I delegated calls to Crypto libs to an Ubuntu machine using Pyro and used the RTMP proxy described in http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=71532 to get the streams displayed.
This almost works, but somehow it seems XBMC is not keeping the HTTP connection open so the proxy kills the connection. Anyhow I packed this up in a zip for everybody to try and maybe improve.

To get it running on Ubuntu 9.10:

1. Unzip the archive. Put "Hulu" into your video plugin folder. Edit line 220 in stream_hulu.py to point to the server running the RTMP proxy.

2. Install the packaged Pyro: sudo aptitude install pyro

3. Run the Pyro nameserver: pyro-ns -n [your_ip] -p 9090

4. Go to "Hulu_Pyro_Client" and run it: python hulu_pyro_client.py

5. Run the rtmp proxy: perl rtmp_proxy.pl

6. Run XBMC and select a stream through the plugin.

With a bit of luck you should see the first pictures appear. Then XBMC somehow seems to drop the HTTP connection causing the proxy to terminate the streaming fork. Maybe somebody has an idea why this happens and how to work around it.

Code available here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9M1A9QLN

mighty_bombero

You should have started with the latest version in git.

Not sure how this helps Xbox users, I don't see Pyro in the XBMC source tree. If you're going to go to the trouble of adding a module to your XBMC install, why not just add the Cipher module?

Why didn't you just use rtmpgw, instead of writing a proxy in perl?

Oh didn't know this existed. That looks really excellent. As for the Python modules. Thought they couldn't be simply added. Will see how far I get with rtmpgw.

Thanks for the good work.

Any progress on this, mighty_bombero? I'd love to have a working build/Hulu plugin, but all of my efforts to get this running properly have failed.

Maruchan,

well not really. I can stream from rtmpgw with vlc, xbmc runs into a timeout when trying to stream via http, though. I would need to investigate how the timeout for http connections can be increased.
All the hard work was done by highlandsun though and he has proposed patches to the rtmp part of xbmc. Once those land in the real build it should work and if the patch is ported to xbox it might even work there.

re: timeout settings: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...network.3E

right, I don't see any reason the new rtmp code wouldn't work on Xbox...

There is a problem with hulu streams skipping forward and back randomly by 30 seconds. It appears, that they made a few changes when they went to the new CDN.