Hulu pulled from Boxee

[lazysean]

I can't post screenshots because I'm not at home right now - just tested it quickly over VNC. It's pretty simplistic though. No pictures, all text. But it does include episode descriptions. When I choose "RSS Feeds" from sagemc's menus (My Menu -> RSS Feeds) I get a list of my feeds. So it says something like:

1. Hulu - Episodes for Dollhouse
(0 unread)
2. Hulu - Episodes for Bones
(6 unread)


Highlighting one of the choices will change the top of the screen to give more detail about it. "15 news items, 6 unread", "Updated 18 minutes ago"...that sort of thing.

Clicking on one of those, brings you to a similar list of episodes. The episode description for whatever episode you have highlighted appears at the top of the screen, with the list on the bottom:

News from Hulu: Episodes for Bones

Bones: The Man in the Mud (s3 | e10)
When a young couple goes skinny dipping, their spontaneity is ruined when they find the remains of a skeleton in the mud.
Added: April 15, 2008Air date: April 14, 2008Duration: 43:
14Rating: 4.7 / 5.0
Tue,15 Apr 2008 11:00:00 -0000


1. Bones: The Man in the Mud (s3 | e10)
2. Bones: The Skull in the Desert (s1 | e17)

... and so on.

Selecting one of those launches IE in kiosk mode to the Hulu page for that episode. Haven't done anything with EventGhost yet. I'll need to have it give exclusive controls to IE and not process Sage commands while IE's open. Possibly put Sage to sleep. Add a play/pause button that sends "space". Add an exit button that closes the window. and figure out how to make it full screen, toggle the quality, etc, which will probably mean emulating mouse clicks, don't know how well that will work.

Like I said, not ideal. But Hulu within Sage, hopefully without needing to get up and use the keyboard/mouse = awesome, for me. I'll play with it more and maybe get to put up screen shots later, but this pretty much covers it.

[Brent]

Nice find. I'll have to play with this over the weekend if I can find time away from work...

[lazysean]

I see now though that your post above did include episode pictures - I'll have to play around with mine and see if that will work. I guess you added it in where Youtube and Google stuff is? I'll check it out. Everything is different here since I'm using SageMC.

[Peter_h]

Wow! It looks like you guys might have found the missing peice of the puzzle.

Would this open the door for all of the other online services, ie amazon VOD, cbs, etc.?

[pjpjpjpj]

Unfortunately, this is only a fix for people using a PC as server/client, and leaves all the Extender-only people (which seems to be quite a lot these days) out in the wind.... ...sigh...

We saw pictures of hulu on the HD200 from CES.... such a tease....

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

We saw pictures of hulu on the HD200 from CES.... such a tease....

And before that we saw Sage running on a BluRay player .....

[lazysean]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

Wow! It looks like you guys might have found the missing peice of the puzzle.

Would this open the door for all of the other online services, ie amazon VOD, cbs, etc.?

It depends on the site - I just looked at Amazon and I don't see RSS feeds anywhere except the forums, so I'd guess no for them at least. I will point out, though, while you obviously can't browse for movies within Sage, you can watch them after they download (again, of course, you must be on a Windows PC, sorry everyone else!) I've only used it a few times, but basically I browse the movies at work, and renting/purchasing something triggers Unbox to download it to my home PC. I configured Sage to include Amazon's download directory in video imports, and set it to play wmv files using Windows Media Player /fullscreen. Another few simple EventGhost settings (I should really donate to those people, that program has made so many things easier for my setup) for pause/play/stop/exit and I'm all set.

Back to Hulu, though - I found the biggest downside to this implementation last night. RSS feeds from them seem to be limited to 20 items, so out of the 5 or so shows I attempted to add last night 3 of them are basically useless because they have more than 20 episodes and the feed never includes them all.

Still, it's something.

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by lazysean

It depends on the site - I just looked at Amazon and I don't see RSS feeds anywhere except the forums, so I'd guess no for them at least. I will point out, though, while you obviously can't browse for movies within Sage, you can watch them after they download (again, of course, you must be on a Windows PC, sorry everyone else!) I've only used it a few times, but basically I browse the movies at work, and renting/purchasing something triggers Unbox to download it to my home PC. I configured Sage to include Amazon's download directory in video imports, and set it to play wmv files using Windows Media Player /fullscreen. Another few simple EventGhost settings (I should really donate to those people, that program has made so many things easier for my setup) for pause/play/stop/exit and I'm all set.

Back to Hulu, though - I found the biggest downside to this implementation last night. RSS feeds from them seem to be limited to 20 items, so out of the 5 or so shows I attempted to add last night 3 of them are basically useless because they have more than 20 episodes and the feed never includes them all.

Still, it's something.

Sounds like a bug that should be sent of to Sage.

For the extenders, once the controls get sorted out, we could always use the netflix hack.

[lazysean]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

Sounds like a bug that should be sent of to Sage.

Sorry - by them I meant "Hulu". No matter what software you're looking at to view their RSS feeds they only list 20 episodes or 25 search results.

Awesome.