Netflix and Hulu Streams in Frontrow!

[mordaskyt]

A brilliant little plug in for Frontrow that allows you to browse and play your Netflix instant que as well as streams from both Netflix and Hulu. Its called understudy

http://code.google.com/p/understudy/

Very new, a bit rough around the edges still but the functionality is amazing.
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Ars Longa, Vitea Brevis

[WheelSpinners]

Hulu works great with Boxee, but I'll check it out. At first glance it sounds promising. Can you get Hulu HD though?

[TonyMontana]

Great find.
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MacMini 2.0GHz C2D (2009)
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Dell Mini 10v *OSX 10.6.4*

[Grover Time]

I've been messing around with Understudy for the last 30 minutes. I seem to get an error when adding Hulu feeds, but it accepts them after you back out of Front Row. The rest seems to work pretty good. It could use a menu icon though. Does anyone know how to add one?

[sraveh]

Netflix does not work for me. I'm loged in to my netflix account using Safari but when I try to watch a movie I get an error message saying. Viedo can not be loaded please ensure that you are logged in to your account

[DavidBaker]

Understudy shows great promise, but I get an error everytime I try to add an individual show feed from Hulu. I also can't seem to get it to show the items in my queue.

Has anyone been successful doing this?

I agree with an earlier poster, there needs to be an icon.

[mordaskyt]

Icons are png format and just go in the plug in's resources folder, there are two, a big one and a blurred one. Grab two from one of the stock plug ins for the size, resolution etc.

I have also had trouble with Hulu feeds but have had no problems adding netflix. Be sure you have the latest version of Silverlight installed in your browser. Now we need some controls, right now I can only play/pause.
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Ars Longa, Vitea Brevis

[don731]

I can't quite figure out the Hulu part. How do you get Understudy to pick up your Hulu queue? Netflix works fine, and picks up our queue. Silverlight starts right up.
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Cheers,

Don in Chicagoland

[mordaskyt]

Yeah I cant get Hulu to work either.
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Ars Longa, Vitea Brevis

[DavidBaker]

I can get the standard feeds, but not my subscriptions or queue. I have left Safari open and logged into Hulu, but nothing. Is there a trick?

[mac37205]

I hope that I can help out since I spent an enormous amount of time trying to get a feed for my Hulu queue. The most direct way of adding the feed is to do it with a property list editor; I suggest Pref Setter 2.0. Here are the steps:

1) Open Pref Setter.
2) Type "fr" to search for Front Row plist.
3) Double click on "com.apple.frontrow". If a dialog box appears, just click "edit anyway".
4) Scroll down to "Understudy". There should be two headings - "feeds" and "titles". Note that there will be the same number of items under "feeds" and "titles" because each feed corresponds to a title.
5) Add correct feed to queue. The form should be "http://www.hulu.com/feed/queue/USERNAME". Replace USERNAME with your Hulu username.
6) Save file.

The queue should show up in a few seconds. An initial reboot may be required, I don't recall. Note that changes to your Hulu queue (not feed URL) will take much longer to show up in Understudy. For me, it takes about 30 minutes.

Have fun modifying feeds that are initially added in Understudy. For example, I added "Recent Movies" in Understudy and went to Pref Setter to change the feed to "http://hulu.com/feed/recent/feature_film". Now I can see which movies were recently added to Hulu. Basically, if Hulu has a feed for what you want, you can add it. Just surf Hulu, find what you want to use as a feed, then click on the orange RSS icon to get the URL (For Safari, make sure to replace "feed://" with "http://").

Additional modifications to the presentation of Understudy include adding an icon and changing its position in Front Row.

Enjoy!

I am using Understudy version 0.4 on a Mac Mini hooked up to a HDTV. Understudy is great!

[Squid]

Yeah I'm digging Understudy a lot. I'm not using it while logged into Hulu via Safari, I'm just copying the RSS feeds Hulu provides and entering them into Understudy. Currently have Heroes and Fringe entered along with Recent movies. The only one I've had trouble with is HD feeds. That and it sucks that you can only get the nasty 360 resolution while in understudy instead of the better 480. I bet if you logged into Hulu via Safari and have your Hulu account set to automatically play the higher res then you'd get the same in Understudy though. I just wish it could be used with Firefox instead of Safari.
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[curt]

[scooper]

[xmen65]

I gave this a try last night, but the Hulu videos were stuttering around really bad. I thought it might be something with my ISP or Hulu, but they played perfectly on Hulu's website. Fullscreen and 480 was like butter. I even went back and tried disabling Perian (don't ask me why), repairing my disk permissions and trashing the com.apple.frontrow.plist file. None of this made a difference. In fact, I'm noticing the same thing tonight. Am I alone on this one?