Five gets fixed

Channel Five have been changing their streaming from WMV to Flash. That has meant that some Five programs don't work in TunerFreeMCE any more. I have made changes in version 2.3.0 to add in support for the Five Flash based programs too. It does that by going to the Five page and then clicking on the full screen button.

Hulu getting tough with Boxee

For those of you who don't know, Boxee is a content agregator that brings online TV together in to one desktop interface. It is is invite-only beta mode at the moment. Boxee was very popular because it pulled rather a lot of content all in to one place, such as Hulu, Netflix, ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr. Pretty impressive. Unfortunatly, last night Boxee got a notification from Hulu asking them to remove all Hulu content. Both sides admit it makes no sense since Boxee preserves Hulu's adverts, but apparently the content providers are demanding it.

TunerFreeMCE with Hulu out of Beta

I have taken the latest version of TunerFreeMCE out of Beta. That means it is stable and has all of the basic features I think it needs for the latest enhancement, which is adding Hulu support. This download is not just for US users though. Even if you are a UK viewer, there is a fantastic new UI to take advantage of, so download now for all of these great new features.

Beta Hulu Support

As noted by Stuart over at The Digital Lifestyle, I have released a version of TunerFree MCE that integrates with Hulu. It's most definitley a beta at the moment because of a number of issues;

1) First and foremost, I am in the UK, and Hulu is US only, so I have difficulty testing!
2) Hulu has a massive amount of content - over 6 thousand TV Episodes and feature films alone (I ignored the clips and trailers). This is 6 times larger than the UK content that I have restricted to up until now. I have enough memory on my 6GB/64 bit development box, but know it may overpower the average living room PC. I have plans for how to fix that though. Done
3) I can't get hulu to automatically play when I launch the full screen flash player. 
I can't get hulu to automatically go full screen when I launch the flash player, but it does automatically play. I figured that was the better of the two options.You need to click with the mouse at the moment for full screen. Sucks, I know, but hoping to find a solution soon.
Now goes full screen too
4) No way is it going to work on extenders, because of the flash player. Yes, transcoding would be great, but that's another level of complexity that I am not tackling just yet
5) Although it has both US and UK content, I haven't implemented a proxy switcher yet. Done
6) Out of the box both UK and US programs are enabled, which is not going to work for many people. US people can't watch the UK content and vice versa. I want to add a choice in the installer to limit to one country out of the box. Done
7) I haven't got a good feel yet for what curve-balls hulu may add in their data, so there is an outside possibility of a crash when collecting the data if they make an unexpected change. Looking stable so far

Here's a few pictures of what it looks like;

Project Kangaroo shut down

For those of you who didn't know, the BBC, ITV and C4 have been working together for some time on "Project Kangaroo", which was a project to merge the on-demand offerings from those providers, and potentially to expand the back catalogue too. Today the competition commission released a report which forbade them from going ahead with that project on the basis that they were getting too cosy and that the consumer is best served by close competition rather than having one service which does it all.

Opinion on my blog.