[mythtv-users] Hulu Integration?

[DISAFAN]

I've been reading the resurrection of discussion on Hulu Integration. 
There are a few thoughts.

1. PlayOn seems like a great idea. unfortunately, you need a Windows 
system...which is in my opinion an unneeded add-on.  Unless someone can 
reverse-engineer the concept.

2. The continual problem of controlling a flash player with good remote 
integration. I tried some experiments using irxevent with hotkeys. You 
can pause and unpause a playing video feed with the Space Bar, but you 
have to make sure the video window has focus, which is harder to work 
with. Alt-F does seem to enable fullscreen. Someone on the MythTV wiki 
discussed the idea of using Xautomation to work with playback.

3. The possibility of putting something together using Mozilla Prism, 
formerly XULRunner, which does support the Flash Player plugins and 
launches 'webapps'. There is a similar program for Adobe 
Air....MyMediaPlayer at http://www.paulyanez.com/labs/mymediaplayer/ . 
We're all discussing Hulu integration, perhaps we need to approach the 
issue of Hulu with a remote and a better interface in general, even if 
it is something we launch from within MythTV as an outside program.

4. The simplest management method may be LIRCMD, the LIRC mouse daemon. 
Not pretty, but launching a fullscreen firefox and passing control to it 
may be the best quick and dirty method of getting things working until 
something better comes along.

5. Someone needs to come up with a scraping mechanism for Hulu. RSS feed 
is available for shows, queues, etc. but it seems to be limited to 20 
items. I think the first step, which some people have obviously 
done...ie OpenHulu and other scraping sites, is to create a program that 
can turn the Hulu library into an XML file of data...genre, shows, 
episode information, direct link to episode.  This can be used to feed 
into any future integration. Data is very important.

I think, instead of searching immediately for a perfect solution, which 
will take time, addressing the individual aspects of the project may 
work better, using the same plugin philosophy MythTV used when 
MythWeather was redesigned. Anyone can now write a custom data grabber 
for MythWeather that adds new data sources. A future Myth Flash player 
solution needs the same functionality. It must be able to pull in RSS 
feeds, or other XML files created by outside parsers with categories and 
navigation, launch the player, and allow control of it.

Since the flash player part is the part that seems the hardest and least 
likely to be solve dso soon, the other part may be more doable.