Cawlin
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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So as the title says, I am trying to watch Hulu on my TV through the Wii game console without using the middle man services like playon.tv that I have to pay for. Does anyone know if this can be done without connecting the PC directly to the TV?
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ZigmundZag
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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I doubt it. Hulu probably uses Flash, and the Wii browser probably doesn't.
More specifically, it appears that Wii supports up to Flash version 8 and Hulu likes 10.
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Koneg
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Cawlin posted:
So as the title says, I am trying to watch Hulu on my TV through the Wii game console without using the middle man services like playon.tv that I have to pay for. Does anyone know if this can be done without connecting the PC directly to the TV?
PlayON is totally worth it. I bought it a couple of years ago now. It not only provides Hulu and tons of other services (especially with all the user created plugins) but it will also stream your own media from your PC to your TV.
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Cawlin
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Koneg posted:
Cawlin posted:
So as the title says, I am trying to watch Hulu on my TV through the Wii game console without using the middle man services like playon.tv that I have to pay for. Does anyone know if this can be done without connecting the PC directly to the TV?
PlayON is totally worth it. I bought it a couple of years ago now. It not only provides Hulu and tons of other services (especially with all the user created plugins) but it will also stream your own media from your PC to your TV.
What do you think of Playon.tv vs. Tversity?
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GrilledCheez
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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I looked into running homebrew on my wii a while ago. I don't know for sure, but with all the support out there, I'd be shocked if you can't get it to run. might take some software hacking to do it though.
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Koneg
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Cawlin posted:
What do you think of Playon.tv vs. Tversity?
Haven't tried it - just might now. 
A quick glance at their site and some vids and it looks very similar to PlayON.
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Aerlinthian
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Hmm, tag.
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Sinlock
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Koneg posted:
but it will also stream your own media from your PC to your TV.
The Playstation 3 will also do this if you happen to have one. Just install PS3 Media Player or Servio (both free) on the PC to connect. 
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Cawlin
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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So the entire purpose of my trying to do this was to catch up to the first few episodes of season 7 of the TV show Bones. Seasons 1-6 are on Netflix and I watched them over the past 6 or 9 months or so but in doing so, had missed the first 5 episodes of the present season of Bones. I never keep on top of actually running shows so I have no idea when their seasons run and whatnot... so anyway.
When I checked on Hulu, Season 7 episodes 2-5 were available for free, you had to subscribe to the pay service to get season 7 episode 1... so I signed up for that 7 day trial as well.
The only game console I have is the Wii - and none of my other electronics are set up to handle any sort of internet interface. We presently watch Netflix streaming through the Wii as well.
So now that we have all that info straight, here's my review to this point of the experience.
Installing PlayOn - pretty simple and straightforward. It has a password battery for you to save all your various logins to whatever content providers you might have, including hulu. So I plugged in my login ID and PW for hulu and was able to connect right away to the Wii. I followed the instructions here to do that.
One thing of note - you must have IE 7 or higher for PlayOn to work apparently - not sure why, but I have a vast and burning hatred for IE and had long since removed it from my computer... I had to reinstall that as well last night... GRR...
Anyway... on to PlayOn and the Wii and Bones...
The interface with the Wii and PlayOn is actually very clumsy and difficult to use - probably has to do with the Wii controller and whatnot. I will go into detail here to explain how bad and clumsy the interface was, excuse the detail but it's hard to get the point across thoroughly without it.
The only "search" capacity you have is to select between predefined menu items "TV Shows" "Movies" etc. There is no free search alpha/numeric type search - it's like the very early days of netflix.
When you select the "TV Shows" menu, you get an alphabetical list, I selected "B" and there were 147 TV shows that started with "B". I had to scroll through them all to get to "Bones". The way I did this was to click on a little "down arrow" on the screen - there was no free scrolling, no use of the Wii controller's + and - buttons, no using the floating crossed arrow button - you had to hold the cursor on the little arrow and keep clicking the "A" button to scroll through each screen of titles - couldn't even just hold it and free sceroll... VERY cumbersome and annoying - it took maybe 15 clicks to get to "Bones" in the list.
Annoyingly - the first episode of season 7 was not offered in the list of episodes even though I had a trial subscription to Hulu - if you watch on your PC you have to subscribe to get episode 1, but episodes 2-5 are currently available free - I suppose they only keep so many episodes on the "free" list. Maybe it didn't update or maybe this was a product of my "trial" only membership to Hulu or maybe even the fact that I had a trial only of PlayOn - but either way - with my trial subscription to Hulu, I could watch episode 1, but I had to watch it on my desktop PC... lame.
Anyway, I then watched episodes 2 and 3 on the TV, streamed from Hulu, through PlayOn through my Wii. Image quality was just OK, not great, not as good as netflix streaming. There was some intermittent connectivity issues causing pixellation and whatnot and there was some jumping and low framerate issues - slide show type stuff but it was intermittent and the majority of the time spent was solid.
I could not get out of watching commercials which was annoying, but so be it I suppose.
All in all - I will probably ditch the sub to Hulu and may just do the one time purchase of PlayOn after I explore more of the content offerings in the next few days.
I will also be checking out Tversity that I linked above to see what it offers and whether or not the interface is any better.
In short:
Ease of setup of PlayOn - 4 out of 5 imo (5 out of 5 probably for those of you who don't have to reinstall IE)
Interface - 1.5 out of 5 (the lack of a free search option and the clumsy way it interacts with the Wii controller makes it terrible - they need to look at Netflix to see how a decent Wii interface works - and even that is only like 3.5 to 4 out of 5)
Image Quality - 3 out of 5 (a little sketchier than Neftlix which I would give a 4 out of 5)
Content Offering - can't say just yet, haven't looked at enough to tell - the lack of the ability to stream episode 1 to the TV annoys me but there are other details that may be the cause of that...
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RHWarrior
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Cawlin posted:
So the entire purpose of my trying to do this was to catch up to the first few episodes of season 7 of the TV show Bones. Seasons 1-6 are on Netflix and I watched them over the past 6 or 9 months or so but in doing so, had missed the first 5 episodes of the present season of Bones. I never keep on top of actually running shows so I have no idea when their seasons run and whatnot... so anyway.
When I checked on Hulu, Season 7 episodes 2-5 were available for free, you had to subscribe to the pay service to get season 7 episode 1... so I signed up for that 7 day trial as well.
The only game console I have is the Wii - and none of my other electronics are set up to handle any sort of internet interface. We presently watch Netflix streaming through the Wii as well.
So now that we have all that info straight, here's my review to this point of the experience.
Installing PlayOn - pretty simple and straightforward. It has a password battery for you to save all your various logins to whatever content providers you might have, including hulu. So I plugged in my login ID and PW for hulu and was able to connect right away to the Wii. I followed the instructions here to do that.
One thing of note - you must have IE 7 or higher for PlayOn to work apparently - not sure why, but I have a vast and burning hatred for IE and had long since removed it from my computer... I had to reinstall that as well last night... GRR...
Anyway... on to PlayOn and the Wii and Bones...
The interface with the Wii and PlayOn is actually very clumsy and difficult to use - probably has to do with the Wii controller and whatnot. I will go into detail here to explain how bad and clumsy the interface was, excuse the detail but it's hard to get the point across thoroughly without it.
The only "search" capacity you have is to select between predefined menu items "TV Shows" "Movies" etc. There is no free search alpha/numeric type search - it's like the very early days of netflix.
When you select the "TV Shows" menu, you get an alphabetical list, I selected "B" and there were 147 TV shows that started with "B". I had to scroll through them all to get to "Bones". The way I did this was to click on a little "down arrow" on the screen - there was no free scrolling, no use of the Wii controller's + and - buttons, no using the floating crossed arrow button - you had to hold the cursor on the little arrow and keep clicking the "A" button to scroll through each screen of titles - couldn't even just hold it and free sceroll... VERY cumbersome and annoying - it took maybe 15 clicks to get to "Bones" in the list.
Annoyingly - the first episode of season 7 was not offered in the list of episodes even though I had a trial subscription to Hulu - if you watch on your PC you have to subscribe to get episode 1, but episodes 2-5 are currently available free - I suppose they only keep so many episodes on the "free" list. Maybe it didn't update or maybe this was a product of my "trial" only membership to Hulu or maybe even the fact that I had a trial only of PlayOn - but either way - with my trial subscription to Hulu, I could watch episode 1, but I had to watch it on my desktop PC... lame.
Anyway, I then watched episodes 2 and 3 on the TV, streamed from Hulu, through PlayOn through my Wii. Image quality was just OK, not great, not as good as netflix streaming. There was some intermittent connectivity issues causing pixellation and whatnot and there was some jumping and low framerate issues - slide show type stuff but it was intermittent and the majority of the time spent was solid.
I could not get out of watching commercials which was annoying, but so be it I suppose.
All in all - I will probably ditch the sub to Hulu and may just do the one time purchase of PlayOn after I explore more of the content offerings in the next few days.
I will also be checking out Tversity that I linked above to see what it offers and whether or not the interface is any better.
In short:
Ease of setup of PlayOn - 4 out of 5 imo (5 out of 5 probably for those of you who don't have to reinstall IE)
Interface - 1.5 out of 5 (the lack of a free search option and the clumsy way it interacts with the Wii controller makes it terrible - they need to look at Netflix to see how a decent Wii interface works - and even that is only like 3.5 to 4 out of 5)
Image Quality - 3 out of 5 (a little sketchier than Neftlix which I would give a 4 out of 5)
Content Offering - can't say just yet, haven't looked at enough to tell - the lack of the ability to stream episode 1 to the TV annoys me but there are other details that may be the cause of that...
tl;dr
Try this service:
http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/111373681/bones?tab=summary
+ Good quality
+ Compatible with most players
+ Price
+ High availability
- Not streaming, so you need some local storage (or local network)
- Possibly not compatible with all local laws, depnding on your location
I also offer this prayer in your time of need.
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and lead us to the eternal nothingness!"
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Koneg
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Sinlock posted:
Koneg posted:
but it will also stream your own media from your PC to your TV.
The Playstation 3 will also do this if you happen to have one. Just install PS3 Media Player or Servio (both free) on the PC to connect.
I use both PlayON and PS3 Media Server. There are some very rare instances where the media I've, uh, acquired  won't play properly in PS3MS but will in PlayON or the other way around.
Edit: Oh and Cawlin the reason that PlayON needs IE is that it needs the flash plugin hooks. When you're streaming web content via PlayON you're basically using IE's engine to grab the content and "play" it, then PlayON streams the output to your TV.
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Tych2
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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I use this and love it.
http://www.roku.com/
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Aerlinthian
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Tych2 posted:
I use this and love it.
http://www.roku.com/
Do you happen to know what are the competing devices to that one? (just for the sake of comparison)
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ZigmundZag
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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http://www.boxee.tv/buy
That's the competitor that I went with because it plays local media as well. I will add, though, that their ability to support their product has been subpar. They promised a Netflix app and did finally deliver it, about two months after their promised delivery date. Also they don't have a Hulu app.
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Aerlinthian
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Hmm, thanks Zig.
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tenkly
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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I use tversity with my xbox and it's pretty sweet
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Special-Fred
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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The wii is the worst of the 3 for streaming and stuff. The 360 is in the middle and can handle your own .avi and .mp4 files. The ps3 can handle pretty much anything.
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Altra_Shadowstalker
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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tenkly posted:
I use tversity with my xbox and it's pretty sweet
This.
I don't bother with the xbox any more though, now that I have my laptop connected to the tv & surround sound. I don't think I'd even bother trying if I had a wii. Looks way too clumsy.
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Altra_Shadowstalker
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Special-Fred posted:
The wii is the worst of the 3 for streaming and stuff. The 360 is in the middle and can handle your own .avi and .mp4 files. The ps3 can handle pretty much anything.
Xbox cannot handle .avi, unless you mean your personal home videos (i have no idea, but I doubt it). It can handle .wmv's though. You need TVersity or something like it. I don't like the UI for tversity, however you can just do very simple console commands for it. Like
/mshare d:/tv
which just adds everything in your tv folder to the server. That plus the RESTART function and I've only had to open the UI once when I installed, to clear out the junk it started with.
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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I've found Hulu Plus for xbox to be highly over rated. I recently canceled my subscription to it.
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Cawlin
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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How long do you think it will be until this sort of technology comes already equipped on TVs? It seems like it must eventually...
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Tych2
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Subject:
Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Aerlinthian posted:
Tych2 posted:
I use this and love it.
http://www.roku.com/
Do you happen to know what are the competing devices to that one? (just for the sake of comparison)
I don't. I went to Netflix and looked at the devices that are compatible and the Roku was the cheapest so I tried it and I love it. There is a bunch of different kinds. Roku was super easy to set up and is super easy to use.
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Mag-Galahad
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Help: Watching HULU on your TV through a Wii console
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Can you get same season episodes of your favorite TV shows with any of these? How about sports?
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