Apr 2, 2009 10:10 AM
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Yesterday you may have read reports of a tricky security measure Hulu put in place to scramble its video embed codes using JavaScript to thwart unauthorized viewing. Well, it didn't stop Boxee.
You may know that Hulu and Boxee have been involved in an imbroglio of sorts over access to Hulu's sweet trove of free online video. Boxee's official Hulu implementation was shot down last month, after Hulu undoubtedly received a call or two from their bigwig content providers saying they would like to control the moment their Hulu shows and movies get piped into the liviing room, thank you very much. It was a sad day.
But as we reported last week, and which Boxee confirmed to us, the latest alpha of Boxee includes a Mozilla based XUL implementation (the part of a browser that parses and presents XML code to users) that looks exactly the same to Hulu as any other Mozilla-based browser. Thus rendering the new encoding, which scrambles direct URLs to video files and relies on a JavaScript translator to decrypt them in a browser, useless against stopping Boxee.
I just watched the A-Team with the new alpha, and it works fine and dandy. So we'll see exactly what Hulu is up to with this encoding (or, whether it was doing this all along, and no one noticed until now). The new Mozilla-equipped alpha of Boxee is available for OS X (and Apple TV) now, with the Linux and Windows version shortly to follow. [Boxee]
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