Project Hulu

[Ben has been accepted as guest blogger on Rainy Morning.]

I wanted a way to watch Hulu on the TV, but I wanted it to be as complicated as possible. I also wanted to not use the over priced and under-performing wireless adapter for the 360.

This wireless adapter costs $100, and for that – it works. Barely. I could barely watch any of the streaming videos on”Inside Xbox” and I had more lag than I should have when playing online. I wanted to somehow use a better adapter for my xbox.

Rachel’s TV has lots of awesome inputs, one of them is a VGA input – which means I can plug a standard computer into it. I remembered that we had this port after a while of us longing to watch hulu on the big screen.

Rachel also had an extra computer, that was just sitting around. It’s nice because it’s decently fast, but doesn’t have too much memory. That’s a plus because it can go into hibernate mode really quickly. That makes it just as convenient as other Home Theater equipment to use!

I had a WRT54G router that I could put the famous DDWRT firmware on. With this firmware, one of the basic features is the ability to turn the wireless capability into a receiver instead of a transmitter. It then sends the signal out from the ports on the back. Perfect for getting hulu to the computer and for getting Inside Xbox to my Xbox.

Of course I still needed a router, so we bought this cheap netgear router. It works great!

Here is the computer displaying on the TV!

and full screen 480p Hulu video!

Here’s where I hid the big computer. It’s nice because the mouse is always there, and we don’t have to have a computer cluttering the place up. We have other things for that.

All nice and hidden. You can see the router behind the speaker. Everything works how I wanted. It’s a little over complicated, but given the equipment I had and the results I wanted I think it’s the most cost effective, and it was fun to put together!