Saturday, January 02, 2010

Squid: Watching Hulu on your PS3 using HTTP_HEADER User Agent modification

Some time ago, probably about a year, I watched “Terminator, The Sarah Conner Chronicles” on Hulu over the PS3. I had reached a certain level of euphoria as I realized my media center in my theater room was complete. I tried this recently, only to be greeted with a message letting me know that the PS3 platform was no longer supported for Hulu content. Seriously? Filtering based on platform now? I'll tolerate the limited commercials, but I don't like being told what platforms I can watch content on.

Fortunately, I found this little gem with a workaround using Squid, one of my favorite tools, to replace the HTTP header en-route, making Hulu think the request is coming from a Windows machine. And old trick, and Firefox even has a plugin that will replace the HTTP header for you, but the PS3 doesn’t have that ability. I remember an article I wrote several years ago talking about using Squid and SSH to get around filtering proxies within a corporate LAN. I’ve also used Squid to simulate slower bandwidth using delay pools for UAT testing. Right up there with Netcat and SSH as useful tools to have on your machine.

2 comments:

kim kardashian said...

This is so cool. I like it. I can learn from you tricks.

Patricia Tesha said...

Thanks for the article. Just want to inform all folks who live outside US that PS3 is a great media Player. If you want to access Netflix and other streaming stations on your PS3 you can use UnoTelly as I do to get around the geo block.