hulu breakage 09-21-09 [0.9.14.6992 - Mac]

**gatherlight** · September 21st, 2009, 03:25 AM

Actually HULU has been broken for many many weeks now and I am not seeing much talk about it. Here is what is happening...

About 10 to 20 minutes into any show, a hidden pop up window tries to come up with a "bonk" sound, the video stops but the audio keeps going. The pop up window is never seen, but you can see the outline animation try to open it and then nothing shows up. Every minute or so, another "bonk" as though hulu is trying to pop up windows again in the background.

This completely ruins the hulu experience.

In addition, there is a lot of screen tearing going on in Boxee Hulu while none at all happens when watching hulu direct in the browser. Same with all local mp4 media with screen tearing as well. What did Boxee developers change with the recent updates that is making screen tearing such a problem on Mac? There are running threads on both these topics for months now and the boxee team has failed to respond or acknowledge any problem what so ever with it after several months.

My only conclusion here is to think Boxee is pretty much done with debugging mac right now and all efforts are going to Windows to grow market share.

**marcel** · September 21st, 2009, 04:35 AM

your conclusion are far of the mark ...will look into the hulu issue (anyone else having this issue) regarding screen tearing can you send us some screenshots of the issue ...

**tcchris** · September 21st, 2009, 06:28 AM

Hi
I have a Ubuntu system , no tearing , but I do get a script error popup .
I just cancel it and everything goes back to normal .

**ratso1** · September 21st, 2009, 09:27 AM

I'm running on Ubuntu also. I noticed the problem a while back. It's annoying but not the end of the world. I'm sure this is a change on the Hulu end rather than the Boxee end.

You have to be new to Boxee to jump to such a conclusion so quickly. If your ready to give up now, then why even run the Alpha? This is awesome software that is constantly evolving. Boxee has changed infinitely since just a year ago. If Hulu is meant to be, then Boxee will fix it; wait and offer helpful advice that developers can actually work on.

**gatherlight** · September 21st, 2009, 12:55 PM

Originally Posted by marcel

your conclusion are far of the mark ...will look into the hulu issue (anyone else having this issue) regarding screen tearing can you send us some screenshots of the issue ...

I'd hope I am off the mark, but then why has no Boxee admin or developer responded to this thread....
http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=10578

31 replies later and started on July 15th, still no response in over two months from anyone from Boxee as far as I can tell. This is a major Mac issue and appears to be happening on Linux as well.... no response from Boxee in over two months.

Then there is this hulu issue started over a month ago....
http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=11355

Again in the mac bug section. Should we just not post bugs in the specified mac section and only post here in the what bugs section if you're looking for an official response?

**gatherlight** · September 21st, 2009, 01:07 PM

Originally Posted by ratso1

I'm running on Ubuntu also. I noticed the problem a while back. It's annoying but not the end of the world. I'm sure this is a change on the Hulu end rather than the Boxee end.

You have to be new to Boxee to jump to such a conclusion so quickly. If your ready to give up now, then why even run the Alpha? This is awesome software that is constantly evolving. Boxee has changed infinitely since just a year ago. If Hulu is meant to be, then Boxee will fix it; wait and offer helpful advice that developers can actually work on.

I've been using Boxee for about a year now and regularly give advice and feedback here. You guys on Linux keep saying you just click cancel, but on my mac, I am not seeing any button to cancel this hulu lock up. I see a brief animation of the outer lines of a box popping up, but then nothing shows up on screen after this brief animation to hit cancel, the video locks up and audio continues. There is no way out of it but to exit HULU in Boxee. If I try to watch Hulu again I get the same problem repeated which forces me to go to a browser to use HULU and bypass Boxee.

Is this making better sense now? Obviously Linux is showing the pop up to cancel it, but mac in not.

**lament** · September 21st, 2009, 03:17 PM

Originally Posted by marcel

your conclusion are far of the mark ...will look into the hulu issue (anyone else having this issue) regarding screen tearing can you send us some screenshots of the issue ...

Marcel,

Image tearing was first brought up in this thread.

I'm experiencing the same on Jaunty. It's forcing me to switch to XBMC until it's fixed.

I haven't checked Jira, but will report it if it's not already in there.

The problem is - it doesn't happen all the time, so it's going to be a b!tch to track down what's causing it, I would assume.

I was originally thinking a driver issue, but since it's fine in XBMC, I'm not sure now.

**gatherlight** · September 28th, 2009, 04:20 PM

Originally Posted by marcel

regarding screen tearing can you send us some screenshots of the issue ...

Here is a screen shot of the problem with a local movie, sorry it is not hulu. Notice at the top the screen does not come together. This tearing works is way down the screen over a 5-10 second period.

This is an h.264 encoded at 2000kbps under standard settings, 2 pass with turbo first pass encode.

I noticed really bad screen tearing in this flick above when the nightclub scene came on with lots of strobe light going on. I have also noticed that tearing is most present in high speed action frames.

As said before, XBMC does not do this, nor did Boxee a few updates ago. Something was changed in Boxee recently that starting causing this problem.

**lkinser** · November 4th, 2009, 08:32 PM

Yep, same issue here... well, similar at least. Sometimes hulu will play part of the video and freeze as described by the OP, but others the "hidden box" will continue trying to appear while content is still playing. If I stop the hulu video and go back into the boxee menus, or even start playing content from different sources, the prompt continues to "BONK" in the background as if it is attempting to get screen focus. The only way to resolve it is to close boxee and reopen. ...and since timeshifting doesn't work in hulu playback via boxee, it truly sucks to have to start a video over.

**jasonsbytes** · November 16th, 2009, 12:51 PM

Last night on my XP box, Hulu did something weird 3 times on the same video -- similar to this issue...

It flashed, then the top half of the screen froze... The bottom half split into two halves (left and right) which were the top halves of the video and they continued to play while the top remained frozen... Does that make sense?

____________________
| frozen area |
|-----------------------|
| top right | top left |
|__________|_________|