Hulu not working in Linux?

Don’t feel alone. America based streaming content provider, Hulu has changed their video playback system which now employs Adobe Flash DRM technology. This completely messed up the things for Linux users because Adobe doesn’t support Flash on Linux for some years and Adobe Flash DRM requires HAL which is also removed from major Linux systems for years now.

This requirement for HAL leaves Hulu unplayable. If you try to use Hulu in Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you would get an error like:

“There was a problem playing this protected content. (Error Code: 3336)”

So, is there no way you could watch Hulu videos in Linux. Fortunately, there is and we are going to see how can we fix protected content issue with Hulu and Linux.

Watch Hulu on Ubuntu and Linux Mint

As explained earlier, we need HAL to be installed explicitly in Ubuntu. Thanks to this PPA, you can easily install HAL in Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Read this tutorial to watch Hulu in Arch Linux based distributions.

Open a terminal and use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mjblenner/ppa-hal sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install hal

Note that even with HAL installed, Hulu will not work in Chrome or Chromium. The only way possible is to use Mozilla Firefox.

Once you have installed HAL, just refresh the browser window. No need of a restart or log out. It will start working as previously. Here is a screenshot of Hulu running in Firefox in Ubuntu 15.04:

Just to add watching Hulu outside USA, can be easily done with DNS service. There was a free DNS unblocking service Tunlr but it got canned. Now I use Unblock Us which works great and requires no efforts in set up.