Hulu on Ubuntu 9.04 problem fixed - check Firefox Adblock

Here's a possible solve for a problem many people seem to be having getting hulu.com to play videos in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackelope.

After I put Ubuntu 9.04 on my new laptop, I started having problems loading videos from hulu.com. It worked for a day or so in Mozilla Firefox browser then suddenly stopped, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe hulu didn't support Linux, but found on their support page that they in fact do, and all that's really need is a Flash plugin, which I already had installed.

I searched forums for several days, tried uninstalling flash plugins and installing new ones and various other fixes, but still nothing worked. Then last night I installed a different browser and hulu worked just fine, so it was pretty clear that flash wasn't the problem. As a last ditch resort, I decided to reinstall Firefox, and it was that decision that led to the discovery of what was really wrong. I searched for info on uninstalling Firefox (which isn't that easy to find!) and stumbled upon the Firefox support pages. Mozilla recommended troubleshooting before doing a complete reinstall, so I (serendipitously) followed their advice.

Starting Firefox in safe mode (type firefox -safe-mode in Terminal), with add-ons switched off, hulu miraculously ran just fine. Then I closed the safe Firefox window, and started Firefox in normal mode (just clicking on the icon in the menu, without running safe mode) then started by disabling all add-ons, then enabling them one by one (of course, restarting Firefox after each new enable).

I finally discovered it was the Adblock Plus add-on causing all the trouble. I had blocked an ad on hulu, but made the mistake of blocking the entire http://www.hulu.com/* domain. I unblocked it, then found I could block http://www.hulu.com/banner_container.swf instead and keep the video player unaffected.

So if you're having trouble with hulu on Ubuntu (or on any system with Firefox I suppose), try starting Firefox in safe mode to see if hulu runs. If it does, check your add-ons. It could be something with flash, or it could be as simple as unblocking hulu on Adblcok. If hulu won't run in safe mode, it looks like you're on your own.