Kikkoman

Initially it barely worked. Sony worked on the flash player and playback performance was much improved.

Life was good. I could catch up on the Daily Show on lazy weekend mornings splayed out on the couch, at “hi-def” 480p and “full screen”.

Recently however, Hulu decided to start blocking PS3’s based upon the User Agent string of the http (browser) header, as documented here.

These guys figured out how to get it working again with the help of an extra linux computer running in your house. That works, but there are still some problems with Hulu playback on the PS3, that are just due to the nature of the device.

Two small gotcha’s:

1. Don’t turn on subtitles. That crashes the PS3 hard; you have to power cycle it via the switch at the back.

2. Don’t pause long enough for the buffer to fill all the way, as that tends to crash the PS3 browser as well. I speculate that letting the buffer fill maxes out the PS3’s limited memory (256 megs). Thus, instead of pausing, I just check to see where I am in the show, and when I come back reset the show to that point.

While not providing as nice of a playback performance as a “real” computer, it makes up for it by running on the big TV in my living room and being basically an “extra” feature of the PS3.

Also, I like the WordPress theme the yPass.net guys use so much that I grabbed a copy.