OK... So I spent most of the night last night trying to find a new way to do the full screen stuff as well use the remote to play/pause, etc... I finally built a new routine that will do the following:

The struggle here is the fact that we are trying to interface with the flash content and not an actual video... From what I have see of vmcNetflix they actually get the URL to the .flv (flash video file) and have that transcoded and streamed via Media Center as an actual video file (that is how it works seamllessly with the remote)... hulu and other providers don't want you to do that because its their flash players that control the ads in the videos so while you are watching a video it will pause it and show you the 30 second ad every once in a while.   Hulu and other providers actually make it very hard to get that URL and if you do get that URL and stream it to MC you are bypassing their ad serving component (which is not good)... that could actually get hulu and other content providers to start making changes to mess up how SecondRun.tv works because if we went that route tons of users would be using their content and their bandwith without displaying their ads.

 

So... as you can see... Ideally we play the content just the way we are... its the nice way to do it and it probably provides a great benefit to hulu and other because we are not bypassing their ads... since we are just opening the main page for the movie and playing it just like you would if you were browsing their site then we are actually probably providing a little bit of a boost to the number of people watching content on hulu.

 

So... to make a long post short (I know too late...) I have all along wanted to keep the content playing the way we are so we were looking at as a benefit to the content providers like hulu and now I think we have a solution in place that will allow us to interface with the videos pretty close to the way you would if you were watching them natively in Media Center!