I wanted to do something simple. I wanted to easily watch shows from Hulu.com on my HDTV. I have three ways to get a signal to the set: a Roku player, my Playstation 3, and the laptop, all via HDMI. The Roku is, of course, not an option since it only supports Netflix and Amazon. The PS3 sort of works. I can start playing, but if I pause the program for more than a few seconds it locks up, requiring a reboot. The laptop plays video beautifully, but if I’m driving the television fullscreen, I can’t do anything else. Any attempt to switch to another program drops the video back into a window.
So, I thought I would try another alternative — install Linux on the PS3 and use that. I followed all the steps for installation last night, but then was sidetracked. I discovered that I could load a Super Nintendo emulator and convince the SixAxis controller to act like a Nintendo controller. It wasn’t long before I was merrily playing Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Cookie on my PS3. Life was good.
Finally this morning I got back around to loading up Hulu in the browser. I was then told that I needed to load a flash player and was directed to the Adobe site. There I learned that their player isn’t compiled for PPC, only X86. So, I now have another way to *not* watch videos on my television.