IT Professionals

Hulu On The Wii With PlayOn.TV Rocks

Posted by on Sep 24, 2009 | 3 Comments

I have been sitting on this for a few days, as I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to really run PlayOn.TV through its paces. After finally completing my tests, I can conclude the following.

  1. Follow the recommendations of the tool provided to tell you if your Windows box has enough RAM/CPU power. I have an older P4 box with something like 512MB of older (expensive now due to age) RAM. It works, but performance is going to be a lot better if you strip down the Windows services.
  2. Setting up PlayOn.TV for the Wii is really simple. Just follow the video below and be amazed.
  3. The CBS plugin may or may not work. And adding other plugins for the Wii might also fail… as I found out when trying NBC. Adding the Spike plugin, however, worked pretty well.
  4. Some content looks like crap. Seriously, while some shows look great over Hulu over PlayOn.TV, other programs on the same path looks terrible. Muddy, even. This is due to the scaling going on, I am sure, which is forgivable as the best programs look at least about standard definition quality.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/3EHvtQDlKX0" width="350" height="288" wmode="transparent" /]

Am I totally sold on using my Wii to watch Internet content from the major networks? Not too likely, as my Ubuntu notebook does the same thing AND Hulu set to hi-def from in the browser looks awesome. The only advantage I found with PlayOn.TV was that the audio was much crisper and easier to manage than trying to dance through audio levels over a notebook with a separate cable.

I think PlayOn.TV is very cool and worth looking into. Just not sure it is worth the hassle for my family just yet.

[awsbullet:tv+television+lcd+plasma]

  • http://www.dcgla.com dcgla

    This was a helpful and insightful article on the quality and functionality of the playon.tv. Hopefully soon i can get mine up and running to reap the benefits of it.

  • http://www.PlayOn.tv John

    Thanks for your informative article about running playon.tv on your Wii. Some additional good news: PlayOn also enables people to watch Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and more on their TVs with their Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 (which perform even better). The free 14-day trial of PlayOn’s full-featured product is a great way for people to decide if they like watching Internet movies, TV shows and videos on their TVs instead of their computers.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/scribblepinch/ Robert Glen Fogarty

    We’ve been using it on our Wii with mostly good results, though the Hulu content sometimes freezes up around commercials. I’d like to more easily be able to fast forward and rewind content, too, but I’m mostly satisfied and plan on paying up once our free trial’s over. It’s a pretty darned neat thing and I’d like to support its development.

    The image quality is more clear than what we get from cable, too! If we can only get over the Hulu freezing hurdle, we may very well cancel our cable service!