After some head scratching today I have managed to determine that the new PID which is used to get the rtmp stream URLs is generated by the new, long PID in the format of ‘[64chars]~[64 chars]’ (as shown when get_iplayer runs in –verbose mode). The correct PID is generated by using some keys (in a var called ‘copyrighted_strings’) and AES crypto functions from this flash file: http://www.hulu.com/sec.swf (specifically function ‘dec’). If anyone feels like writing/porting this in perl please let me know.

Today Hulu.com kicked Boxee off their system by, from what I can tell, changing the algorithm/method that is used to determine the playlist PID from the Hulu content-id. This means that get_iplayer will not be able to download Hulu until this is worked out again. I’ve looked at all of the latest Hulu javascript and the algorithm doesn’t appear to be in there. I’m supposing its now done in ActionScript inside the some swf. If anyone has better tools for getting at the algorithms inside of the flash player then please have a go and let me know!

After spending many hours playing with wireshark and perl scripting, you can now download Hulu.com closed-captions / subtitles with get_iplayer v1.33+. Since I am in the UK, I had to set up a SOCKS proxy on a US based ssh server. By using:

ssh -D 1080 [server ip]

and then installing tsocks to transparently redirect all network traffic from my system via the US based server, then running up firefox to play a Hulu flash-based movie and clicking the ‘CC’ button, I was able to network sniff for the web requests that obtained the Subtitles. Simple really.

I’ve converted the SAMI subtitle stream to SubRip format because it seems to be the most widely supported subtitle format (see this comparison).

So all you need to do now is run:

get_iplayer --type hulu --subtitles --get [search terms]