How To Watch Hulu On Linux

So Hulu used to have an app available on Linux but it is no more in development. No problem since Hulu is available via the browser, right? But no!. Hulu won’t work with either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox by default on Linux. This is because Hulu is just being stubborn by still providing its services with Adobe Flash (should be dead already) instead of switching to HTML5.

How To Watch Hulu On Linux?

Hulu requires the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) package to be installed in order to stream and watch Hulu videos but this package hasn’t shipped with most Linux distributions for a while now. The package isn’t also available via the Ubuntu archives. This tutorial is going to show how you can get the HAL package to install from a third-party PPA.So we are going to look at a little tweaking to get Hulu working on Mozilla Firefox. Yup, this won’t work for Chrome or any other browser so please take note.

1. Install Adobe Flash plugin for Mozilla

Install the Adobe Flash plugin on your desktop if it is not already installed. Make sure you install the version designed for Mozilla, Firefox or the NPAPI version.

2. Install HAL on Ubuntu and derivatives

Instead of installing the “zombie HAL PPA”, Martin Wimpress a lightweight version that provides all you need in order to get Hulu working. This will also work for other Ubuntu based distros like Linux Mint and elementary OS.a.

Add the third-party PPA to your software sources – Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flexiondotorg/hal-flash

b. Update your software sources and then install HAL –

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libhal1-flash

3. Install HAL on other non-Ubuntu based distros

The HAL package is also available for non-Ubuntu based distros. You just may have to search for it. For Fedora 24 and its derivatives, you may install HAL with the following command via terminal –

For 32-bit

sudo yum install
https://sourceforge.net/projects/postinstaller/files/fedora/releases/24/i386/libhal1-flash-0.3.3-2.20160402git95cdd6e.fc24.i686.rpmFor 64-bit
sudo yum install
https://sourceforge.net/projects/postinstaller/files/fedora/releases/24/x86_64/libhal1-flash-0.3.3-2.20160402git95cdd6e.fc24.86_64.rpm

4. Watch Hulu on Linux

Once HAL has finished installing, restart your browser and Hulu should now work. If you continue to see an error, just reboot your PC and try again.

Conclusion

If Hulu has no interest in providing and supporting an app for the Linux community, that’s OK. But at least, they should allow it to work in most browsers. Get rid of Flash and then use HTML5 already.There you have it. A simple tutorial to enable you to stream Hulu on your Linux desktop.