Hulu tries HTML encoding trick to protect streaming content
Hulu has apparently taken steps to thwart nontraditional browsers from accessing its video content by using JavaScript to encode and decode HTML sent to the browser. The move is clearly an attempt to prevent third-parties from displaying the site's video streams outside of approved Web browsers, but Hulu is already doing a poor job of trying to outsmart developers and hackers.
The discovery was made by TunerFreeMCE's Martin Millmore, whose media center software makes it possible for users to watch video feeds from a variety of sources in one application (similar to Boxee). Millmore noted on his website that new Hulu content contained a string of URL-encoded characters that are byte shifted from the original characters. "They then run the character stream through a series of JavaScript functions to convert it back in to plain text before pushing it in to your browser using DHTML," Millmore wrote. "That's quite a lot of effort just for fun, so I assume that is to stop screen scrapers from parsing content."
