Obscure Problems and Gotchas

This is an exceptionally stupid problem and I wish Hulu would fix it already 😡. Luckily there is a proven work around 😀! Woooo 🙌! I will watch/listen to older TV shows I never had a chance to watch before while I do mundane busy work in my office on my desktop. TV shows where the pattern is predictable and I don’t have to actually pay attention to follow the plot (sometimes lack thereof).

Obscure problem

So I cannot actually tell you how this problem happens because it’s inconsistent and it happens intermittently. I have seen it happen not at all for multiple seasons of a single TV show at a time or sporadically. You would think that restarting the video or refreshing the browser would do something to fix it, but it has a very low success rate. Basically never works. This is an example of the error you get after you see the episode pre-roll footage warning you that this is mature content.

If you are wondering what I was watching, it’s “The Shield” by FX. I don’t know why, but for this series in particular it seems to happen more often than I have experienced in the past with other series.

Dumb solution

This is not a great solution, but it works! When the error presents itself do the following:

1. Click the OK button on the error on your desktop. Talking about the green button depicted in the screenshot above.
2. Open your Hulu App on your phone.
   • If you are not logged in, you have to login.
3. Play the same video giving you the problem.
4. It will play, I don’t know why, but it will.
5. Let the pre-roll pass. Example, “This video is rated Mature blah blah blah”. Runs for like 5-8 seconds.
6. Once the episode starts to play, move the episode like 10 seconds forward for safe measure.
7. Back out of the video on your phone.
8. Refresh the browser.
9. Play the same video that was giving you trouble.
10. The expected result is it will play where you left off from on your phone. Hence why move it 10 seconds forward.

I think this has something to do with that pre-roll, I don’t know why.

I partially got these tips from a Hulu support rep, so thanks to them for that.