How to download videos from Hulu: a step by step guide

Here’s a step by step guide to downloading videos from Hulu using free software. These steps can be taken to download videos from most video sharing services, including most sites that encrypt their media.

Free programs used in this tutorial are SteamTransport and FLVMDI. Note that this article is for informational purposes only and that you are responsible for abiding with the relevant laws that govern copyright in the state or country where you reside.

Step #2: Browse to the video you want. Run StreamTransport and use the built in browser to find the video that you want to download, such that that it starts playing in the browser. It is important that the video starts playing; if it doesn’t for whatever reason you will not be able to download it.

Step #3: Identify your video in the list of URLs. You now have to identify the video in the list of URLs that appear in the bottom window. The reason there are multiple entries there is because there are other video streams being loaded on that same page (mostly ads). Identifying the actual video should be easy enough though:

• The video will have a title that makes sense that often starts with “Hulu -”, while the ads and other stuff will have a meaningless title. The video entry can appear on the list before the ads and other stuff, even when the ads are displayed first.
• If you look into the duration of the different entries in the URL list, the video you seek will have a duration in minutes that makes sense (30 minutes or 45 minutes, etc), while the ads and other stuff will have a duration of mere seconds or a couple of minutes at most.

Step #4: Initiate the download. Select the video you would like to download and click the “Download” button on the right. Your video will start downloading. Note the following:

• You should start downloading as soon as the entry appears in the list. I found that initiating the download quickly almost always works, while waiting can sometimes result in a failure to successfully capture the URL.
• Once the video starts downloading, you can go back to the main StreamTransport dialog to browse and add more videos to the download list. Multiple videos can download simultaneously; the video does not have to be playing in the StreamTransport browser for it to download.
• The overall download for Hulu videos takes a much longer time than downloading from other video sharing services, and the download speed will constantly fluctuate. This may be due to the process of negotiating the encryption.
• In fact, total download time for your video may not be that much less than the duration of the video. The best way to download, therefore, is to start a batch of downloads overnight or during your lunch hour or something like that.

Step #5: Locate the file on your hard drive. You can tell that the video has finished downloading once it has reached “100%” in the download list. To locate the downloaded video on your hard drive select it in the list and click the “locate” button on the top bar. This should open the folder on your hard drive where the video is located. The video will be in .FLV format. See image below.

Step #6: Open the file using a proper media player. Now that your video is downloaded, see if it plays correctly. Make sure that you are using a media player that will play FLV videos, such as The KMPlayer, VLC player, or Splayer. FLV format will typically not play in either Windows Media Player or iTunes unless special filters (called codecs) are installed on your system.

What I have found is that while the video will start playing just fine, any attempts to fast forward the video will cause playback to fail.

• If this is the case (the video will not fast forward) then go to step#7
• If this is not the case (the video is playing just fine and you are satisfied), then that’s it, you’re done. Happy viewing.

Step #7: Download FLVMDI, a tool that can inject keyframe objects into FLVs. The reason FLV videos downloaded from Hulu do not fast forward is because they lack keyframe objects (little markers interspersed across a video that enable the media player to navigate back and forth). Hulu videos probably do not contain these by design, to make it harder for people view videos downloaded from Hulu. This is easily fixed, however.

• Go to the FLVMDI website. Scroll down to the “Downloads” section (towards the bottom of the screen) and download the latest versions of FLVMDI and FLVMDIGUI (at the time of this writing these were versions 2.95 and 1.05, respectively).
• Extract both FLVMDI and FLVMDIGUI, then move flvmdi.exe to the FLVMDIGUI folder.

Step #8: Run FLVMDIGUI.exe and process your FLV. Once you launch this program the dialog is self-explanatory:

• For the input file, browse to your downloaded FLV video file. Note: to process a number of FLV files in batch use”All files in a folder” tab. This will let you point to a folder rather than a single file and process all the FLV files inside.
• For Output, you can use the same name as the original, which auto-populates. Really no need to create a different output file name.
• Check the “Include ’keyframes’ object” box
• That’s it. You can now click the “Run FLVMDI” button on the bottom right to process.
• Processing should conclude in a few seconds.

Step #9:You’re done. Your downloaded file should now be fully playable on any media player that plays FLV files