fancast.com

Today I wanted to watch Castle on my Google TV, and since both Hulu and ABC.com, the two sites I would usually use are blocked, I decided to just do a search and found Fancast. Looking at it, it looks a lot like Hulu, and seems to be owned by Comcast. Good news Castle works just fine. It looks like Chuck works there too, and I haven't looked around much more, but yay I can watch the shows I want again. Note: Yesterday I learned you can use NBC by changing the User Agent to Generic, but that trick doesn't work for Hulu anymore so I don't think it will last on NBC. Yay for using my Sony Internet TV as it should be used.

I haven't found a way on Fancast to queue like Hulu, but it does have RSS feeds when you go to each of the shows so you can add it to your Google Queue and it will tell you when you have a new show to watch. I couldn't get it to work right just using the favorite button then clicking add to queue, but I went to my computer and added the RSS feed to my Google Queue subscriptions in Google Reader and it works now.

Update: November 5th:

It seems that I was just a little excited and didn't review Fancast very well. In order to watch shows on it you must have the User Agent switched to Generic. If you don't it will just stay and the loading screen and never actually play. There is one down side to using this site. Ocassionally after commercials the sounds will come back, but the video will not. You have to actually refresh the page(Crtl + R), then go back to where you were. It is a bit of a hassel, but still it mostly works, which is better that what I can say for other sites.

Update: November 12th:

I haven't actually checked this, but according to everything on the internet this is now blocked too. The user agent switch will not work because the companies are blocking the version of flash, not the browser. Wow this is getting annoying, I need to get a new laptop with HDMI out, and just watch what I want no problem. I already have the HDMI cord to plug in across the room thanks to Monoprice.com, but my laptop is just two years to old. I have tired this with my roommate's computer it works great.

Blu-ray Player

I a still waiting for my Sony Internet TV to be delivered. I sent and email to the apartment manager and she said she will open my apartment for the delivery man when it gets here. That is quite the relief, I was wondering how I was every going to get because I am either at work or class from about 8 am to 6 pm every weekday.

Since I was now going to have an awesome TV, I thought to myself I want to watch movies on it. I was just going to buy an Up-converting DVD player with HDMI output since my roommate hates Blu-ray Players. He says that they charge too much for people to use them and so by doing making sure that independent films and other things cannot succeed. He is very small business oriented. So earlier this week I told my friend we would go DVD shopping and she has been excited all week about.

We started our adventure by going to Costco. They only had one DVD player, which would have worked, but I wanted to shop around anyway. Next we went over to Best Buy to check. After looking at the DVD players and seeing the same one for $10 more, I decided I was maybe going to buy Sony just to have it work perfectly with my TV. After circling a few times the girl I was with just said get the Blu-ray, because our friend has a ton of movies we could borrow. That pushed me over and I just went for a cheap $100 Blu-ray Player. It is the Best Buy brand "Insignia" and they even got me to get a 2 year protection plan on it. I am now the owner of a Blu-ray player! I would not usually spend that much money, being a poor college student, but I recently noticed that I have just that much money coming to me in a rebate for the use of my credit card for the last two years or something. The funny thing is it has all these features like internet and Netflix streaming and I am just like I don't need that, my TV does that on its own. (Or at least will, if it ever comes.) I am not sure if it came with any cables to plug it in with, but luckily I was getting prepared and ordered some HDMI cables from Monoprice today, so I should be good.

The best part of the day was when my roommate got home. He ranted for a while. No one believed me how mad he would get over it, but they were so wrong.