How to Fix “Press Esc” Issue on Hulu Plus

I was watching an old English film The Divorce of Lady X (Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, 1938) on my 27-inch iMac via Hulu Plus the other day when a vexing thing happened.

When I expanded the movie on my iMac to full-screen, the below distracting message popped up right in the middle of the screen:

Press Esc to exit full screen mode

Despite refreshing the Firefox browser, I couldn’t get rid off the darn message.

Hulu Plus is not free.

Since I pay $7.99 a month, I’m entitled to a certain minimum quality.

Upon researching the “Press Esc” issue, I realized this was not a rare occurrence with Hulu Plus.

How to Fix Press Esc Issue on Hulu Plus

Here’s how you can solve the “Press Esc” problem while watching a Hulu movie on the Mac:

* Click on the below link and go to the Macromedia (Adobe Flash) web site.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html

* Once you are on the above Macromedia site, you’ll see a “Global Storage Settings Panel.” Now drag the slider in the panel to the right till you see 1MB (Hulu recommends 100KB but that did not work for me)

* Ensure the box labelled “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer” is checked.

Now refresh your browser, and the pesky “Press Esc to exit full screen mode message” in the middle of the full-screen mode should have disappeared.

I haven’t tested the above workaround on Windows PCs or on other browsers.

But I suspect it should work fine since the underlying issue is Flash, which is used as a plugin on both Mac and Windows PCs.

By the way, Hulu Plus has a ton of classic movies under the “Criterion” collection. I strongly recommend them to all movie buffs.