I recently had some trouble playing a video on Hulu because of a DRM scheme which I've aparently not encountered before (despite being a long-time Hulu viewer). It may have something to do with the network, as the show was NBC's Community.

In any case, the helpful Hulu support staff pointed me to the 'hal' package, per this adobe help page. This resolved my issues.

My question is this: if hal is sometimes required for proper use of the nonfree flashplugin packages, should it be a dependency? Who should I be contacting about this?

I had this issue with both flashplugin-nonfree in the default 12.04 repositories, and adobe-flashplugin maintained by Adobe. Is there a reason why this is not a dependency? A quick search of the forums shows that this is a somewhat common problem.

Many thanks,
Andy