Slashdot Mirror
How To Watch Internet TV Across International Borders
colinneagle writes "Living in the U.S., one of my greatest regrets is that I can't watch BBC video with iPlayer. If I were living in the U.K., I'd feel the same away about not being able to watch shows on Hulu. But, with a Web proxy or a virtual private network (VPN) and an IP address in a country where the content is available, you can watch these shows. Technically, it's easy to set your browser up to use a Web proxy or VPN software. With a Web proxy and Windows XP, for example, you just go to Internet Options, click the Connections tab, and then click LAN Settings. Next, under Proxy server you click to select the 'Use a proxy server for your LAN' check box. Finally, you enter the IP address of the proxy server and in the Port box, type the IP number that is used by the proxy server for client connections—that's usually 8080. It's usually pretty simple to do that in any browser and operating system. There are also programs, such as Proxy Switchy, for Chrome that makes it easy to switch from one proxy to another in a single session. When you use a proxy, though, all your traffic is still open to network administrators. If you want to visit another country and watch their TV in privacy, you'll need a VPN."
Really?
What slashdot reader is this written for?
A: Someone who doesn't know what a proxy is, or how to set one up?
B: Someone who isn't wise enough to google how to watch internet media that is region blocked?
D: Gnomes
C: Someone who accidentally stumbled onto slashdot today?
The answer is D! Because the others are all make-believe!
Your mouse. How to move it left and right AND up and down on your screen.
Next thing you know we'll have all the bullshit that goes along with ask.com and ehow.
Slashdot's official mission is "News for nerds", I think that this qualifies. During a major event like the Olympics a common complaint amongst techies and non-techies alike is that they are unable to view coverage because of their location. This is informing people that their is technology that enables users to bypass the restriction. I clicked on the story and read the comments because I found it interesting.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Of course sometimes you can just set the X-Forwarded-For attribute in your browser to an IP address inside the country. A fair amount of web servers are set up to blindly trust it. A lot cheaper than a proxy when it works.
Some people might find this useful, so let's not get too carried away with our technical superiority. If you don't find the story informative, don't read it.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people on messageboards will weight in on a topic that they're not interested in just to say "I'm not interested in this topic." On /. we seem to have people who do nothing but post inane comments about how they're not interested in a particular story, usually in the Idle section. I find it amusing because clicking two buttons to post a reply was an even bigger waste of their time than the few seconds they spent reading the summary.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There are *a lot* of people, expats and otherwise, that would be absolutely fine with paying for some sort of international license for the BBC. I see this "you're stealing BBC" crap from Brits, but they are not giving an option to us and we're asking for it.
Dear Slashdot,
I've been doing exactly this for, oh, I dunno, 8 or 9 years. I even have several fellow /.ers as clients on my VPN/proxy/privacy service. Thank you, Soulskill, for this lovely little time capsule from 2004.
Stay tuned for our next story, where a young startup named Apple plans to change the world with a new kind of graphic calculator, tentatively called "Newton".
-Billco, Fnarg.com
2 years ago I decided that I wanted to view stuff through the BBC's iPlayer, forgetting that most of the good stuff from the BBC makes it here, and what doesn't make it here tends to be the dregs. Anyway, I found an open proxy in the UK and was barely able to get video across it. That was just the starting point. From there I looked at all of the HTTP communications (with Live HTTP Headers) and using FoxyProxy was able to just have certain pieces of data going through the proxy. I narrowed it down to just a few small HTTP communications that were being checked for location, and just proxied those. I got good streaming video after that because the actual video was being served up by Akamai. I wound up being served BBC video content from a server in Arizona.
Given that BBC America has most of the better stuff from the BBC, I haven't bothered messing with that kind of thing in several years.
This kind of thing may not work now, but it's worth checking to see just how much data really does have to be proxied/vpned if you are doing that kind of thing.