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Watch the Olympics from anywhere: this actually works
- irq 14y agoIf the BBC changes their IP addresses and I haven't updated the IP list, you can simply adjust your VPN client settings to route all traffic over the VPN connection. Viscosity makes this easy. That will always work, but will cause other Internet services to think you're in England, and make things feel a bit slower overall.
- coderrr 14y agoAs I've said in other comments. This is fun and hackerish but it's cheaper and simpler to just sign up for a VPN for a month that has UK gateways. Like https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ for $6.95
- fl3tch 14y agoThat's what I've been using and it works great. Some of their US nodes are slow, probably because overloaded, but I maxed out my 20 Mbit internet connection testing their UK London server. Edit: I should also point out that a $20 Linode box just for VPN is overkill. If you really want to go the VPS route, there are plenty of sub-$10 VPS providers in the UK.
- coderrr 14y agoIf you email me at coderrr.contact@gmail.com I can try to help figure out why you get slow speeds on some of our US servers. None of our servers are even running near capacity.
- someperson 14y agoIt would have been good courtesy to declare your affiliation with this company in your original comment
- coderrr 14y agoYea I should have. I guess I forgot to because I had already done so in these other comments [1] and wrongly assumed everyone had read them as well. Anyway, I'm the cofounder of said service. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307364 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307364 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307380 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307380
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- dcesiel 14y agoOr you could just use the unlimited TunnelBear VPN for $5 a month.
- irq 14y agoAnd potentially send sensitive traffic through an untrusted third party. Some people are comfortable with that, some people aren't.
- rorrr 14y agoYou can disconnect from the VPN after you're done watching.
- irq 14y agoAll of the UK-endpoint VPN providers I considered were sketchy in one way or another, and most of them had very poor speeds from the UK to the US. A VPN connection usually bypasses your local firewall too, depending on configuration, which means you really, really have to trust the people running your VPN service, and trust that they isolated their customers from each other. Linode, on the other hand, is a well-respected company with extremely good connectivity (I get 160ms pings from San Diego, CA and more than 30mbit/s transfer). And I know the guy who is running my VPN service on Linode: me. If you're the kind of person who gladly exchanges security and privacy for $10 to $15, then those other options are for you.
- Gigablah 14y agoAnd how do you determine that Linode is more trustworthy than TunnelBear?
- brackin 14y agoI'm not sure about the legalities abroad but in the UK at least it's illegal to watch this stream without a TV licence and they do try and prosecute people if they can find an address attached to your IP, obviously this isn't possible through this method but just a heads up. Another option which doesn't require a tv licence is TVCatchup.com which legally streams UK TV channels (to the UK only). Although I will say the BBC interface is far better and allows you to go back to the start if you press play on the live player half way through and of course is ad free. Regardless, I condone this as NBC should allow everyone to watch online live and if they don't people will go to better alternatives.
- mseebach 14y ago> they do try and prosecute people if they can find an address attached to your IP How? Will the ISPs actually just hand those out?
- brackin 14y agoThey do a surprising amount, they seriously have vans that drive around scanning to see if you're watching television on a physical TV and if so if you don't have a licence they'll fine you I'm not sure if they are actually finding out if you have a TV licence on the stream yet but I wouldn't be surprised if they are/do.
- mseebach 14y agoThe effectiveness of detector vans is an urban myth. The only confirmed tactics is requiring stores selling TVs to collect the address of the buyer and knocking on the doors of people not paying the licence in the assumtion that they actually have a TV.
- ZoFreX 14y agoThey drove a very obvious looking "detector van" around near our university halls for a few days, and a few days later every person that had a TV and no license got a letter, got scared, and paid up. Of course, everyone that had no TV and no license also got a letter... and so did everyone that already had a TV license!
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- irq 14y agoedit: original poster was suggesting using a ssh -D SOCKS method instead. He deleted his comment, this was my reply: This method does not work. You cannot get Flash to go through a HTTP or SOCKS proxy on Mountain Lion. The very reason that VPNs "tie in at a fairly low level on the network stack" is why my method works.
- ajross 14y agoFlash isn't a protocol. Certainly if they're streaming over HTTP (or TLS) it will go through a proxy (or at least it does everywhere else, I don't have OS X). What specifically are they doing that a "ssh -D" wouldn't handle?
- coderrr 14y agoYou're correct HTTP connections over flash will use HTTP proxy settings. The problem is many sites don't stream over HTTP, they use some custom streaming protocol using raw flash sockets. And these do not respect SOCKS proxy settings.
- coderrr 14y agoI just remembered it's not actually custom protocols with raw sockets that are common and don't respect SOCKS settings but rather Flash's RTMP protocol.
- coderrr 14y agoYou actually can, but it's quite complicated. I wrote a post on how to do it using linux a long time ago: http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/how-to-force-flash-or-any-program-to-use-a-socks-proxy-using-transocks-and-iptables-in-linux/ http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/how-to-force-flash-o... I had a similar setup working with OSX using ipfw and natd. Really complex and disgusting setup though IMO. Using a VPN is so much cleaner.
- wolf550e 14y agoIf I don't care about watching it live, can I just get the recording in a torrent?
- njs12345 14y agoThere are definitely a lot of recordings on Usenet...
- icebraining 14y agoSure, the opening ceremony has more than 8000 seeds: http://torrentz.eu/search?f=olympics http://torrentz.eu/search?f=olympics
- kellishaver 14y agoI really wish I could just subscribe to iPlayer. I don't want to subscribe to a cable or satellite service that I wouldn't use (and then pay extra for BBC channels), and I like a lot of their content. I'd gladly pay the BBC money for easy, legal online access to it.
- AffableSpatula 14y agoI'd like to see this happen just so that British taxes aren't being spent providing free coverage to people in other countries.
- dasil003 14y agoIf they wanted to do that they'd need to have global streaming rights, which would cost much much much much more than the marginal bandwidth taken up by the fraction of users with the tech savvy to set up a proxy.
- Someone 14y agoThey must have negotiated some international broadcasting rights; BBC 1 and 2 are on many Dutch cable systems, and show the Olympics live. And that is not because it was easier for them to get rights for this Olympics; they did this with all previous Olympics, too. BBC iPlayer is not available in the Netherlands, though.
- josephlord 14y agoThis is largely a historical anomaly in the rights. The terrestrial broadcasts were received in the Netherlands so broadcast rights the BBC gets still include this at tleast in some cases. The Olympics are bought collective for Europe by the EBU/Eurovision and then their members broadcast them so for the Olypics the BBC may have Euopean rights from the IOC.
- sambe 14y ago
- stoked 14y agoI did something similar to watch hulu from Canada awhile back but I had split tunnelling disabled where all traffic goes through the vpn so no messing around with static routes and ips. Also setup a local DNS cache on the VPS and configured openvpn to use the VPS DNS cache when connected. CDN's generally use the ip of the DNS request to determine where to direct your browser to download the media, static host entries would avoid the DNS request though. I no longer have it setup, but I do have my config backed up somewhere. If someone's interested I'll look for it.
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- robwgibbons 14y agoI shouldn't have to pay for a proxy to watch the GLOBAL OLYMPICS live from anywhere in the world.
- webmonkeyuk 14y agoI reckon it'll just be a matter of time until the BBC start blocking traffic from IP ranges that look like VPS hosting companies.
- Axsuul 14y agoHopefully this method won't become too mainstream since it requires some hacking.
- idan 14y agoI found this resource to be helpful in actually getting the routes working. In particular, setting up NAT to forward traffic from the VPN to the outside world: https://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/ubuntu-10.10-maverick#sph_configuring-the-virtual-private-network https://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/ubuntu-10.10-m...
- davej 14y agoOr you can just tunnel through the ssh connection to your VM, I do this all the time to watch BBC. ssh -D 9050 [user]@[vm.ip] You now have a SOCKS proxy on port 9050. Done!
- enimodas 14y agowhile you can easily set a SOCKS proxy for your browser, flash will still use your normal connection.
- seabee 14y agoWhich is more efficient if the sites don't care where the flash connection comes from (like, apparently, the BBC)
- irq 14y agoActually, the Flash BBC iPlayer will _not_ work if it connects from the United States. Additionally, I discovered that the BBC is using Akamai for streaming their live content, and Akamai's United States servers do not have the content. So even if you convince the BBC that you're in England, but talk to Akamai servers in the US, the content does not stream. Interestingly, BBC is using Limelight for pre-recorded content, and that content is apparently cached globally.
- seabee 14y agoI never tried the live streams - the time difference was inconvenient enough. Live content gets licensed differently to the catch-up content, which you can view without paying the license fee. Given catch-up is usually more restricted (some programmes unavailable for example) I imagine the only reason Limelight is globally accessible is because that's the default mode of operation and the iPlayer website is considered a sufficient region restriction mechanism.
- gsa 14y agoFlash with Firefox on Linux respects the SOCKS proxy setting.
- cientifico 14y agoThe same thing that the people need to access "How I need your mother". After a few years, the easiest solution is to just buy a prxoy. Normally cheaper.
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- MrKurtHaeusler 14y agoOr just sign up for a distance learning course from a UK university. Aberdeen gives you a proxy, the OU as far as I know, doesn't.
- bgentry 14y agoWorks great. This way you don't have to send all your traffic through the VPN, only the requests that are used to geolocate you. You can use the same method to bypass MLB.tv blackout restrictions. Instead of a Linode box, I use a privatetunnel.com VPN (free starter available) and modify the config: route-nopull # (to avoid sending all traffic through) route outbound-ip netmask # ex: route 8.8.8.8 255.255.255.0
- vegardx 14y agoIf you're in europe you can watch it live at NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), but the commentary will ofcourse be in Norwegian. NRK has excellent coverage, with 7 (9 including NRK1 and NRK2) dedicated channels. See more: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnrk.no%2Fol2012%2Fnyheter%2Fslik-ser-du-ol-pa-nrk-i-utlandet-1.8257380 http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl...
- JacobIrwin 14y agoI'm posting this in all three of the 'Olympics' threads showing up on the front page of HN: I live in Berkeley, CA and I was able to get full access to videos, including streams and highlights, by selecting Xfinity as my service provider during my initial sign-up/activation on the NBC Olympics website. Here at my apartment, we have no cable service and an internet provider called Zoom. So obviously, I wasn't being truthful - but instead was trying to circumvent this ridiculous corporate stranglehold during my first attempt to access Olympic footage. I don't know if it will still work, but it worked for me on Friday and my credentials have held since - allowing my full access without login each time I access the website.