Bbc iplayer and VPN's

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Peter

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Had quick conversation with a friend and he mentioned using a VPN to access bbc iplayer and other TV channel iplayers when abroad, at the moment Spain. Is he correct as he was not coming with a lot of knowledge. Is he correct? and if yes any recommendations for a VPN, ideally free as they seem to be a lot of them around.

Thanks
 
Peter said:
Had quick conversation with a friend and he mentioned using a VPN to access bbc iplayer and other TV channel iplayers when abroad, at the moment Spain. Is he correct as he was not coming with a lot of knowledge. Is he correct? and if yes any recommendations for a VPN, ideally free as they seem to be a lot of them around.

Thanks
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I've used Tunnel Bear successfully for iPlayer until the last few weeks. The Beeb are actively blocking VPN addresses and I assume TB has fallen victim to this.
My experience of the free VPNs is they're not worth the bother to save £4 a month.
I imagine this will turn into an arms race between content providers and VPNs, as happened with Pirate Bay etc. but it does seem to be getting more difficult at the moment.
 
TunnelBear was still working last week when I tried it. I use the free option as I don't use much and 500MB easily lasts for a month. I always connect via TunnelBear, download 15MB, pause, kill iPlayer and switch off TunnelBear. Download resumes when I restart iPlayer.

You probably don't need to kill iPlayer after pausing but I have seen it stick a couple of times and always seems OK if shutdown and restarted. I decided on 15MB because iPlayer often seemed to slow or stop around 6MB and 12MB but was OK by 15MB. I had problems years ago when restarting the download after a couple of MB. The software usually stuck soon afterwards as I "wasn't in UK". Never had any problems if first 15MB is under VPN, but it is just an arbitrary number.

I don't often watch live TV as downloading still works on poor WiFi. Live TV would freeze but a download just takes longer.
 
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I used Witopia for a few years $50 p.a. Quite good but also had the same problem as another poster - sticking at 12 Mb. The problem for me was the cost of the broadband link. Currently in Spain and the connection costs are 3x what they were in Malta. I use Lebara, the cheapest I could find, and it's 20 euros for 3GB. Now I load up iplayer in the UK, but there's obviously a 30 day time limit. Overseas it's local TV and Radio 4, 5 live. Soon we'll have to pay for iPlayer.

Don't buy a Lebara sim in Gatwick - ready for Spain they say. It's not. The product codings cannot be read by Spanish Lebara outlets. Sorry for thread drift, that one made me angry!
 
If you have access to a PC in the UK, then VNC (I've used TightVNC) would work. Basically, VNC allows you to control and see a remote machine. I've used it to set up machines in Buenos Aires from Cambridge, with no problems at all. It would certainly work for iPlayer and so on, as iPlayer would actually be running on the machine in the UK, not on your on-board PC.
 
I'm currently in Finike marina Turkey.
I watched the Manchester 10k on BBC2 this morning using Filmon (Looking for wife and daughter running but didn't spot them amongst the other 30,000 runner) - it worked just great (occasional stutter) unlike my Slingbox which I couldn't connect to - stuffs up watching the England Rugby tour of Australia on BT Sport :(
 
GrahamM376 said:
Have just tried it and iPlayer blocked in free version, say Elite version has to be purchased to access.
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It's been that way for about 2 years now. They suddenly blocked iPlayer and asked for money to allow access. I rarely watched live and just downloaded after a program had aired. Filmon was actually better as you could set to record and download about 5 mins. after the program ended. BBC often took several hours to make a program available.

Filmon gave 10 hours free recording time but that was reduced to 1 hour (last year, I think). Pity, as it was a good service. I think that people were registering multiple email addresses to allow 30-40 hours to be recorded for free.

I don't watch that much TV and find torrents fine as a lot of UK TV programs appear pretty quickly.
 
JumbleDuck said:
I'd be mildly surprised if it coped well with video. The bottleneck is the broadband upload speed of the UK machine.
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Well, I was using it over academic networks, so that wasn't a factor. But It should handle it - the download speed at the fixed PC on a land-line should be better than the connection speed via MiFi. It may also help that you're not downloading the video, only the UK PC's screen and audio, which should require a smaller bandwidth. But it's only a viable proposition if you KNOW you have 24/7 access to a PC in the UK. The biggest technical issue would be determining the IP address of the UK PC, which may not be straightforward, depending on how the UK ISP handles that side of things.

The first time I did something like this was pre Internet - when I accessed a machine in Los Alamos from Cambridge via the experimental IPSS system in 1987! But that was a character only telnet type link :)
 
AntarcticPilot said:
Well, I was using it over academic networks, so that wasn't a factor. But It should handle it - the download speed at the fixed PC on a land-line should be better than the connection speed via MiFi. It may also help that you're not downloading the video, only the UK PC's screen and audio, which should require a smaller bandwidth. But it's only a viable proposition if you KNOW you have 24/7 access to a PC in the UK.
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It's the upload speed which is the bottleneck, not download. At the moment I'm sitting on 8128kbps download, 448kbps, so anyone wanting to watch video from here would effectively be using a 448kbps link, no matter how good their download connection. I've given help over VNC connections at similar speeds, and it's a big laggy for simple desktop work, with quite a delay to draw a new or moved window ... any moving image on screen, even just a small animated icon, slowed things to unusable.

The biggest technical issue would be determining the IP address of the UK PC, which may not be straightforward, depending on how the UK ISP handles that side of things.
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That's easy to sort with a dynamic DNS service. I used to use DynDNS, but it wasn't worth to me what they started charging.
 
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