One of the most anyoing things with [stag]BBC iPlayer[/stag] is that it’s not possible to access it if you are not situated in the UK – fully understandable as UK residents pay license to watch BBC, but then again I also do, indirectly as my cable company rob me for a fair amount of money every month to allow me to watch BBC 1 & 2.
There are currently three way to get access to iPlayer if you are not in the UK;
- Get a VPN connection, but that will cost money. Currently the price is around 7 – 11 € per month
- Find a free HTTP proxy which might work, and it might not
- Find another way, and use anonymous networks like [stag]TOR Network[/stag]
I have tried the first two, and where the VPN solution works, I do not want to send all my internet traffic through a VPN tunnel, and finding a free proxy can be daunting, and they might not be up when I feel like watching TV.
Therefor TOR is probably the nicest way to get this working.
-
1) Download the latest client from here, if you use OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) you need to get 0.2.2.6-alpha.
(update 04/02/10: latest is 0.2.2.8-alpha)
(update 28/08/10: latest is 0.2.2.15-alpha)
- 2) Install the client, and start it
- 3) After you have started it (we just need it to create some default files), stop it again.
- 4) find ‘torrc’, on OSX it will be in ~/Library/Vidalia and add the following two lines to it:
StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes anonion,anotherlink,colinwillsdorkyahoo (update 28/08/10: looks like there have been some changes to the exitnodes, the ones currently working for me are):
ExitNodes F00DD00D,devasdfasdf,EverylckleBit,Unamed,- 5) create a browser auto-proxy file (PAC).
function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
if (shExpMatch(url, "*.bbc.co.uk/iplayer*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "*.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector*")) {
return "SOCKS localhost:9050";
} else {
return "DIRECT";
} }
Call it ‘iplayer.pac’ and save it somewhere on your harddrive.
- 6) In your browser (OSX is differnt as it uses a system wide proxy setup) preferences change the proxy to use the file create 5).
With OSX (that is Safari, 3rd party browsers have their own settings) you need to do; System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced -> Proxies -> Check ‘Automatic Proxy Configuration’ -> Select the file.
- 7) Point your browser to https://torstat.xenobite.eu/ and it should tell you that you’re connected via TOR.
Now you shold be able to access the iPlayer website…
I used most to the information from Cherie Hurwitz’s blog to get this working, but instead of FoxProxy I find that a PAC file is easier to work with.
Update 28/08/2010
Looks like there have been some changes to the exitnods. The ones which are currently working for me are:
ExitNodes F00DD00D,devasdfasdf,EverylckleBit,Unamed,ben,DestroyTerrorismNow,deusexmachina
Update 04/04/2011
Currently working exitnodes: st0nerhenge,Alice,DynoTor,F00DD00D