Tuesday, April 29, 2008

BBC iPlayer Overseas - Update

Today I have noticed a vast upsurge in hits to this blog. At first I put this down to Dr Crippen in his erratically-regular round up of the British medical blogosphere, BritMeds, which cited a recent post of mine on ubiquitous UK pharmacy Boots in Sunday's edition.

However, I am disillusioned.

Although Dr Crippen's citation generated a fair number of hits, he has been upstaged by overseas snooker fans who want to watch the World Snooker Championship at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre on the BBC.

A useful update to my original post on how to fool the BBC iPlayer was posted in the comments – Firefox now has a brilliant little add-on that controls your Tor connection and overrides the need to have Privoxy running. Even more impressive is its filtering capability in that you can specify which urls go through the Tor network and which don't.

Does the BBC domestic license payer finance this piece of software bullshit ? Of course.

I'll soon be having Watt Tyler, the Devil's Kitchen and the UK Taxpayers' Alliance (which I certainly won't link to – go google it) linking to me! Aaaagrh!

11 comments:

UK Musings said...

Thanks Angus,

I'll check out the FoxyProxy add-on.

I reckon that we have paid enough license fees when we lived in the UK to fund this exercise in futility by Auntie!

Funny thing is sometimes watching iPlayer here in Canada is faster than my partner who was trying from her hotel in London! I could get on and watch "The Pink Floyd Story" and she couldn't??

UK Musings said...

Come to think of it - I just checked my Canadian Tax return and I paid almost 2,000 pounds to the UK government in 2007 - and I don't even live in the UK!

I don't think that the Tax payers Alliance should have a problem with me! so much for reciprocal Income Tax treaties!

Anonymous said...

Thank you SO much for publishing the information on Tor. I am an expat who finds the selection of BBCAmerica too limited. And am thoroughly enjoying watching Eastenders, even though I recognize very few of the characters, it's been so long...

But I have been unsuccessful in getting Tor to work for me with Channel 4. Even though I can get through the first page, and click to watch a show, it catches me when Media Player opens, and won't play as I am not in the UK. And 4oD doesn't work either.

Have you been able to watch Channel 4? If so, how?!

Thank you again, from a very happy Brit.

Angus said...

I haven't been able to get 4OD working - mainly I think because it is more intimately bound to the Kontiki shell whereas the BBC iPlayer uses a browser.

Blackchilliman said...

hi,

I have to say i'm a bit of a technology idiot! I have just moved to Trinidad and want to be able to watch iplayer- Because we're only here for 6 months i'm still paying for my UK TV licence too ;-)
I've downloaded foxyproxy but I'm not sure how to configure the TOR? Would anybody be able to put up an idiot proof guide as to how to do this pleeeeeaaaasee?

Angus said...

Blackchilliman - see my original post
http://childhoodall.blogspot.com/2008/01/bbc-iplayer-overseas.html

... and then get back to us if you still can't get it working.

Anonymous said...

I configured this and had it working but as of July 1st It stopped working!!

Anyone else experience the same issue?

Anonymous said...

Thanks to this blog I could watch bbc iplayer in the us. But since the new beta player it keeps telling me to install flash. And if you've done that it still tells you to install Flash. Anyone else having this problem?

Anonymous said...

I'm having the same problem, it used to work great,but since the new beta release I get an error that tells me the programme isn't available and Ishould try later. Ihope there's a fix. I'm on firefox on XP.

Unknown said...

I'm havin the same problem with the new version.

With Firefox under XP it repeatedly tells me to install Flash latest version (which I have).

If I configure IE 7 Tools > Options > Connections > LAN > Use a proxy server > 127.0.0.1 and Port 8118 I get a message telling me it's 'not available, try later'

Anonymous said...

Toget rid of the flash message, you need to go to your torbutton settings under one of the tabs and deselect block all plugins, this should allow your flash plugin to work. Hope it helps. It's a great tool for catching up on BBC - Over here in Italy, TV is rubbish, no documentory's nothing informative. Good luck everybody!! -A