I have a friend ...

[Christopher Woods (CustomMade)]

> I have a friend in Canada who would like to avail herself of 
> the facilities afforded to those of us in Blighty. Does 
> anyone outside the UK have get_iplayer working through a 
> proxy or VPN? And if so, what is involved in the process?

I tried a VPN once but I didn't inhale ;).

> Following a successful install of get_iplayer, are there any 
> options to be added to the options file? How does one tell 
> get_iplayer to talk to the proxy rather than use whatever 
> internet connection it finds?

Windows by default passes all traffic through a connected VPN, which is a
pain in most circumstances but useful in this situation. It worked fine with
no additional steps required with get_iplayer and I doublechecked that the
traffic was indeed passing through the VPN by reconnecting via a Canadian
endpoint (and got the predictable unavailable messages on video material).

> Of course, one needs a UK proxy - is "any old proxy" suitable 
> or are there certain points to be careful about? Does Auntie 
> allow proxy connections?

The BBC does block IP ranges it's aware of but it either takes a lax
approach to ranges controlled by people like server hosts based in the UK .
For e.g., Viacom is similarly lax in its approach - I can use a
Dreamhost-hosted SSH tunnel to watch Colbert Report shows complete with
ginuwine American ad breaks! As far as I can tell, the Beeb outsource the
classification of ranges to a third party so if a block's designated as
being in a country it will just allow access irrespective of purpose (unless
I suspect the controlling organisation is only engaging in activities that
allow people outside of the UK to access UK only content).

Sometimes they're a bit slow too on allowing access to people who should
have it, they took ages to allow T-Mobile IP ranges used by UK customers (by
default we all used to be routed through Germany, they have significantly
improved the geographic routing and rDNS since then though)

Might you be able to get 30 mins access on a spare dedi or VPS in your
workplace and give a VPN a whirl? ;-) In theory if you setup an OpenVPN
instance going and then just connected to it as a dialup connection in
Windows all traffic would just route through it and bingo, done. When I
played with it, I tried tunnelbroker although it was too congested to get a
reliable stream (iirc it was peak time UK).