iPlayer in Australia

Watching the BBC iplayer in Australia for Free

As an Expat in Australia, one of the first things you notice is that Aussie television is worse than you could possibly imagine, being mainly composed of American sitcoms, which run late, are rescheduled without notice, and which have seemingly interminable ads of the lowest possible quality.

So, never mind how much you used to complain about UK TV, you’ll suddenly miss it a lot. Even 5 years ago I remember pubs of the backpacker style used to have VHS tapes of British TV sent via snail mail, to keep those from the old dart happy. No longer – now we have the joy of the BBC iPlayer!

I remember going along to the launch of the iPlayer at TVC and hearing the speech about it had to – for licensing reasons – be restricted to those who pay the licence fee. Hence, the BBC iplayer will not work abroad. However, since I had already paid for my licence fee for the year before escaping to the sunny shores of Australia, and because I only want to watch the BBC six o clock news, I felt slightly less guilty at finding ways to hack the BBC iplayer.

What the iPlayer does is check your IP address - the number that gets assigned to your computer when you connect to any network – and checks to see if this inside the UK. The good news is that there is now a well established method to ensure that you can watch iplayer outside uk.

No Cost techniques for watching iplayer abroad

Here are the simple instructions for watching iplayer in Australia for Free.

Many companies now offer a paid-for service for this, at up to 40 quid a month – they are simple, but there are ways to watch the Iplayer for Free in Australia. Bear with me, as they are quite complicated, and you’ll have to know your way around a PC. What you want to do is create a virtual private network (VPN) so that all your web requests are routed via a server sitting in the UK, so that to the iPlayer, it looks as if you are in the United Kingdom.

The method I’m going to describe uses Tor, which is an application that sits on your computer, and which takes requests from Firefox, and routes your requests through a server in another country - in this case the UK.

Stage 1: Ensure you have Firefox.
Make sure you download the British version of Firefox from Mozilla at http://www.mozilla.com/en-GB/firefox/all.html and select the British English version, or just click here to download it.
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6.13&os=win&lang=en-GB
Test it, and make sure it is working. Don’t download the US version, and if you already have the US version, dump it for the UK version (which will also speak to you in properly spelt English!)
Then, in the firefox window, download the latest version of Flash from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
And, again check it is working.

Stage 2: Install the latest release of Tor for Windows
Go to http://www.torproject.org/ , click the large purple button marked Download Tor, then the Vidalia Bundle for windows version. This is called “Stable Vidalia Bundle works with Windows 7, Vista, XP”. Click on Download Stable, then Save File. This (should!) be saved in your Downloads directory in My Documents. Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Windows Explorer, and in My Documents, click on Downloads, and then double click on Vidalia-bundle-0.2.1.29-0.2.10.exe (the numbers at the end may change slightly as Vidalia gets updated).
Once it has finished running and installing, in your taskbar you'll have a new item marked Vidalia. In here is Vidalia (the onion icon) and TorrC which is a notepad file. We edit the C config file to define how Tor works.

Stage 3: Find a Free UK VPN Server

Now we have to find a server in the UK that will let us route iPlayer requests through it.
Go to http://torstat.xenobite.eu/ (either on IE or Firefox, but you may find it easier to use another browser other than the one you will run the iPlayer on).

This website shows you all the Tor servers around the world – alas, it is very slow at listing all the possible servers. You'll have to wait ages for it to load. Either wait for ages, or enter into the searchbox some nonsense characters, and it will show no results, and you can get at the bits you need, down the bottom of the screen.
Click on Show custom / advanced query options >>. More options appear, and down at the bottom under “Require Flags” choose “Yes” for “Exit” and under “Advanced Search” choose “Country Code” “equals” “GB”.
Click “Apply Options”.

Now, take note of all or some of the Router Names of the resulting servers except those marked Unnamed. These are your exit nodes in the UK. There may be plenty of them, so look out for ones that have plenty of bandwidth – the grey scale bar. Bandwidth over 200KB/s is good. Beware of nodes that have a UK flag, but with addresses that don’t end in .co.uk. There will be some that end in .eu or even .nl . Chances are, these are in the UK, but if you also want to use TOR to access services like ITV Player or the UK National Lottery in Australia, you’ll come unstuck on these, as they also detect the URL.

Stage 4: Configuring Tor to watch iplayer abroad
Go to Start Menu and open All Programs > Vidalia Bundle > Tor > torcc. This will open the Tor configuration file, in which we tell it what servers we would like it to use.
Scroll all the way to the bottom and enter the following lines:
StrictExitNodes 1
ExitNodes
Now, after ExitNodes and on the same line, type in a list of the GB Routers you found in step 2 separated by a comma and a space.

An example would be:
ExitNodes tormfaelixnet, lobster2, docTor, Freaky, froschitor, gadg3ts, jakkal, n1x0n, TheHomeOffice
If a line starting with “ExitNodes” already exists, then overwrite the line with your new exit nodes. Save the file and exit notepad.

Stage 5: Run Vidalia
Run Vidalia, by clicking on the Vidalia icon in All Programs > Vidalia Bundle which looks like a large onion. It looks like an onion, because the Vidalia onion is a sweet onion grown in certain American states, and which is Georgia's official state vegetable no less. Well, one of the vegetables there at any rate.
The progress bar along the top will click along, and after a few seconds, it will say "Connected to the Tor Network". If it doesn’t then none of your exitnodes in the C config file were valid: go to stage 3, and repeat.

Stage 6: Enable Tor
In Firefox, there should be a status at the bottom of the browser saying “Tor Disabled”. In order to enable Tor, you left click it, and it will turn green, saying “Tor Enabled”. This is where you can switch Tor on or off depending on whether you are browsing a site that needs it.

Stage 7: Check Tor
Now we need to check that Tor is doing what it says on the tin.
On Firefox, with the green “Tor Enabled”, go to http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/. This page should confirm that you’re now using a Tor exit node. Check the Your Geolocation – this should say “GB” but occasionally, with the uncertain exitnodes I mentioned above, it will says “we haven’t a clue”. These will fail for the Lotto, and only work some of the time for iPlayer.

Stage 8: Ensure Flash works in Tor
Right-click on the “Tor Enabled” status and select “Preferences”. In the “Security Settings” and “Dynamic Content” tabs, make sure that “Disable plugins during Tor usage” is unchecked. I know it says it is crucial to leave it ticked: it’s not if you want to use the iPlayer overseas.

Stage 9: iplayer outside uk
In Firefox enter the URL http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ to use iPlayer. Enjoy watching programmes inline! It should all work fine, but you won’t be able to download programmes. I’ll come to that.

Issues – Flash Player doesn’t Work
If you are having problems with flash player do not reload it. Open Firefox, right click, on tor and select preferences. click on security settings and uncheck disable plugins during tor usage. Try it again (refresh the page). if it doesn't work uncheck in the same way unhook JavaScript. It will eventually force it.

Issues – Jerky slow programmes that continually freeze up
Remember in Stage 3, I said that you should ensure you have plenty of bandwidth – the grey scale bar when you were hunting for nodes. You’ll now find out if you do or not: without it, you’ll find the iPlayer picture is very jerky. A quick get-around is to pause the picture and wait for it to catch up, but this isn’t very satisfactory. A better solution is to find more bandwidth, or to download programmes.

Issues – Downloading programmes
To download programmes from iPlayer in Australia, you need to trick your windows licence into thinking you are in the UK.

Download Stage 1: Download programme
Go to the page of the programme and click on “More downloads” under the video. Choose “Windows Media Player” and save the file to your desktop. The file will download without problems, but it will take quite a long time. You can download it without using Tor, which will be a lot faster.

Download Stage 2: WMP in UK
Now set up Windows Media Player so that it thinks you are in the UK, and it will download a valid license to watch the episode. Ensure that Vidalia is running, then go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Internet Options. Under the “Connections” tab, click on “LAN settings”. Now under “Proxy server”, check “Use a proxy server for your LAN” and enter 127.0.0.1 for the Address and “8118? for Port. Untick “Bypass proxy server for local addresses”.

Download Stage 3: Watch iplayer episodes abroad
On the download you saved, and Windows Media Player will start up, it will download your licence automatically, and the episode will play. Remember of course that you should have a UK TV Licence to watch the episode, even though you are in Australia.

Download Stage 4: Back to normal
It will make sense to undo the proxy settings in IE (by going back to Internet Options, and unticking “Use a proxy server for your LAN”) once the license is downloaded, to get back to normal.

Now that you have a UK IP address from abroad free to watch the BBC iPlayer, you can also access other services in the UK that restrict access to UK IP addresses. However, this is even harder, because many organisations keep a list of proxys and block them, however there are a few that work – these are small private servers with very low bandwidth, and finding these is a matter of trial and error. They are very slow.

If you want to be really flexible in terms of where you are located, you can also download Mgeni http://code.google.com/p/mgeni/ , which is another option depending on the flexibility you need - it will allow you to select the country you need by clicking on an icon, however recently the BBC have started blocking this on some ports: it's touch and go if it'll work.

Also, one last point: remember to turn Tor off (just click it at the bottom on the right, and it will turn red) before you start doing any other surfing, in particular accessing your bank account online, or paying for anything online. Remember free proxies are mostly hacked servers and your details are decidedly un-safe being passed through them.