Good VPN for Hulu ect...

[soul_stalker]

Just curious what Canadians are using for their Proxie needs to access US only contect like Hulu and what not.

I know there are many out there, some are constantly being detected and blocked by Hulu and ect... some are cheap, some $$$, some free.

I thought maybey we could keep an open discussion on this so all us canucks can get, and keep access to this.

I would personally be willing to pay (resonable price) for a VPN that was releiable and fast enough to stream the increasing quality offered online from the states. They way I think of it the quality level of the streams have come far enough that I could potenitally ditch my VOD subscriptions, plus... obviously VOD is not useable via any HTPC sofware I'm aware of, much less extenders...

Right now I am not using anything, but I think I will begin a little testing soon.

[Skiier__Dude]

I have tried a couple but have found Witopia to be very solid. They don't do a "trial" but have a money back guarantee. I tried it and initially found that Hulu didnt work. I went to cancel, and a very helpful person wrote me to ask why -- I told them about Hulu and they gave me a custom VPN setting to use which has been rock solid since mid-December. Have been able to use both Hulu and Netflix since.

[Kryspy]

Check out tvgorge.com, a Hulu tye site which is accessible by us Canucks.

Kryspy

[SteveW]

Originally Posted by Kryspy

Check out tvgorge.com, a Hulu tye site which is accessible by us Canucks.

Kryspy

Interesting! The question is - any way to get it into Sage?

[c5davey]

That sounds cool. The only question I have is do I have to jailbreak my iPhone to use GV Mobile & Skype?

[Helheim]

Did you have any issues with the SageTV PlayOn plugin? When the VPN is running it can't find PlayOn with it off it can, the Xbox360 can see it off or on.

Thanks

[Sector7g]

Originally Posted by Kryspy

Check out tvgorge.com, a Hulu tye site which is accessible by us Canucks.

Kryspy

maybe im missing something, but i see a link to watch episodes on amazon VOD and satellite VOD

Originally Posted by SteveW

Interesting! The question is - any way to get it into Sage?

I think in sage7 there is a way to add web feeds via source setup, but i haven't tried it yet.

[soul_stalker]

This sounds great but I have a few questions..

Is ALL your internet traffic routed through the VPN? I pay alot of money for my excellent connection and I use ALOT of bandwidth.. although I would love to access all the online television content I dont want to bottle neck all my other internet use through the VPN. Can I specify certain traffic be routed through the VPN like anything from my HTPC but not my other PCs? Or do you need to turn it on and off as needed?

[wayner]

I have wondered the same thing as soul stalker. I have five extenders and I am assuming that they have to be on the VPN as well, not just your server. That would make things a bit trickier.

Is there any way you could just route calls to certain sites, like Hulu and Netflix, to the VPN and keep everything else as it always was?

[plawlor]

Originally Posted by soul_stalker

This sounds great but I have a few questions..

Is ALL your internet traffic routed through the VPN? I pay alot of money for my excellent connection and I use ALOT of bandwidth.. although I would love to access all the online television content I dont want to bottle neck all my other internet use through the VPN. Can I specify certain traffic be routed through the VPN like anything from my HTPC but not my other PCs? Or do you need to turn it on and off as needed?

Guys,

I've been using PlayOn and StrongVPN for about 6 months now. When I originally set it up, I had two choices:

1) Connect to the VPN at the Router -- All my Internet traffic would route through the VPN. This greatly impacted my normal Internet access, so I moved away from this.

2) Connect the PlayOn Server to the VPN -- Originally, I had PlayOn installed on my Sage Server. When I connected this to the VPN, my PlaceShifter connection (when I'm on the road) was terrible. I've since moved PlayOn onto its own server.

So with option #2, only PlayOn uses the VPN. Everything else uses my normal Internet connection. This works great as long as you startup the server in the right sequence, which is:
- Connect to VPN and wait to allow connection to fully initialize
- Start the Mediamail (PlayOn) service

If the VPN connection drops (rarely), you need to shutdown Mediamail, reconnect, then restart the service.

My Sage Server, clients, and extenders are all on my normal network and are not conncted to the VPN, but are all able to see the PlayOn service fine. I assume that only the Sage Server really needs to see it, however. My PlayOn Server is a Windows 7 Professional box. When you go into Connections Manager, it is maintaining two connections once the VPN is connected: 1) LAN Access using my own private IP; and 2) WAN Access through the VPN and it's DHCP-assigned IP. As long as you allow your Sage Server to see the PlayOn Server via your internal, private IP, you'll be okay.

Hope this helps.

[vikingisson]

The best setup is a VPN client at the edge router/firewall with routes over VPN for only specific destinations. I've used Mikrotik routers for this and Linksys WRT54G routers with custom firmware. Using "Openvpn" makes it all automatic, the routes as configured just happen and the rest go over the regular netz. I use a cheap VPS and run OpenVPN there, the routes are pushed to the client when it connects.

Having said that you might find that Hulu is very tricky and is hard to find the exact routes to make. It's a cat and mouse game. Pandora on the other hand is easy and in fact I can run it on my smartphone. It just works when on my home WiFI or when outside I just tap the openvpn client on the phone.

[wayner]

How exactly do you do this? Do you have to set up a second router that is inside your regular router to act as the router for all traffic that you want to go through the VPN?

Or can you set up a "mapping table" (I don't know if that is the correct term) that would route traffic that is going to Hulu, Netflix, etc. through the VPN but would not affect all other traffic.

[vikingisson]

If your router can run a VPN then that's the best way, if not then a second router or pc capable of routing can do it but then you have to build a set of static route rules. If your router can't run a VPN then the easiest is to just run a VPN client on the sagetv server.

Before I put VPN on the router I just ran one at the sagetv server and it worked great. I prefer OpenVPN because I can do all of the tweaks at the server end and the routes are pushed to the client which makes it easy to run clients on a laptop and smartphone.

The specifics can get a bit technical so depends on what you have.

[vikingisson]

that works because you're routing *all* of your internet traffic via the VPN. I prefer to be more selective in what goes over the VPN. Here's a gotcha, get connected and test hulu, then test netflix.ca (the Canadian version of course). Betcha it tells you it is only for Canadians, the catch-22. Or your local ISP's SMTP server if you have to use one. etc.
But that kind of VPN is dead simple to setup, just not flexible enough.

[wayner]

That's what I thought - I haven't decided to go this route yet but if I do then I don't think I want to route all of my internet traffic through the VPN for various reasons. But I don't mind throwing another router in the mix if I do so.

[vikingisson]

seems that the post above mine has been removed. Maybe he was spaming for the vpn service. Makes my reply look a bit silly but it referred to a specific vpn service that routes all of your netz.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by vikingisson

seems that the post above mine has been removed. Maybe he was spaming for the vpn service. Makes my reply look a bit silly but it referred to a specific vpn service that routes all of your netz.

It sure smelled like an advertising spam to me!

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by vikingisson

seems that the post above mine has been removed. Maybe he was spaming for the vpn service. Makes my reply look a bit silly but it referred to a specific vpn service that routes all of your netz.

Yes, it was removed. There have been a lot of spammers posting in this topic. So, I'm a tad bit leery of any new user posting a link to a VPN service as their first post here; if he's legit, he can come back to talk about something else.

- Andy

[herrdude]

When I run playon with Canadian Netflix, it works beautifully. However, when I run the connection to the VPN in order to watch American Netflix, I get the dreaded: "The requested media file was not found on the server". But when I watch American Netflix through the internet browser it works. Everything else works: hulu, mtv, espn, late night swim, and so on...

Basically with regards to US Netflix, SageTV and VPN aren't playing nicely...

Any ideas?

[Opus4]

Sorry, but I'm tired of removing spammers from this topic every other day. Since it is such a spam magnet, this topic is now closed.

- Andy