Accessing BBC iPlayer from abroad: (In text for now, will switch to HTML when I get a chance. Just wanted to write this up quickly) Ok, I can tell you how to do this but first of all let me remind you that you need to pay a UK TV license for this to even have a chance of being legal. That said, many people who are UK TV license payers are abroad for a number of reasons, holiday, work trip, etc. If you are one of those people then this might help you. If not or perhaps even if you based on the UK (just not now) it is quite possible you will be breaking the law. Spend some time considering this before you continue. I am uncertain because laws are different in different countries and am not a lawyer in any country! I don't know if you will be breaking laws. My current guess is that this will be legal for some people, hence why I provide the instructions but I'll admit I could be wrong. You need to work the legality for yourself. If you want to know for certain ask a lawyer, otherwise don't follow these instructions. I accept no liability at all! If you are satisfied that this is legal you also need to bear in mind that whilst I start out with the easy stuff, some of the following methods are relatively complex for the average computer user and I am only going to very briefly skim over these methods. If I was to explain every single step in detail then this small article would easily become a book. Also most of the key bits you need to know can be found on the internet with a little searching. Most people just need a few pointers of where to start. That is ALL this article is, nothing more. Ok firstly consider how the BBC knows you are abroad. The key is your IP address. If you want to know more about Geolocation ustilising IP addresses there are plenty of articles on the web but it is not really necessary to know much for the purposes of this article. Suffice to say every computer on the internet has an IP address and these addresses give the BBC an idea of where you are located. To get BBC iPlayer content from abroad you therefore need to have a UK IP address (or know someone who can help you that does have one [i.e. someone already in the UK]). If you do know someone in the UK then you might find the easiest way to get around this is simply to ask that person to download the show you want to watch and find some way to send it to you. Some of the slightly more technical people reading this might be thinking, but content downloaded from iPlayer can't be copied from one machine to another because of DRM (Digital Rights Management). True ... but only of you use the BBC official downloader! There are others such as these: http://po-ru.com/projects/iplayer-downloader/ http://fader.co.uk/post/iPlayer-Grabber-the-iPlayer-downloader-for-Mac-OS-X.aspx http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer/ (Note: This is by no means a complete list) If you want to understand how those work, then read the following: http://beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/IPhone_H.264_version If this method isn't good for you because you don't want to be reliant on someone else to do the downloading, or because the person downloading for you doesn't have an easy way to send you the files (or indeed any other reason) then read on. Ok, if you are not going to get someone else to download for you then you are going to need some form of UK Proxy server. Basically a proxy server handles a request on your behalf (a more complete explanation can be found by searching for Proxy server on Wikipedia or a similar site). A proxy server that is UK based will have a UK address, therefore if you connect via this it will appear to the BBC that you are UK based, as your request will appear to come from that server rather than your own machine. With a bit of searching on your favourite search engine you can find free UK based proxy servers. However they tend to only be available for short periods of time due to the fact that people use them for things like iPlayer and this consumes a large amount of bandwidth, that the owner of the proxy server must pay for. Alternatively you can find providers that allow you to pay for access to a UK based proxy service. these are likely to be more reliable. Search around and read some reviews. Once you have a UK proxy you will need to set it up so that your browser uses it to connect to the BBC website. I'm not going to explain how to do that here as there are many articles on the internet that do a better job of that than I could. As I hinted at above, this article is mainly to give you some pointers in the right direction and to consider some of the alternatives to standard proxy (paid or free). Finally, you can create your own proxy service if you have access to a machine in the UK. Note, if it is your own machine you might consider installing proxy software (e.g. privoxy). Personally I would consider this overly complex (just to access iPlayer) and there are security implications, so I will skip over this option. Your best option (in my opinion) is to connect to the machine via ssh. SSH stands for 'secure shell' and it is a method for accessing machines remotely in a secure fashion. Modern Macs, Linux and UNIX machines all allow ssh connections to be enabled easily. However, you need to have the Mac, Linux or UNIX machine directly connected to the internet with a Static IP address or domain name, and with a strong password for the login account. If this doesn't make any sense or is beyond you right now, you will either have to spend some time investigating on the internet (I'm not going to go into detail here) or skip doing on this on your own UK based PC. There are other options anyway. Any UK machine with ssh enabled that you have an account on and is publically accessable from the internet will do. This could be a technically minded friend or family member's computer that you have an account on, a UK based University/Work machine, UK VPS or regular hosting account (with shell access) or a UK shell account. The last three otions are services that can be bought (VPS hosting, a regular hosting account [with shell access] or a UK shell account). The UK shell account likely to be the cheapest. Again if you are paying for a service search around and look for reviews. Remember the most important bit for you is that you have shell access via ssh. The easiest way to use your ssh is with Dynamic Port forwarding (a.k.a. SOCKS proxy emulation). I have written about this before for a different reason. However my old article still serves as a quick summary for how this works. You can find it here: http://www.panix.com/~ruari/censorship.html Note: That article lists Panix as a shell account provider, however they would not be useful for accessing iPlayer as they are U.S. based and hence have a U.S. IP address, rather than a U.K. one. There are reasons that you might not want to use SOCKS proxy emulation to access iPlayer. Examples could be that your favoured browser does not support SOCKS (e.g. Opera), or that you might want to use one of the downloader programs listed at the start of this tutorial to download copies or your favourite shows for viewing later, rather than watching streamed in real time. In cases like these your ssh access to a UK machine give you other options. You could just use regular port forwarding, i.e. from the machine you are on connect to the UK based machine as follows: ssh -N -L 80:www.bbc.co.uk:80 [remote server] (Note: On Windows use Putty as this provides port forwarding options over ssh, see my censorship link) Next edit your hosts file ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file ) and enter the following on a new line: 127.0.0.1 www.bbc.co.uk Now start your browser (or downloader application) and use iPlayer normally. When you have finished, disconnect your remote ssh connection and change your hosts file back to how it was (or you won't be able to access www.bbc.co.uk). If you use the iplayer-downloader (iplayer-dl) or programs based on it (e.g. iPlayer Grabber on the Mac) you customise it to avoid having to constantly switch your hosts file back and forth. Within iplayer-dl's installation there is a directory (folder) called lib/iplayer with files that can be edited. Change all 'www.bbc.co.uk' references in downloader.rb, metadata.rb and subtitles.rb to 'localhost:9999'. Then prior to running iplayer-dl, start up your ssh connection first as follows: ssh -N -L 9999:www.bbc.co.uk:80 [remote server] Where exactly these are located will vary depening on which (iplayer-dl based) program you use. I'll give you one example using iPlayer Grabber as I have looked into it. You will need to locate the files yourself on other variants of iplayer-dl. On your Mac with 'iPlayer Grabber' installed navigate into the application bundle by right-clicking on the 'iPlayer Grabber.app' and choosing 'Show Package Contents', then navigate with the Finder through to the 'Contents/Resources/lib/iplayer' directory. (Alternatively with the command line you could do the following '$ cd /Applications/iPlayer\ Grabber.app/Contents/Resources/lib/iplayer' [assuming iPlayer Grabber is in the Applications folder].) One final method for those with ssh access would be to get a copy of the original iplayer-dl script from po-ru.com (see above) and place it on the remote machine. You can then connect to this remote machine via ssh and then run the ruby script directly if you don't have root/admin access to install (use 'ruby -Ilib bin/iplayer-dl [Program ID or URL]'). Remember This must be run from the appropriate directory or the command must be altered accordingly. After the show has downloaded to the remote machine use a file transfer method (e.g. scp, sftp, ftp, http, etc.) to download to your local machine. Ok, that is it. Hope it is of help to someone! ;)