HI All
I find iPlayer very flaky on my PC which we use for Radio 4 throughout the house. It keeps dropping out "Sound of Silence" in the window or just flips to "STOP". Using Air Radio on my old iPOD Touch is much more reliable than iPlayer and rarely drops out.
For TV we use Private Internet Access which is very reliable and cheap (€39.95 for a year). It works very well on my iPAD Mini but is less good on Android. There is a small problem in that (in common with several other VPNs I have tried) it tends to stall after 1.5-2 hours and you need to switch off and on again. It has UK servers in London and Southampton. The point about the connection to UK is a good one and very significant in Cyprus where the "off island" link is heavily biased to business users and bandwidth is much reduced after about 5-6pm local time (7-8pm UK time). Since the realignment of the Astra satellites the footprint over Cyprus has been virtually eliminated and everyone is now using internet for TV which has increased the burden on the UK link considerably.
We also use Filmon in Cyprus where (for reasons I don't understand) it seems to perform better than the VPN and doesn't seem to slow the connection quite as much. You do have to remember to record programmes so you need a bit more planning than with iPlayer where you can get "catch up". There is also a system called UK TV in Cyprus (and maybe in France as well) where they record all incoming programmes and keep them for 14 days so you can pick up anything you want for up to 2 weeks from broadcast. It needs a special box (about €200 in Cyprus) and a sub of about €20-30 a month so is more expensive but I am told, by friends who use it, very reliable.
At least you don't need to pay a "licence fee" for internet TV in France so remember to check your Taxe Fonciere or Habitation (I can't offhand remember on which one TV is included) to make sure you aren't paying this (you do need it for a satellite dish).
subscribe to tvonholidays for £6 a month and you get BBC and ITV iplayers . Buy an HDMI cable, connect up your laptop/PC to the large screen TV and away you go.......
Yep, I concur with that - Strong VPN is a good, reliable service.
Peter, I am interested in using a VPN and always prefer a solution someone else "is actually using";
(much advice on this and other forums is well intended but often from people who have not actually "walked the walk") so you say you are using stongvpn. Would you recommend it?
Unlike most people, I don't watch tv but i love my films and have been recently castigated by Hadopi and threatened with a 2,000€ fine for downloading. So I need to find a solution which hides my IP address. I have used Stealthy but it slows things down and I am led to belive that a VPN is the only really safe way to do it.
Any comments most welcome;
Regards
geoff
I use iportal and it is excellent. You pay £50 a year and it allows you to watch any programs that have to have a UK ip address - BBC, ITV, Channel 4 etc
I use it on a laptop/pc but there is an app for tablets - perhaps they do need to "jailbreak" your ipad, whatever that means!
Anchorfree Hotspot Shield, Elite version, 25$ p.a. for 5 devices. Works a dream on my android and our laptops. Activate it before opening iPlayer use app as normal. Simples!
p.s. y you can also change your virtual location if you want to watch say US or Japanese television.
How fast is your internet connection? If you're having buffering problems it may be due to a slow connection. If that's the case, then no matter which way you access the material, you'll have problems actually seeing it. You'll need at the VERY LEAST a 4Mb connection for solid TV.
Checked out security kiss tunnel and it said
needed to ‘jailbreak’ my iPad…put the wind up a bit…
Security kiss ! Used since 2011, free or paying service, check it out.
Chris, - Strong have a permanent (24-hour) support service, normally operated by online 'chat'. For an iPad, you probably don't even need that, as you can download the StrongVPN App, which takes all the technical work away from you. After signing up, where you need to note your password (known as your "billing password"), you launch the App & give it your email address & password. After that, there's no more to it than clicking Connect. Much the same applies to Windows 7 & 8, though I never had any luck with a Vista machine. Galaxys, & Android machines in general, appear to be a little more tricky unless you're using (a) Android 4.0 or later; & (b) take the $85 p.a. OpenVPN package. If these apply, there seems to be an Android app as well on the Google Store. I haven't tried the Android version, but Strong's support is very knowledgeable should you get stuck, and if it's as good as the iPad app, you won't need it anyway.
I find that the Maidenhead UK server gives very good results from France, but your ISP may not be the same. (You have to choose the location to which you want to connect when you sign up. My recommendation would be to go for the OpenVPN service rather than the slightly cheaper PPTP or L2TP version. I appreciate that this is double-Dutch to most people, but these are just different ways of achieving the same thing.)
To slightly de-mystify things, I hope, a 'VPN' (Virtual Private Network) connection is a secure way to become apparently ('virtually') a part of a network that is not your own. Once a VPN connection to the UK is in place, you appear to be in the UK, so far as web servers, iPlayer & the like are concerned. If you want to be a real geek, you can test this by simply browsing to ipecho.net before and after connecting through the VPN. When not connected, you will be given your public Internet address (in France) which will change to a UK internet address once you're connected over the VPN.
Hi Chris,
Haven't looked at this, but Tor/Tor Browser might be of use to you. You can define the country for the exit points, so in this case you set up Tor to choose UK as the point of exit, which would then be seen by i-Player. Tor exists for many differents operating systems and also tablets. There is even a special Tor/Firefox combo available for download (I haven't looked for this or downloaded it, just read about it on the net).
NB : I haven't actually tried this, so your mileage might vary...
One thing that you might suffer from with Tor is latency, as you have no control over where the various connections to reach the final exit server are made, and these depend on the state of the network in any given country through which the data packets are routed.
Peter, this is really kind of you; the only trouble is, I use computers, but don't understand the technical language. If I go on to StrongVPN, will I find simplke instructions or will I get lost in the fog like with MediaHint or UnoTelly?
Chris - I have used a VPN from StrongVPN.com from all over the world and find it very reliable. I think I was paying US$50 per year for a link to the UK, though I've now upgraded to the $85 "OpenVPN" package, as I'm experimenting with a router-based solution. This works absolutely solidly for me, but I've had a good ADSL link for many years. With my recent upgrade to Fibre, it's even better. If you're getting lots of buffering, it may be just that your link is bad. Alternatively, your ISP (Internet Provider) may have poor links to the UK, and things would be better with a different ISP.
PS Although BBC i-Player sort of worked [long interruptions for buffering], ITV Player didn't want to play at all.
Hi Simon, I tried downloading unotelly but it was very clunky and didn't work well on my new Lenovo laptop; couldn't get it to work AT ALL on my wife's Samsung Galaxy tablet. What might I be doing wrong?
www.unotelly.com is a dns service , put the dns settings in your router and iplayer will work on any device in your house including smart TV's etc ....its a free trial then about 4 dollars a month ....worth every penny we have used it for years now
PS tried Mediahint; didn't like. Very difficult to navigate and very clunky. Doesn't seem to allow you to create a simple shortcut to the i-player.