Video streaming outside the US

Just wanted to check to see if any of the Empeg braintrust has ever noodled with streaming Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, etc... from outside the US and found a good solution.

I just arrived in Guadalajara yesterday, so I haven't even had a chance to unpack yet, but before I left the states I followed this tutorial to setup a geospoofing gateway (VPN) on a rPi I had laying around.

The author hints at selectively using the gateway to only direct specific traffic over the VPN. I'm further interested to see if anyone has figured out a way to direct only the Netflix or Amazon or Hulu handshake over the VPN, but once the video begins streaming, bypass it for better speeds and cheaper VPN service. Anyone have any experience with this?

John --

If you can make Amazon Prime streaming work for you in Mexico, I will gladly pay you to come to my house and set me up to do the same thing!

Really.

I suspect that it is possible, I just lack the technical knowledge and expertise to do it myself.

tanstaafl.

I'm sure I can do it. Just need to finish figuring out the most efficient way. I'd be happy to do it for the cost of the equipment (currently just a Raspberry Pi with a case, power cord and SD Card) and a cold Coke. Give me some time to get settled in and experiment a bit and we can sort out the details. I have to go back to the States in June for my sister-in-law's wedding, so if we aren't able to source the bits locally, I can pick them up then. According to Google, you're only 55 minutes from where I am in Bugambilias on the Southwest side of GDL

I've been meaning to ask: is there a reason why you don't just use a VPN service like IPVanish or Private Internet Access? These services offer just what you're looking for, without too much trouble. Cost isn't that bad either. Starting at about the cost of a Raspberry Pi per year. I've been using IPVanish to watch the US Netflix, and this has worked excellently for me. If you combine it with a DD-WRT or Tomato router, you can have it always route your traffic via the VPN service, effectively offering your favorite streaming service to any device connected to the router.

Sorry, I failed to mention that I'm using this with a Roku, so I have to have some sort of router in between that and the internet.

A commercial router running DD-WRT or Tomato is an option, but they've gotten crazy expensive these days. Gone are the times you could get a WRT54G for $50. I had the Raspberry Pi sitting in the drawer, so it was free. If I could find a decent router for about $50-$70 that would likely be a better option.

The challenge isn't getting a VPN to work...I've already done that. The challenge is to get just the handshake to route over the VPN and then once the streaming video starts, bypass the VPN to get full network speeds.

Not really...

tanstaafl.

I should rephrase. When the WRT54GL came out, it was a fairly up-to-date router. I guess that what I meant is that you can't get a modern router with the latest wireless standards for a similar price.

Ah. I can see why you would want to do that, but I don't think it would be necessary : the speeds I'm getting with IPVanish are *really* good. More than enough to stream two or three things simultaneously without any problem. (eg. normal speeds for my connection are 130 mbps down and 10 mbps up, with VPN enabled this is 70 mbps down and 8 mbps up ; in other words, not noticeable).

It's true, current routers are more expensive than a WRT54G was. I'm now using a Netgear R7000, which cost me about 150 euro. But I'm very happy with it ; it's been rock-stable for me.

So, sorry to steal the conversation, but given the Up/Downstream ratio, I would guess that is a home link, am I correct?

If so, I just want to say those speeds are unheard of here. My 30/3 Mbps (FTTC) data link is the best you can hope for in Italy, as far as home data links go.
Well, some small neighborhoods in three happy cities can enjoy 100/10, but that's about it.

I may be moving up to Belgium just for that.

Continuing the threadjack...



My FTTC is rated at 40/10; I just checked and I'm getting 36.96/9.24 Mbps. I could upgrade to 80/20, but it doesn't seem worth the extra cost.

I just ran a SpeedTest check (see photo). I have the fastest connection possible where I live, and when I talk to other people who don't buy the extra bandwidth that I have they are amazed at my speed.

This SpeedTest, run at 6am before other people on the line are up and using the bandwidth, is the fastest I have ever shown, the first time ever that I have exceeded or even reached the advertised capacity of 15/2.

130/10? In my dreams!

tanstaafl.

Are you using cable or DSL? Up to 3 to 4 years ago, those speeds were normal here also. Then cable switched to the docsis 3 standard and bam!
This speed is the fastest currently available in Belgium. In Holland there are now also providers that offer Fibre-to-the-home, at speeds of up to 512 mbps. And since it's fibre, that's both down AND up! No provider is Belgium currently offers that, though I've read they are working on it.

Nonetheless; needless to say I'm very happy with my internet speed!

Roger, can I ask you how much you're paying on it?

Because I have a "business" type of contract at home, I can have public, static IP address(es) - I am using one - and some supposedly better tech support. It's € 60 / month + 22% VAT.

A non-business contract would cost € 55 VAT included.

Unmetered 40/20 with a static IP address can be got for under £18 (including VAT) a month here in the UK. That is on top of the line rental, which is something like £15 a month.

80/20 can be had for a couple of £ more.

That is with FTTC, using BT's network. Sadly my two FTTC lines top out at 23/3 and 18/2, the downside of living somewhere nice and rural...

I can only get 14/1 here. I think cable may finally be faster, but the last time they claimed that, it wasn't. I dropped them because the speeds were almost as miserable as the customer service (one day my connection started dropping about 6 times a day, and after two weeks of me calling to find out what was going on and them saying 'nothing on our side' without even sending out a tech, I told them to piss off).

Remember that I'm on A&A. They're not the cheapest, though I'd argue that they are the best. So, numbers: it's £15 line rental (to BT), £35 for 40/10 FTTC (to A&A), A&A want £12 more for 80/20.

That's quite cheaper than here, especially considering the larger upstream. £33 = €46 at today's exchange rate.

Also, my FTTC performs somwehat inconsistently, ranging from 20 to 28 Mbps down, from 2 to 3 Mbps up-

One of my lines is an A&A one still, the other one, the one I was quoting figures for is PlusNet.

Cable. It's part of the basic Cable TV package. I have 75 channels, and in the past three years I have probably watched less than three hours of television. I could have the "Internet Only" package, but it costs about 40% more than the TV + Cable package for the same bandwidth.

Go figure.

tanstaafl.

Would I need such a router for setting up your streaming video idea? The reason I ask is that I have a spare WRT54G router sitting on top of my computer hutch.

tanstaafl.

It could be that the WRT54G has currently become too slow to route your internet connection efficiently, because the speed of that connection has increased a lot over the last couple of years. This surely is true in my case. If I were to still use a WRT54G, it would throttle my connection down.

If you mean it's too slow to route over WiFi, then yes. 802.11g is not good for streaming HD video. But a wired connection of 100Mbps would be perfectly fine for HD video (probably not 4K, though).

Thankfully, Doug, fully modern routers are really starting to come down in price. 802.11ac is the latest WiFi standard, and up until recently you couldn't get an ac router for under ~$200. Now there's this TP-Link router for $90. That will be more than enough for any amount of HD video in your home. It should even be enough for 4K video.

Yes, that, but also that even the wired connection (and especially the WAN port) has become too slow to route the traffic at the speed the internet provider is actually providing it to you. If I were to still use my D-Link DIR-655 router, which I liked very much, there's no way I would be able to do 130 mbps down with it.
You're right, that's still enough for HD streaming, but I really don't want my own equipment throttling my bandwidth.

Yes, it would be too little if you have a lot of bandwidth, but Doug won't have any problems with his incoming connection if he rarely gets to 15Mbps.

Here (Ottawa, Canada), we pay CAD$65/month for really good 60/10 over CATV lines. But there's now a 250/20/unlimited package available for CAD$100/month.

Gotta love progress.