Dave.McLeod

Is anyone using a Slingbox? I'm looking at getting up setup on the father-in-laws Sky+HD box in the UK so we can watch Britsh TV once we move.

dave99

Its a good idea, the only downside is that most internet companies have restrictive download quotas, so you will need a pretty expensive package. One of the best is the iinet one with a 200gb quota thats the biggest I have ever seen here and has only just be brought out in the last month or so, not sure if its availiable everywhere though

freebo

I've got one, but didn't hook it up before we moved as we cancelled our Sky & neither of the parents have it. I do watch a lot of iPlayer here in Australia though, done via a vpn account, uses about 700Mb/h but I have 400Gb/month so so issues.

fish.01

I'm not sure that 200GB plans are the biggest or that new. TPG do unlimited for $59.99 or $29.99 if you bundle a home phone line: http://www.tpg.com.au/products_servi...cing/adsl2plus

Even IINet now do a Terrabyte plan (1000GB) for $99.95 if you bundle a home phone line: http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/plans.html

ozzieeagle

I'd suggest VPN is the way to go as well, as your not just restricted to Sky.... I would love to try a Slingbox out though. My father has Sky so I could hook into his account. Can you get most programs on Sky via the net "on demand" as catch up ?

BTW Freebo which VPN provider are you using. Every free trial I've used stutters and pauses. Are you definitely having no issue with yours ?

TPG now do unlimited accounts for 59 bucks per month... AAPT are close to unlimited as well at 1.1 Terrabytes. IInet have a 1 TB account as well. The other ISP's have to eventually follow.

I'm on the IInet naked 400 gb plan at 89 bucks per month.

freebo

I've been using (paid) hideipvpn for 3 months at $6 per month its much better value than my foxtel. Definitely have no issues with it, I run a proxy server (squid) on my Mac (well on my NAS now) and point my PS3 at it to play iplayer.

I watch all the F1 races on it at 3 hours a time, the apprentice etc - never had a connection problem and extremely rare pauses in playback, I'd say once every 8 hours of viewing, it does take a couple of mins to buffer & start playback. I did a speed test and am getting about 2mbps from it.

ozzieeagle

Yehp I'm going to try and make the leap.... There will be a lot of whinging in this household when I do though. So I have to make the whole thing use friendly... hence I have to go down the remote controlled acer revo path I reckon.

I'll give Hideipvpn a go....

Hmm my plan was to cancel Foxtel... Did you hang on to yours ?

freebo

I'm still in my contract period on foxtel but will scale the packages way down as early as poss.

I'm not familiar with the revo but the PS3 solution works OK and is fully remote controlled (via a logitech harmony one remote).

My view on hideipvpn was it was worth $6 to give it a go for the month, I didn't choose the automatic paypal sub & pay manually every month. Get it working on your PC first to test (for firefox foxyproxy is great for this, I use Chrome and Proxy Switchy).

HTH if you have any issues.

ozzieeagle

Yes should give that VPN a trial.... I just realised the following is probably the most user friendly way to go. I've already given Boxee a trial on my comp, works great, not quite as good as XBMC but a hell of a lot easer to set up,, All I have to do is plug it into the TV and away I go.... (May have to change over to a N rather than a G modem though)

http://www.dlink.com/boxee/more.html

Someone should set themselves up in business installing these alternatives. I reckon theres a massive market for this. Bit of clever marketing and Woosh... Should be a high take up of internet TV over the next 10 years, especially once people realise they dont have to have Cable/Sat TV.

Pity I aint got the guts to do it myself.... you never know the Post Office could come up with a Redundancy Package in the next 18 months or so

It's just that little bit too complicated for the average householder, so there is bound to be a fantastic market for World Wide no international barrier TV.

One thing I have realised, with these larger download limits from TPG/IInet etc is that people dont really need to download movies and store them for future use anymore... You can just get them on the day No need to have large amounts of storage dedicated to a video media library. You never know the Movie Companies may even see the writing on the wall and start charging 2 bucks for a 'streamed' movie.

Amazulu

I'm using Overplay VPN at the moment. I've had it for about 3 months and so far, so good. They have servers all round the world, so if one is slow you can connect via another country. I tend to only connect during the night as well.

Before I had Hideipvpn but had mixed results.

freebo

How much does that one cost? I'll give it a look if I ever have problems with hIPvpn - so far its all been good though.

Dave.McLeod

Hi Freebo...

What kind of NAS are you using as your host, I take you this is back in the UK? I was going to leave the slingbox at my parents house in Scotland, but also want to setup some form of a vpn/proxy tunnel so again were not restricted to Sky and can watch the likes of iplayer & itv player. Altough saying that Sky are releasing an on damand service soon to customers who have HD subscription and Sky internet, so hopefully that will be useful too. I'm looking to purchase a mac mini and just setup that up beside my TV and use it as a media server, so I don't have to get a cable TV package.

Interesting to hear other peoples experiences with VPN and proxy services.

I had a look at the whirlpool site and there seems a few choices. Has anyone had any issues getting a static IP from any of the providers?

Tellyaddict

If someone does set up this business I will be your first customer, fed up of paying Foxtel for the various packages that cover our viewing needs!!

arigold

just use a vpn

freebo

Hi Dave,
My NAS is a Netgear readynas but any NAS will do (got this one cheap and I love to do these configs as efficiently as possible), so long as its running Linux and you can install your own stuff on it. The NAS is sitting in my study in Sydney and is running a passthrough proxy to my VPN account in the UK. The proxy (squid) is just a bit of linux software which listens on a particular port & forwards traffic to the VPN server. Then the media client (PS3 in my case) is set up to proxy to the IP address of the NAS and the port its providing proxy services on.

I do it this way only because my NAS is always on and I don't need my PC (Mac in my case) to be on in order to watch iPlayer. This is needed simply because while the PS3 can be configured for a proxy/vpn it cant provide authentication information to one (login/password for the VPN account).

A much simpler way is to have a home cinema PC or laptop connected directly to your TV and have that pointed at your VPN account, but I already had the PS3 and NAS and find it useful to have a central always on proxy server, this way I can watch iplayer on any pc/mac/media client in the house, its also great for Spotify, which I stream to my home cinema amp for a free on demand jukebox of pretty much any track except the Beatles. The PS3 is a great media client and does a wonderful job of playing HD material, but there are several others which would work equally well.

I did muse about setting up a service to configure solutions like this for people, but the support calls would be a nightmare and I have a day job doing roughly this kind of thing for a financial institution (at least for now).

Now its all set up it "just works" and for anyone technical I can only recommend getting a NAS, as well as storing all my media centrally its a great backup server, proxy host and does all of my downloading automatically.

BTW, I didn't need a static IP for any of the above, to do certain inbound VOIP routing I use dyndns which is a more portable solution if I change ISP.