nbc is still awful at the olympics

10 Feb 2014

two years ago, i had trouble with nbc and the olympics finding a service called “tunlr”. well, nbc still sucks. so i was considering my options. one of them being, i wanted to use tunlr again. but instead of using tunlr, i wanted to make my own service to do something similar. using a vpn would make this easy, and if i cannot get it to work well, at least i have a vpn to use.

so, i found a neat guide that explained how to this. it is pretty clever and much simpler than what i imagined would be required.

running this one just one machine, instead of setting up a dns server, i just used my /etc/hosts file. everything worked as expected except a couple things.

the biggest obstacle was the fact that the sites i wanted to use used region locked cdn sources. typically, the cdn would not care where you are from, they are just serving content. so, making the website think you are local and giving you access to the cdn would mean not having to run the cdn stream through a vpn. but being region locked, this is not possible. so making my own tunlr clone would not benefit me at all.

i did get iplayer to work just fine, so maybe i can do a little more with that later on. i ended up just using the vpn as normal to watch cbc streams of the olympics this year.