Monday May 05, 2008
- All
- Linux
- Personal
- Sun
- Technology
Monday May 05, 2008
I stumbled onto something called Zattoo this past weekend http://www.zattoo.com
It is a P2P streaming Television service that uses a concept similar to BitTorrent to provide very high quality video to your desktop. It is cross platform - Windows, OSX and Linux/Unix, which is a major plus in my books (since I refuse to use that horrible disaster of an OS called Windows).
The program is quite easy to install (I installed in openSUSE10.3 and Kubuntu 8.04) and even easier to use. The interface is quick, clean and fast. The video being shown is live, not delayed (I compared it with common channels I also get via my DVB-T tuner). The quality is excellent.. not full digital like I get from my DVB-T tuner, but close enough. I had TVoverIP from my ISP for a while, and that was only about 50% the quality of the video feed from Zattoo... so a definite thumbs up for video quality.
There are limitations though... the biggest one is that the application uses geolocation to pin down where you are connecting from, and if you are connecting from an "unsupported" country, you're out of luck. Currently only a few western European countries are available. If you connect from a German ISP, you will only be able to get local German TV programs.... same if you connect from France, or the UK.. only local "allowed" programming.
The whole geolocation thing is probably good for the broadcasters, but it is a MAJOR pain for the viewers... the customers. The broadcasters are still stuck in a 1953 mentality, but the world has moved on. So many people are on the move, living in countries outside their country of birth... more so than ever before, and a service like this would be more than welcome if... for example... a UK citizen living in Portugal could watch English language Television from the UK. But on the surface, this is not possible... technically more than possible, but restricted for reasons the viewing public don't care about.
Anyway, a bit of a rant there... because I am one affected by the geolocation thing when I don't want to be. I want the BBC... I got used to the BBC when I lived in the Netherlands (I like to watch Doctor Who episodes for example), and it is not available where I live now in Germany. I "could" get it with Zattoo... but cannot since I am connecting from the wrong IP. Maybe it's time to investigate proxies in a little more detail....
The solution should be quite simple:
#1 Get a shared web hosting account from a UK provider. Insist that the IP address of the machines assigned be a UK one (.co.uk hostname) - like server45.hostwhatever.co.uk
#2 ask specifically for SSH access
#3 use SSH with SOCKS
See here to get the general idea
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy-forwarding-secure-browsing/
Now, I haven't tried it, and it will depends on wether that TV app can be run socksified
See also
http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/runsocks.html
Let me know if it works, and also let me know if you find any affordable UK hosting provider that meets the above criteria. :)
FC
PS: There's no real name in your blog. I tried to find who you are but couldn't get any real human being name from reading the blog. Is this "working as designed"?. ;-)
Kudos from down under. FC
Posted by Fernando on September 02, 2008 at 06:07 AM CEST #
That's an interesting solution. I will have to try it out... assuming I can fins a reasonably priced shared host in the UK that allows ssh and socks :-)
I've never added my "real name" to the blog. I'm old school... or something :-)
Posted by cdc on September 02, 2008 at 10:32 AM CEST #