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The BBC IPlayer is a flash based web application for watching BBC news or tv series, for example. International tv regulations limit the service to watch the player outside the UK, however it is still possible. How this is working I would like to show you now.

Prepare your FireFox

Every time when using proxys in FireFox, I prefer to setup different FireFox profiles using the FireFox profile manager. This helps to avoid using the proxyserver by accident, to use firefox with and without a proxy at the same time, or to change the settings quickly by opening an other profile. To open the firefox profile manager, we have to start FireFox with additional params.

Firefox Profilemanager

To do this you need to edit the preferences of your FireFox shortcut icon. Right click it and select preferences in the dropdown menu as well as on Linux as on Windows. Later on you need to add two start params to the command, related to the shortcut icon. The profilemanager param is required to start the profile manager, the no-remote params is required to be able to run more than one FireFox instance at the same time (you need at least two instances to work on two different profiles at the same time).  The exact names of the params differ on the different operating systems, but you will find help at the pages linked above. Using Linux “firefox %u -profilemanager -no-remote” should be working well. Using Windows "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P -no-remote" should be the correct command. Now you can start the profile-manager and create a new FireFox profile, which we will use for surfing with a proxy server. I do this to seperate my usual surfing from the proxy usage. I think it could be dangerous to send your logins and passwords to websites threw a proxy server, whose owner you do not trust.

Configuring a Proxy

To set up a Proxy use the following click path in your FireFox: “edit->preferences->network->settings”  like it is shown on the screenshot (sadly in German).

configure a proxy server in your FireFox browser

But before you can configure your proxy you need to know a proxy-ip which you can find on pages like this one. Proxy ips are mostly listed in this format: “94.76.202.146:3128″ the part before the colon is the proxy-ip, the number behind the colon is the proxy-port which you need to know as well. It is important here that you pick a fast but as well a UK-proxy. This means the Internet provider of the server must be traceable as a UK-provider. To see to which country your IP (if u use a proxy you are using it’s ip in the web), can be traced to, you can use the website wieistmeineip.de. The Proxy-Server used in the examples above worked perfectly in my tests.

Enjoy BBC IPlayer

Now its time to enjoy your BBC IPlayer from outside the UK watching e.g. series like “The trick of it” or the BBC News. When living in the UK you should not watch live-streams without having a TV-license for your computer.

Complementary information

It is possible to setup a proxyserver for online one website without the FireFox profile manager, by using the FireFox plugin FoxyProxy. It might be usefull to have a look at it.

Tags: Internet, Proxy, Webseiten

This entry was posted on Dienstag, April 27th, 2010 at 11:29 am and is filed under Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.