Saturday, February 25, 2006
HOWTO stream The IT Crowd from outside the UK
Episode 6 of Channel 4 and Graham "Father Ted" Linehan's amazing, hilarious sysadmin sitcom went live yesterday, and as with the previous episodes, the show is available for download from C4's website.
Unfortunately, as with previous shows, Channel 4 has once again locked the show up with DRM, presented it only as streaming Windows files, and has used crude IP filtering to restrict playback to the UK only.
You can always circumvent this by just downloading the torrent that inevitably goes live within minutes of the show going up on the site -- no geographic restrictions and no DRM, thank you very much.
But if you'd prefer to stream it from Channel 4 with DRM (and if your computer will actually play it back) (mine won't!), and you're outside of the UK, Tian has written up a tremendous HOWTO explaining the best way to get the show online:
1. In Firefox, under Tools, select Options...Link (Thanks, Tian!)2. Under General, click on Connection Settings...
3. Type in "83.100.217.53" in HTTP Proxy field, "80" in Port field, and check Use this proxy server for all protocols.
4. Click OK to return to browser screen and enjoy the show.
Update: Messi sez, "please advise people to remove the HTTP proxy entry when they finished downloading the episode from C4. This unknown proxy may collect passwords and other stuff. Thanks!"
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:54:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
