There are some home comforts that make being away much easier.

One thing you may miss is your home TV viewing routine. We have a few shows that we like to watch and would be broadcast while we were away. These include Ski Sunday, The Christmas Lectures, University Challenge and of course Only Connect. If you have an HDMI cable then there are plenty of big screens to watch these and Netflix on.

Through the Hoops

The BBC don’t make this easy. Despite now forcing you to have a token account to watch iPlayer, there is no way to use this to watch from outside the UK. There are multiple hoops to jump through and if the TV tax was a normal subscription service (rather than a legal requirement for UK citizens) then I would have cancelled it long ago due to the technical deficiencies (the programming is however excellent).

Pi Player

The first hoop is to set up a VPN on your home internet connection, which I did using a Raspberry Pi. I may write a tech guide on how to do this (on my other blog) if people are interested. This is necessary because the BBC actively block the IP addresses of commercial VPN providers, which is frankly a dick move.

Thankfully we moved away from Virgin Media cable as our broadband provider with their pathetic upload speed, as that is typically the bottleneck. We are usually limited to the 8MB/s upload of our VDSL connection when we enable OpenVPN.

Keeping it on the Download

However, sometimes the LTE connection isn’t good enough to support streaming, or you may wish to download to watch later offline. The BBC don’t make this easy either, with no option to download over mobile data in the app (unlike Netflix). You will need to use a portable hotspot and download on another phone, tablet or laptop.

If you do download on a laptop then be careful with file history and other backup software. The iPlayer downloads app unthoughtfully saves partial downloads to your user profile, which will eat your disk space if you are not careful. Don’t update it either, as that can cause trouble.