406 Not Acceptable

If you, like me, live in Opal student accommodation or any student accommodation that uses Ask4 broadband, you will notice you can access freeview television through your web browser. This is a very nice addition; however, it seems they do not want us to connect via any other means than through our web-browsers. I personally found this restrictive, but there is a way around this. Using this setup will allow you to stream their IPTV to others (which I would not reccommend as Ask4 would not be happy,) or download the live TV broadcast to your computer. Effectively like setting up your own Tivo! Finally, you will be able to mess around with the settings of your media player to get better image quality, this is highly beneficial when watching sport as the IPTV stream is poor for fast moving images. I find watching Match of the Day to be rather difficult using their setup.

First you can try the ‘easy method’ I am not sure if it will work for everyone, or even anyone. It could just be down to the server cache that I am able to go this page that I like to call ‘The Magic TV Page’. Click that link please, and try it out. If you have gone to the normal page you need to use the second method, described below, otherwise you can skip the next paragraph.

Otherwise you need to install the User Agent Switcher for Firefox. Go to the portal page (where there is a link to the TV page.) Now set the Firefox plugin to use the option ‘Opera 9.2 Windows Vista.’ This will fool the server into thinking you are using an unsupported browser, so you will get access to what I like to call ‘The Magic TV Page’. Try going to the TV page and you should go to a page link that in the picture below:

You should now be at this page:

When you select a channel from the dropdown menu and select ‘Play’ the port will change, this is effectively sending a steam to your computer on the network. All you need to do now is set up a media player to do so. It is easiest to do so with VLC, which also provides methods for saving the stream; however, I have successfully watch TV using Totem and I would presume Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Media Player Classic would be able to do the same. You do need to keep this window open for the stream to be sent, that is the only drawback I know of so far; however, this will let you use all the fancy image and aspect ratio enhancements your player has. If you were to use Media Player Classic and FFDShow you could get a really good picture with this method.

 Here is how I set up VLC, you should use similar methods with all the players. Not all media players can handle streaming video of this type, I couldn’t set up MPlayer or Xine, but that might be my own inexperience with those players.VLC is just good as it is easy to save a stream to disk, which means you can record those programs you wanted to watch whilst revising…

I hope you found this tutorial useful, thats 406NotAcceptable 1 – 0 Ask4Broadband.

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