406 Not Acceptable

Sadly for those of us not in America, we cannot watch the streams provided on Hulu and these other sites. So how do we watch Hulu from the UK, Canada, or anywhere outside of the US? We have to use a SSH Tunnel and some other software to trick Hulu into thinking we are from America.. Otherwise we have to wait for the latest episodes of Family Guy or American Dad to finally get relased in our respective countries… Now you may think that it would be easy to simply set up a connection to a proxy server in the United States and trick Hulu into believeing you are in America. This is not the best solution! First, you will find free proxy servers to be slow and unreliable; plus, even if you do find a working proxy, you will not be able to watch the videos on Hulu or One Piece Official, due to the way flash works.

So you are left with two options: purchase or set up a VPN connection on your own webhost/VPS, or use putty to set up a SSH tunnel and ProxyCap to connect to server in America. Thankfully, for me anyway, my Linode is in the United States! Setting up a VPN connection is a lengthy process, you really want to avoid doing so at all costs; whilst a SSH tunnel requires very little work! For those of you without a server to connect to, finding a cheap VPN is your best option for streaming video from these sites.

What you will need to do is: set up a SSH tunnel to your US server, then instruct your web browser to connect via that tunnel. This will work like setting a proxy server, but pointing to localhost/127.0.0.1 (your own computer) Putty will then force all connections to Hulu to go through your US server, and will make it possible to watch Hulu/South Park/One Piece videos.

You should already have SSH on your webhost/server. Most shared web providers will allow SSH access with the same details you use for your FTP settings. This is because SSH is far more secure than FTP; so you should be using it already!

To set up the SSH tunnel, you will need to use a certain set of options in Putty:

This is from the SSH -> Tunnelling Menu

Once you have it set up like in the picture, press ‘add’ and the forwarded ports should state D8080 or D<your port>. Save your connection settings for later and connect to your site. Alternatively, you may use a command line tool like this:

ssh -D 8080 -p 22 -f -N exampleuser@exampleserver.com

In either case, you may use a different port than 8080.

Next in your browser, you need to change your connection settings to connect via a SOCKS proxy based at 127.0.0.1 using port 8080. The following picture shows the correct set up on Firefox:

This is how you set up Firefox for SSH tunneling

Now you are almost there! Check your connection works, if it doesn’t it is likely you have typed in the wrong port or have not connected to your server yet, both easy mistakes. You could use the FoxyProxy extension if you wish to set up some advanced rules (e.g. use the proxy only for Hulu.)

Now you may find you can now browse One Piece Official, which you could not before; this is because you now have an American IP. Check it out on any of the hundreds of ‘what is my ip’ clones. Yet, don’t bother trying the watch any of the videos on Hulu yet, there is still one step to go! This is because Flash does not respect your browser’s settings and just does what it wants, so tries to connect via your standard connection — effectively bypassing your proxy. You will need to get a copy of ProxyCap, they provide a free 30 day trial on their site. I am not sure if the trial is like WinRar’s infamous 30 days, or if you can simply redownload it. There is a FoxyProxy video helper, which supposedly does the same job; but I can not get it to work for me. If anyone has any tips, that would be a great free alternative.

Once ProxyCap is installed you need to edit the preferences to use your proxy, click the dotted square nto the right of the text ‘Manage your proxies’. Enter 127.0.0.1 and your port, as shown below:

Setting up our tunnel as a proxy

Next you need to update the rules to allow ProxyCap to deal with UDP, as follows:

The only change here is a tick on UDP

Now go check out Hulu and enjoy some TV!

For those of you who wish to use the BBC iPlayer this will work in the same manner, just get a UK based server