Watching TV shows overseas

[dee]

So you all know I'm in the Middle East. Needless to say, most sites don't stream here. (I miss my Netflix!  ) Anyone have suggestions for European sites that are like Hulu or would have kids shows? Disney Jr Eu pretty much blows, and Alex is going thru Little Einstein withdrawals.

[r00]

Only thing I can think of is using a VPN tunnel to the states so Netflix sees a US IP address making the streaming requests.  You could probably sign up with someone with an annual fee (I am guessing around $50/year).  Check some middle eastern ex-pat forums.  I bet you could get a good service recommended to you.

[Goose]

I doubt streaming via VPN or a DNS-redirect is going to produce decent results with her being all the way across the planet.  Buffering and lag across atlantic and mediterranean undersea cables is probably going to be nasty as hell.  Personally, I'd just forgo streaming all together in a situation like this, and just go for torrents of things I wanted to watch.  At least that way when you're watching your show you know you're not going to be subject to intercontinental transmission glitches.

[r00]

The added latency doesnt make a difference with streaming video.  The video buffers what it needs to on the client end based on the transfer rate.  I VPN'd to Europe so I could watch Olympic events streamed on the BBC in real time and had no issues achieving HD quality.  Mpeg-4 720p only requires a 1 MBps connection speed which should be easily achievable globally if you aren't bottlenecked at your local ISP in my opinion.

But yeah, bittorrent is always the easiest way to go for planned watching.

[dee]

Just watched the "tutorial" on bittorrent. Is there anything I need to do to make my comp secure for that?

Streaming is a huge pain in the ass over here. Oman isn't as bad as KSA was, but our connection is so bad- "stuttering" is the only way I can describe it -that I can't even log into WoW because of the pauses in the connection. Youtube works most of the time. We do have streaming issues during the early evening hours. Alas, YouTube doesn't have the cartoons Alex likes.

Thank you guys

[Goose]

Just use uTorrent as your client software and you'll be fine in that respect.  You have to be more careful about what you end up downloading, rather than worrying about bittorrent itself.  Make sure you know exactly what you're downloading.  If you think you're downloading a TV show/season, make sure there's only video files in that torrent.  If the files are .exe files or some other crap, or the torrent says you have to download some oddball codec to make them work, **DON'T TRY TO USE THEM**.  Delete them immediately and find another torrent.  You can't get viruses just from normal video files.  You can get viruses from being tricked into running something that looks like a video file, but isn't.  So be wary, know what you're downloading and expecting, and you'll be fine.

[dee]

Thanks Goose, but apparently I'm 'tarded. I can't get it to work.