Friday 26 December 2008

I pay my TV license

Therefore, I'll want to listen to 5 Live tomorrow lunch time, when I'm in France, but United play Stoke.

This is more a little for me, but could be useful for other expats :)

1. Create a Socks5 proxy:
ssh -D 9999 your.remote.host

2. Build the tsocks library

3. Create a tsocks.conf file:
server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 9999
server_type = 5

4. Launch a (simple) player with proxy support:
TSOCKS_CONF_FILE=`pwd`/tsocks.conf LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/libtsocks.so.1.8 mplayer -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/live/live.asx

Voila. See also Bug 505456.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Therefore, I'll want to listen to 5 Live tomorrow lunch time, when I'm in France, but United play Stoke."

The BBC TV Licence is for the UK so it's rather silly to complain while in France lmao

Bastien Nocera said...

How clever, TVLR. I pay a UK TV license, so I want to be able to watch UK TV wherever I could be. I don't see why you'd think it's silly to complain...

Anonymous said...

> I pay a UK TV license, so I want to be able to watch UK TV wherever I could be
That's your problem: a common but fairly obvious error. The two statements you made have no logical connection. Otherwise foreign visitors (who don't paya TV license fee) would not be allowed to watch UK TV.

Anonymous said...

You should be to run "tsocks mplayer ..." rather than setting LD_PRELOAD, etc. by hand.

Anonymous said...

The phrase "TV license" pains me greatly.

Anonymous said...

>Otherwise foreign visitors (who don't paya TV license fee) would not be allowed to watch UK TV.
That doesn't really make sense. The viewer doesn't have to pay the license, the person owning the receiver does. Even having your own television in a hotel doesn't count since it's highly likely your hotel is paying the fee for you. (unless you have a no-tv room in which case you'd be illegally watching TV if you brought your own there and managed to hook it up)

Anonymous said...

TV Licence = Stealth TAX

Why cant we buy TV`s that do not include BBC frequencies?

You have had your fun BBC now fix it by advertising like the rest of the channels have to. Does ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5 charge a stealth tax? NO.

Anonymous said...

RCR UK has some good comments about the TV Licence.

"Blogging Britain"

Bastien Nocera said...

Anon: Unlike you, I'm happy paying for the TV license, given the great wealth of information, and ad-free TV viewing I get from it.