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Comment by matthewrudy | Hacker News Reader

Until recently I could watch it using my VPN from Hong Kong, but recently they've been blocking access from VPNs.

I should set up my own VPN again, instead of using paid for services.

Edit: I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing, given I've never paid for a UK TV licence, but for official purposes I still live at my parents' house, who do pay.

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You could spin up a DigitalOcean droplet in the London region around once a week and use youtube-dl to download the bits you're interested in. Cost would be like $0.10 per month. You could even make a script that sets up an OpenVPN droplet and automatically tears it down, would still be very very cheap.

I ran openvpn on digital ocean before.

But then I wanted one in the UK sometimes, and in the US sometimes.

And then I tried to watch HKTV from Taiwan, so needed one in HK.

So I ended up with ExpressVPN.

But... let's see what happens this year. Especially with netflix!

If you set it up manually each time, sure, that won't work very well. But you should be able to automate that - create the config (CA and everything) once and then just spin up a droplet via the API, install the packages, copy and unpack the config. I don't think you'd need to customize more than the sever's IP address in the config.

I built something similar with sshuttle (way easier than OpenVPN) two years ago, it's at https://github.com/lorenzhs/instavpn but it uses the old DO API and is rather hacky. sshuttle also isn't very good for streaming.

I'll have a go! Thanks for the suggestion.

You need to get a better VPN my friend - mine still works!

Its expressvpn, and I just (accidentally) paid for another year.

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