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Comment by texasbigdata | Hacker News Reader

Not the same. Only works at home

A road warrior VPN setup running on a Raspberry Pi 4 and placed in your home costs less than $50. There are 1000 reasons to have one anyway, and watching TV while traveling is also one of them. I know for a fact the Spectrum TV app works quite well under this setup.

You'd expect the average Joe to do all of this ?

The average Joe isn’t subscribed to YouTube TV in the first place, are they? They’re usually paying their cable/telco for TV service. (Which, as it happens, already comes these days with mobile wi-fi streaming of the same content via the provider’s apps.)

Not sure that's a given. Anecdotally, quite a few people on my friend circle hate cable and have YouTube TV for sports and a few minor things.

No data but I'd assume YouTube's biggest pull is people young enough to hate cable but old enough to use YouTube often and have $$ to pay for the convenience

I have an Amplifi device but never tried this Teleport thing which looks like a toggle-and-forget thing. Seems simple enough, I’ve seen regular Joes and Janes go to surprisingly more convoluted lengths to access content they feel entitled to.

https://help.amplifi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037903234-Tele...

Btw, some routers have built-in VPN—I think ASUS has it, for no particular discernible reason. For dynamic IPs, it also can ping a couple DynDNS providers.

Can't speak as to whether the performance of a router's hardware is enough for VPN together with two streams of video.

Do you have a good link that explains how to do this? I am very much interested in implementing that

This OpenVPN[0] setup works very well and uses certificates for auth. It's easy to use and you just need to set up port forwarding in your home network so you can dial in from remote.

These days all the cool kids are using WireGuard[1] though. I don't have a link to a handy installer and setup guide for that but they do exist.

Using a Pi 4 with gigabit ethernet makes a big difference over older Pi hardware.

[0] https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

[1] https://www.wireguard.com/

I see you commented below that you used OpenVPN for implementing this. I tried using a self-hosted Squid proxy with the Spectrum website, but was unsuccessful at getting it to work. I also tried routing the traffic over SOCKS5 (using ssh -D) and it still didn't work. This was a while ago, but I recall that the website was using Flash. I'm just assuming that the website was using Flash to do some local network checking outside of the tunneled traffic and that's why it didn't work, but I'm uncertain if that makes sense. Sounds like I should have tried a full traffic solution like a VPN...

Routing through where? If you put your proxy in the cloud then it definitely won't work as most providers block known cloud host IPs like AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. I placed my Raspberry Pi inside my home network so that when I'm traveling my traffic still appears to be coming from my home, which is what Spectrum and others are looking for to determine whether to show you the entire channel listing or just a small slice of available channels. If you're not showing a residential IP in their network then it doesn't matter what setup you use, it still won't work.

Uh yeah, sorry I didn't specify that I meant at my house, also on a raspberry pi as well FWIW.

Don't pretty much all cable providers have an on-the-go app now?

What do you mean by only works at home? I use Youtube Tv on my mobile and while traveling.

Likely they were referring to the "Spectrum is offering more channels for $45/month" bit.

Not an expert since I don't really watch cable TV, but it seems like Spectrum's app is available for iPhone too - so not just available from home.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spectrum-tv/id420455839

Sort of.

"you can enjoy up to 250 live TV channels and up to 30,000 On Demand TV shows and movies when you're connected to your Spectrum Internet WiFi network at home. Plus, when you're on the go, enjoy up to 150 live channels and up to 20,000 On Demand titles anywhere you have an internet connection"

TY for reading the fine print, sort of sounds right.

i left Spectrum for youtubetv for precisely this reason

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