(2014-05-29, 00:27)exobuzz Wrote: You are comparing apples and oranges. I have no idea what unblock-us can and can't proxy but the website might use a different CDN, different meta-data source and so on. Same with the App.
It might be a device issue, but it could be related to geo-locking. Maybe a a UK based user can confirm whether it works on their Apple TV with XBMC, as I don't have that hardware to test.
Usually a VPN should work better than a proxy type service. Also for example I know that the BBC Live streams are geolocked on at the CDN level. When I'm out of the country I use a VPN.
Unblock-us is a simple DNS spoofer. It doesn't proxy at all. So, you still need to be able to reach the CDN with your source IP allowed. If you use an anonymous HTTP proxy, SOME of the CDNs (not all - not Akamai for example) appear not to check the source IP and in fact you are redirected to a pretty local store. What that means is that you proxy your request for the metadata to the Beeb, they reply with the list of CDNs and then RMTP flows local CDN->client based on DNS lookup of the CDN.
VPNs are horrible - all that extra header and latency and your quality soon goes down the river.
For the live streams the issue is more complex. If you use a PC to access iPlayer via an anonymous HTTP proxy, it all works, but this is because the content is NOT cached - it is delivered over HLS. But of course, HDS uses HTTP, so your HDS segments are delivered through your HTTP proxy just like regular HTTP traffic. Is that a good idea ? Absolutely NOT. HTTP proxies add delay, latency, etc, but then again, I'm just a simple Network Engineer who thinks you should use the correctly designed protocol (RTMP in this case) rather than shoe-horn everything over HTTP. But I digress.
So, my guess is that if the iPlayer plugin selected one of the HDS streams rather than the RTMP stream, it too would draw the live content via HTTP proxy. I think XBMC suport HDS now ?
At some point, it may be worth a quick hack to see if this is correct.
BTW, setting up your own HTTP anonymous proxy really is a piece of p**s (cake). A VPS in the UK with Squid and a few iptables rules to do NAT (iptables calls in masquerading...) and all if fine and dandy.
Next time you're out of the UK, try using an HTTP proxy instead of a VPN. Then, when the stream is playing, have a look at the netstat output - you may be VERY surprised at where your stream is actually coming from :-)