how to watch hulu in europe?

June 19, 2009 2:44 PM

HULU voodoo... American but not in the US.

I am an American living in a Scandinavian country. I want to watch HULU and other region specific sites using PLEX with a mac mini. Is there something free or a relatively cheap proxy (fast!) I can use to get all the shows I want and ditch this crap Viasat?

I have seen previous questions and answers here. I have to add more...

Also, I will be traveling to the US soon. My folks have FIOS. COuld I set up a proxy there using an old computer? If so, how?

TIA!

posted by thedoctorpants to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I'm not a Mac person, but I've been using Hotspot Shield on a Windows, with decent and occasionally slow service. I'm not sure how good their Mac version is, but it's free.
posted by maudlin at 3:04 PM on June 19

We're currently in London and my husband logs into his American company and uses a VPN. We can watch Hulu that way. Unfortunately, I know next-to-nothing about computers so that's all the help I can give.
posted by cooker girl at 3:06 PM on June 19

I'd stay away from Hotspot Shield on the Mac. It was incredibly hard to uninstall, and it redirects ALL your traffic to their servers -- and as far as I could tell, there was no way to be selective and say "only do this when I visit HULU".

As for proxies, yeah, you are probably better off setting one up for yourself, if your folks have FIOS. In fact, I think you should be able to set up your own VPN, and log into a computer at your parents place. Of course, you want to be as careful as heck, since you would not want other people doing the same (eating up your parents BW and maybe costing them a bundle ...)

Problem is setting up your own proxy or VPN will force you to get your hands dirty. If you are comfortable with Linux/Unix/BSD, I'd suggest OpenBSD, since it is known to be one of the most secure OSs around (see this for example). As for Macs ... check this old link, which may be a good starting point.

Good luck!!
posted by TheyCallItPeace at 3:24 PM on June 19

I'm an American living in England and have an always-on proxy (i.e. ssh -D) through a Mac back home. It works quite well for every website I use *except* hulu. I don't get the "you can't watch because you're not in the USA" message, the video just fails to load. sigh
posted by crayz at 3:57 PM on June 19

Yeah, I'd stay away from HotSpot Shield on Mac, it adds ads to the top of every page you go to while it's on, and tries to redirect your Google searchs to their engine, and other similarly annoying things. Plus it's not fooling Hulu for me these days, so, pretty much useless.
posted by yellowbinder at 4:40 PM on June 19

A proxy won't work with Hulu. VPN will. I've tried both.
posted by oaf at 7:00 PM on June 19

I second crayz experience above. (Using firefox, putty, and foxyproxy). It worked for a short glorious while last summer, but it is over.
posted by whatzit at 12:52 AM on June 20

Adblocker seems to stop too much Hotspot shield contamination for me and I only turn it on when I want to watch US stuff.
posted by A189Nut at 8:08 AM on June 20

I just tried Hulu with Hotspot shield from the UK - worked fine.
posted by A189Nut at 8:12 AM on June 20

Laterally: All the shows you could ever need are on your favorite bit torrent tracker, often hours or minutes after their US showtimes.
posted by signal at 5:03 PM on June 20

You could use Freedur. It has both Windows and Mac versions. Here is a Freedur tutorial: Freedur – Anonymous proxy solution for Windows and Mac.
posted by aroman07 at 9:51 PM on June 20