Streaming Netflix abroad?

January 28, 2014 8:23 AM

My family and I are going to be out of the country for the next month, and we'd really like to watch the new season of House of Cards when it premiers on Valentines day. Does anybody have any advice on how to do this? Right now, I'm planning to get a TP-LINK TL-MR3020 router, install OpenWRT (and OpenVPN?) on it to configure it to access a States-side VPN, and stream Netflix to a Chromecast in our hotel room. Will this work?

I've got some specific questions:

1. Will this setup (router + VPN + Chromecast) work?
2. Can anyone point me to instructions for setting up the router + VPN side of things?
3. Is there a better/simpler way to stream to the Chromecast?

Thanks!

posted by jacob to Technology (10 answers total)

Hola chrome extension won't work via Chromecast but will work via the browser.
posted by girlmightlive at 8:29 AM on January 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

It would be easier and cheaper to just buy a $10 a month VPN plan from any of numerous services that offer it, and connect to a US based server when you want to watch Netflix.
posted by COD at 9:04 AM on January 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

This sounds needlessly Byzantine and tedious. The House of Cards 2nd season episodes will be torrent-able within just a few minutes of being posted to Netflix. Why not just torrent the episodes to a laptop and then stream them to your Chromecast?
posted by killdevil at 9:15 AM on January 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: unblock-US works great. 5 bucks/month.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:24 AM on January 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

I use UnoTelly and I've been very happy with it.
posted by olinerd at 10:00 AM on January 28, 2014

Best answer: A couple notes on previous answers:

The last time I checked Hola Unblocker added an adware component that injects ads. Apparently that was a test and they've stopped, but it turned many people off to the extension.

A VPN pipe will tunnel all your traffic through a (most likely) smaller pipe. Good for security but could lead to video streaming quality downgrade.

A DNS-only region unlock solution is arguably better. Unblock-us, which humbold32 already suggested, or adfreetime, are the best known and rated ones.
posted by bluecore at 10:12 AM on January 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

An additional recommendation for adfreetime. I've been using them for a couple months now and they're great (and cheap!).
posted by Betelgeuse at 10:39 AM on January 28, 2014

Which country are you going to be in? Do you know for a fact that Netflix won't work for you in that country? In Canada we get different content on Netflix than in the US, and when I travel to the US I get the American content instead of the Canadian stuff, but House of Cards is available in both cases. I would expect any Netflix-produced shows to be available in all places that have Netflix.
posted by teg at 10:51 AM on January 28, 2014

Best answer: Second vote for unotelly. I live in Spain and I've tried various things over the last 5 years. VPN is unreliable. Speed is an issue, you need all the bandwidth you have. I've got unotelly running now for 3 months and works like a charm. It's much better than VPN access. Read up on their website about how it works to understand the difference between it and VPN.
posted by postergeist at 3:32 PM on January 28, 2014

the answer to this is probably going to depend on what country you are going to be in.

are you sure that the show will not premier on the same day in all countries that (officially) have netflix streaming?

i have not personally used unblock.us, but know many who have had great experiences with it when it comes to streaming (non-netflix category)
posted by knockoutking at 6:39 AM on January 29, 2014