TV for Laptops

Access your favourite music, videos, photos and even TV programmes online

Foreign travel can be fun, glamorous and exciting, but sometimes it’s more about sitting in a dull hotel room in the middle of nowhere on a cold, wet Wednesday evening.

If your hotel gives you access to a fast internet connection then you could pass the time by catching up with UK radio or TV – but what’s the best way to do it?

Your first approach should be to try the regular catch-up sites, such as iPlayer (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) or 4oD (www.channel4.com/programmes/4od). Normally they block IP addresses outside the UK, but this doesn’t always work. Radio in particular is generally available worldwide. If you’d like some familiar background music, or maybe you’re short on bandwidth, click the links at www.bbc.co.uk/radio, or a site like www.absoluteradio.co.uk, and it should work right away.

The BBC’s iPlayer is normally only available to viewers inside the UK.

If you absolutely must catch the latest Mock the Week and iPlayer won’t give you access, the simplest solution may be to find a free UK proxy server. Your traffic goes to the server, which then makes the connection to iPlayer. The proxy is UK-based, so iPlayer accepts it, then the TV stream is routed back to you.

The problem? The BBC knows about this, and has blocked many proxies already. Most of the rest are slow and unreliable, without the bandwidth to cope with TV watching.

But if you’d like to try anyway, browse sites such as www.proxy-list.co.uk, www.xroxy.com or www.freewebproxylist.com to see what options are currently available.

Television on the move

A more effective solution may be to use Tor (www.torproject.org), which is intended to help you browse the web anonymously, but also works well for our TV-watching purposes. You’ll need to install Tor, then configure it to use UK exit nodes.

Cherie Hurwitz has written a helpful blog post that explains exactly how you can do this
(www.hurwi.net/blog/?p=139), and WebTVUnleashed has a portable package that includes every software tool you’ll need to get the deed done (www.bit.ly/dzT350).

Tor can still be slow, though, so for decent performance we recommend paying for a commercial solution. There are plenty of choices. iPortal (www.iportal.me) is an effective VPN tool. It’s somewhat short on documentation, but you get a 24-hour trial, and even after that it’s only €5 a month. VPNUK (www.vpnuk.net) has more features, will work with just about any device you point at it, and is yours for £5.99 a month (no minimum contract).

WatchUKTV (www.watchuktv.co.uk) is cheap at £4.99 a month, with a free one-hour trial. If you don’t get on with any of these sites, ViewTVAbroad (www.viewtvabroad.com) also offers a free one-day trial, and while it’s a touch more expensive at £6.49 a month, it enables you to watch programmes from the USA as well as UK TV – which is a valuable extra benefit.

Let VLC take control of your media streaming

If you’re serious about viewing media on your laptop on a regular basis then you’ll need to download the open source VLC Media Player (available free of charge from www.videolan.org/vlc). Not only is this the fastest, most lightweight media player you’ll find, but it also has its codecs built in, so it plays just about everything – even files that are damaged or incomplete – without any hassle. It can handle DVDs, audio CDs, web streams, Flash video and much more besides. There are also various skins available to download so you can choose a look that suits your preferences.

1. Keep a local copy

If you want to keep a local copy of a streaming video file, VLC Media Player can usually help. First, though, you’ll need the URL of the media. This may be obvious in the link if it uses a streaming protocol such as ‘mms://’, ‘rtsp://’ or ‘rtp://’. Otherwise, play the file in Internet Explorer, right-click the display, select ‘Properties’ and copy the ‘Location’ address to the clipboard.

2. Choose a profile

Launch VLC Media Player, select ‘Media | Convert/Save’ and click the ‘Network’ tab. Then paste the Location address into the ‘Network URL’ box, check ‘Show more options’ and click ‘Convert/Save’. Now enter a name for the file that you’d like to save and check ‘Display the output’. Choose a profile that matches the type of video you want to create, and then click ‘Start’ to save it.

Access your media remotely

The ability to access UK TV from anywhere in the world can be extremely useful, unless you run into that all too common problem: the day when there’s absolutely nothing on. A more attractive alternative is to make your own media collection accessible via the web, courtesy of the free streaming package Orb (www.orb.com).

Use the free Orb utility to stream videos from your PC to your PlayStation 3.

Begin the process by choosing the files you’d like to share, including music, videos and photos. There’s no need to worry about file types or video codecs – Orb has the ability to stream anything you can play in Windows Media Player, as well as 3GP media (‘.3gp’, ‘.mov’ or ‘.qt’ files), Real Media files and all sorts more. But that’s not all – the program can even stream your webcam or TV broadcasts if you have an Orb-compatible TV tuner installed. Very cool. Once it’s set up, Orb can act as a media server, streaming your chosen files to PCs, games consoles such as the Xbox, PS3 or Wii, compatible mobile phones and more.

As long as you leave your PC turned on and connected to the internet when you leave the house, you’ll be able to stream your media via the Orb site. But don’t worry, because it’s also very secure. Access is password-protected and through a secure connection, and you don’t even need to open any new firewall ports, so the program is a very safe way to put your files online.

Start the computer from which you’ll be sharing your media, then point your browser at www.orb.com and follow the ‘Download’ link to grab a copy of the program. It runs on anything from Windows XP SP2 upwards, and there’s a version available for Mac OS X Intel 10.5 available as well. Run Orb and it will launch a wizard to walk you through the setup process. Click ‘Next’ to begin.

Enter your details and create an Orb account. Make sure your password is easy for you to remember, but impossible for anyone else to guess – the security of your files depends on it. Orb then displays the ‘Media Sources’ dialog, which contains the folders holding your music, videos and everything you want to share. Click the ‘+’ sign and add new folders if you’d like to share files in other locations. Click ‘Next’.

Orb will now index the contents of your Media Sources folders. Be patient – this process might take a while. Click ‘Next’ when it’s finished. Choose your country and click ‘Next’ to detect your TV tuner card (click ‘Skip’ if you don’t have one). Click ‘Close’ and a browser window should open at www.mycast.orb.com. Enter the username and password you’ve just created to log in to your account.

 Click ‘Add Channels’ on the right, then click ‘Recently added’ under ‘Audio’ and ‘Favourites’ under ‘Photo’, for example. This will add new channels to your Orb account, making these files available from your login page. Scroll through the list of channels and you’ll find that you can add much more to your page, including RSS feeds and even Google Gadgets. Experiment with these optional extras and add anything that you think looks interesting.

Now start your laptop, open a browser window, go to www.mycast.orb.com and log in. This is the view you’ll see remotely, even if you’re half a world away from your media collection. Click on an audio link and it will stream the track from your main PC, or click on a photo and you’ll be able to view it full-screen. Explore all the features and options on the homepage and think about what other things you’d like to be able to access on the move.

That’s a quick look at the basics of Orb, but there’s a whole lot more that you can do with it. To take things further, return to your main PC, click the ‘Help’ link and discover how to create playlists, which enable you to share specific documents, music or video files from one place. You can also configure Orb via the program’s control panel. Just right-click its system tray icon and click ‘Control Panel’ to further explore what’s on offer.