NewInstance

I've never been a great TV watcher when I was in Italy. Here in Germany I don't watch TV also because I don't understand German. But sometime I miss some Italian news shows, like Anno Zero.
The public URLs are the followings:

RAI 1     mms://212.162.68.163/prodtvr1
RAI 2     mms://212.162.68.163/prodtvr2
RAI 3     mms://212.162.68.163/prodtvr3
RaiSport+ mms://212.162.68.163/raisport+

Unfortunately the Italian public television is not accessible from abroad: probably they check the IP address. So, to watch those channel you need to use a computer located in Italy.

But... if you have a Unix server hosted in Italy, port forwarding can do the trick:

$ sudo ssh username@yourserver.com -L 80:212.162.68.163:80 -Nv
$ vlc "mms://127.0.0.1/prodtvr1"
$ vlc "mms://127.0.0.1/prodtvr2"
$ vlc "mms://127.0.0.1/prodtvr3"
$ vlc "mms://127.0.0.1/raisport+"

The first command will ask for the password on your local computer, then the password to the destination server. The sudo is needed because you need to bind local port 80 to connect to destination address. And you can't bind port < 1024 without root privileges. The second command will launch vlc to watch RAI2.

Also, a nice thing to know if you have a running Unix and OpenSSH server, is that you can easily setup a Socks proxy to access the internet from that server.

ssh -C -D 1080 user@yourserver.com -Nv

This makes your local port 1080 to act as a Socks proxy server. On Firefox you can set it as socks proxy on localhost:1080

The option -N opens a non interactive shell, while the -v is used to display debugging messages on the console. You can remove the -v and add a & at the end of those commands to run them on background, as a daemon service.

The problem is that I have to consume precious bandwidth on my servers... so, if anybody knows a way to access Italian TV from abroad without needing to proxy like I am doing, please leave a comment. I already tried CoolStreaming and Yalp, but they don't work from abroad.

Links to read:
SSH Howto, on Ubuntu Community Documentation
Italian howto on a university wiki