If you've ever wanted to view a video on Youtube or any other video hosting website and received a "Video is unavailable" or "This video is not available in your country" message then this post is for you.
I personally don't understand why these kind of restrictions even exist but I suppose they are yet another symptom of an overly controlled internet.
The error messages that you get might differ from one page to another but this little Chrome/Firefox Addon should be able to help alleviate some of the annoyance.
In short how it works is simple, you install the addon, you open the video you want to see and click the button to select which country you want it to think you are in and after a quick refresh the video should be playing like a charm.
The way it does this is by making configurable VPN's available.
As the site itself says:
"The Hola Unblocker is a free, configurable VPN service, similar to many such services that exist on the Internet.
It is useful for seeing how a web site looks like from a certain geography, for overcoming government censorship (e.g. seeing Facebook from a country that blocks it), for overcoming your corporation's Internet site blocking, for seeing a site in its native language (e.g. seeing the Spanish news site as it appears to Spanish users), etc."
Privacy is a growing concern for a lot of people, including myself so I made sure to read their FAQ and as far as I can tell they do nothing funky that I don't want.
Some notable Questions from the FAQ:
Does Hola share any of my personal information with the rest of the Hola community?
No. Hola handles your HTTP requests exactly like HTTP web proxies do according to the HTTP RFC standards, and in a similar way to how ISPs do it in the normal course of your browsing. That also covers 'Cache:' public/private HTTP headers and the correct handling of them.
How can content owners make sure that a piece of content doesn't get cached by Hola?
If you are interested in learning more about the service and it's privacy policies I suggest you read on their website at Hola - Privacy
Easy: They can use HTTP's standard 'Cache-Control: private,no-store' in requests/responses, and Hola will not cache this information.
If you are interested in learning more about the service and it's privacy policies I suggest you read on their website at Hola - Privacy
Now for a quick guide on the setup.
For Chrome, browse to the Chrome Web store and download it or simply press this link:
For Firefox use the corresponding Addon repository.
After the installation you will be presented with a configuration page with a few services preloaded.
You can find other scripts on the net (https://www.facebook.com/HolaUnblockerScripts) but typically you can just press the button that Chrome/Firefox has added on any page and pick a country.
I've tested the service myself and I can say that I feel no delays and it bypasses both bbc and youtube content blocks with no problem.
I hope this will help other people with overcoming another a rather stupid problem.
(This Addon also allows for bypassing for certain corporate filters, use on your own volition at work!)
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