Chromecast in Canada!

I am probably going to have one of the first Chromecast dongles in Canada unless someone ordered it with 1-day shipping or got it from a Best Buy across the border. I ordered it from Amazon with 2-day shipping to pick up in Point Roberts. I should have it by Friday or Saturday. I can report back as to how many region-related obstacles it throws up.

The first is getting the Chromecast setup apk as it's not available on CDN Play Store. Thanks to the helpful Dropbox link in this forum, I've got that covered.

If there is anything to note that CDN Chromecast users should be aware of, I will edit this first post on an ongoing basis.

EDIT: I have posted the Chromecast apk as of 2013/07/31 to the top post.

Summary:
- Everything works.
- If you have cloud music enabled on your Google Play Music it works.
- CDN Netflix works.
- YouTube works.
- Google Cast from Chrome desktop works. I do not have a powerful enough desktop to stream video but that is unrelated to region.
- If you connect your Android to a VPN or a DNS-changing service to try and access non-CDN Netflix, it will not cast titles unavailable in Canada to Chromecast successfully. Workarounds include either connecting your router itself to the VPN, or entering custom scripts into your router to redirect its hard-coded reliance on Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4).

Finally got my Chromecast here to do some actual setup and testing.

After much trial and error, and many PMs back and forth with comminus, I finally got U.S. Netflix to stream through the Chromecast. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work with the free service tunlr.net -- they work fine for setting up and watching US content on your PCs/tablets but for whatever reason I couldn't for the life of me get it to work with the Chromecast and IPTables. It *should* in principal be the same as Unblock-us (which I finally did test using the free 1 week trial), but for whatever reason the Chromecast would hang when I had the tunlr.net DNS servers in the IPTables.

Anyway, I'm using DD-WRT on my Netgear router. Here is how I set it up:

Step 1:
Under Services tab for DD-WRT set up a static IP for your Chromecast. This is to ensure it always has the same IP on your network so that your IPTables script will always reference it:



Step 2:
Go to Adminstration tab -> Commands subtab and run the following IPTables script (one at a time, for some reason when I try to run both commands at once it doesn't work. Note in my script the IP is the static IP I gave to my Chromecast, yours may be different.
The IPs of 208.122.23.22 and 208.122.23.23 are the Unblock-us DNS servers.

Enter each of the lines below and hit "Run Commands". I also optionally saved it as a Custom Script so I can go and manipulate it later




Step 3: (Optional)
Since Chromecast requires a phone/tablet or PC to be the remote, that device also has to have access to the same region of Netflix that the Chromecast content is coming from (in this case U.S.) You can either enter another IPTables rule like above, but change the IP address after -s to match whichever device you want to use OR you can use DNSMasq feature right in the router. This allows all your devices to use the unblock-us DNS servers for netflix.com only. Note in my screenshot I'm specifically saying "netflix.com" which means all my other devices will still use my normal DNS servers except when they go to netflix.com

This is located under Services tab, DNSMasq box:

ArclightX said:

So I guess I have 1 question and 1 request.

Q1. So I assume that the script entries from post #38 (the iptables ones) were the ones that won the day that allowed you to view US Netflix content through you Chromecast Device?

R1. Could we bother you CM to update your first post with the exact iptables commands that you added to your router so all the info is in one concise spot please?

Followup Q.
I suppose I just want to be clear that the only DNS traffic that gets re-routed are requests sent from the Chromecast device and not every DNS request made from every device on my LAN. Can we confirm this?


The final lesser Q is my personal situation. My home router is that new Asus RT-AC66U (beast of a router from all I can tell). I'm running the latest stock firmware. I was considering using custom firmware like Merlin however I haven't made the jump just yet. Still have a lot more reading to do.

Does anyone happen to know if this router supports entering these iptables commands/scripts?

Thanks!

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Simple question first.

The ASUS RT-AC66U does use iptables. You can configure additional rules without going to custom firmware (i.e. Merlin, DD-WRT) but the custom firmware is required to have the rules survive a reboot. As a side note, Merlin is the simpler of the two. You can enable telnet in the stock firmware on the Administration > System page (Advanced_System_Content.asp). You can then telnet to your router and authenticate using the same credentials as the web login.

In terms of how to set up the RT-AC66U (also the RT-N66U), the settings are entirely dependent on the result you wish to achieve. There are many ways to handle this so I'll describe a few scenarios. Note: the iptables rules below assume you're using the router's default 192.168.1.0/24 subnet.

1. Configure iptables to redirect all DNS queries on the LAN through the router.
2. Configure iptables to redirect DNS queries from a specific LAN IP address to a specific DNS server.
3. Configure iptables to redirect DNS queries from a specific LAN IP address, destined for a specific DNS server, to a specific DNS server.

Scenario 1:
The idea here is that you would manually configure your router to use the DNS provided by unblock-us, unotelly, tunlr, or other. All DNS requests , regardless of destination IP are handled by the router. This is the easiest to configure, but also the most heavy-handed imho.

Scenario 2:
In this example, we're only re-routing DNS requests from a specific IP. To make this work, you'll need to assign a static IP in the router using the device's MAC address.

Scenario 3:
This is almost exactly like scenario 2. The variation here is being explicit about re-routing traffic destined for one IP (one of Google's in this case) to another.

You can try any of these out on the stock firmware and test using your computer. Just set your computer to use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as DNS. Keep in mind that modern browsers perform some DNS caching so you may need to flush the cache to see the DNS re-routing work when testing on your computer.

Worked first try

Got mine up and running on the first try. Here are some instructions that I put together.

1,-Navigate to the DD-WRT website and download and install the firmware for you router. All the information to do this is on their website.
2,-Open router settings and set the Network Address Server Setings (DHCP) to the Unblockus DNS servers.(208.122.23.22, 208.122.23.23)
3,-Click on the administration tab and then the commands tab. Cut and paste the following commands into the window. Be sure to hit the save startup and save firewall buttons.

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 8.8.8.8 -j DNAT --to-destination 208.122.23.22
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 8.8.4.4 -j DNAT --to-destination 208.122.23.23

Cheers

Figured this out using comminus's nice steps. I'm using http://tunlr.net/ as my DNS provider.

I chose step 2 "Configure iptables to redirect DNS queries from a specific LAN IP address to a specific DNS server."


I am using DD-WRT, so I put this in "Administration->Commands" and saved it as a custom script. Only thing I need to do is to press "Run Commands" one time to activate it. Also to test it out on my PC, I had to clear the browser's DNS cache, so in Chrome you go to Settings->History and clear it.

Tested on the PC accessing Netflix, got U.S. content, then went to another PC with Netflix and saw only Canadian content. This works great! All I need to do now when I get my chromecast is alter the script to use the Chromecast IP that gets assigned on my network and I'll be good to go!!

Oh, should also mention, as per comminus's instructions I also set the IP I was using as a static IP so it would never change for the PC I'm testing from, I'll also do this for the Chromecast so it's always assigned the same IP.

Thanks guys!