At home, I have a Sky Q set-top box for watching satellite tv. This box records tv programs so I can watch them later.
On my iPhone, I have the Sky Go app. As well as letting me watch live tv when I’m not at home, this app also lets me watch recorded programs - but I can only watch recorded programs when I’m at home, on my home WiFi.
I’d like to be able to watch recorded programs when I’m not at home. My thinking is that, if I set up a VPN at home, I can connect my iPhone to that VPN when I’m out, and then Sky Go will think it’s on the same network as the Sky Q box (in fact, it will be on the same network), so I’ll be able to watch recorded programs.
Does my plan seem reasonable?
And if so, can you point me towards a guide as to how to set this up, for someone with zero knowledge of networking? When I try to google this, I just get instructions for using a VPN for outbound connections (for security, or for overcoming geo-restrictions), which makes sense as that’s a far more common scenario, but I haven’t been able to find anything telling me how to start with the setup I’ve described.
I’m not sure if it’s important, but I’m in the UK, my ISP is Virgin Media, and my hub is a Virgin Media Hub 3.0
Raspberry pi with pivpn should do the job. Can also install pihole for network wide ad blocking at home and adblocking on the go
Yes, you’d need to set up VPN on your home network to allow VPN connections. Some prosumer routers will have the option, like Omada ER605. Or you can set it up on a Pi. It’ll be slow, but should be enough for streaming. I only get 25Mbps max connecting to my ER605 at home.
VPNs won’t work, people have tried in the past but I’ve never heard of anyone succeeding.
The Sky box is believed to do some communication at layer 2 to check devices are really on the same network, check it’s on the same subnet, and speculated to do things like check latency and TTL of packets.