Because I connect to the internet on my laptop by tethering my G1 phone to it, my internet sometimes gets lost and I have to reconnect. If this happens when I'm watching 4oD, the show will have to be restarted and I'll have to go through the 3 adverts at the start of the show. If I was far enough along, the 2nd set of 3 adverts would then also have to reload.
Being that this happened a few times I needed to find a fix to this problem. And I have...
The FAQ page on the 4oD site gives some advise to those people using Ad-blocking software and a way to check to see if they're having problems with it. What this also does, is provide some vital information that we need to easily block the ads from showing on the shows.
Some of you may be familiar with what a HOSTS file is. For those of you that aren't, it's your computers first point of call before it travels out to the internet to a DNS server to translate the URL you type into a set of numbers computers can communicate with. Think of it as a complex form of turning a phone number like 1-800-COLLECT into 1 800 265 5328
Essentially, what this would allow you to do is to tell your computer that when you type www.google.com for it to go to www.bing.com instead all the time. In this case however, we want to tell our computer to look at our own computer for the answer, yielding no result at all.
- Locate your hosts file (you will need to have administrator rights and change it from read-only)
- Windows - C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\
- Mac - /private/etc/hosts
- Add these 3 entries on new lines at the end of the file
- 127.0.0.1 s0.2mdn.net
- 127.0.0.1 realmedia.channel4.com
- 127.0.0.1 webstat.channel4.com
I've just finished watching all 6 episodes of The IT Crowd flawlessly with absolutely no adverts on it at all.
Sorry 4oD
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8 comments:
You sir, are a genius
This is no longer working, thanks anyway nice while it lasted.
Seems like they changed some things. I've updated the sites you need to block and it's working once again. Enjoy!
Hey Steve, looking at your solution I think there are problems if you have no cache and no cookies for 4od. I tried on a machine that is fresh to 4od and the video seems to hang without playing anything at all. Can you replicate this?
Awesome, thank you!
I have the same problem as Chris, the vid just hangs on loading with a clean cache. I've used the hosts file for a few things now and was getting quite excited when I read this... Any fix/info? Cheers.
Sorry mate doesn't work at all, maybe not a great solution...
I was able to edit the HOSTS file but when I try to play a video the player just says 'loading' and never plays it. Any ideas?
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