Tuesday, 3 December 2013

Freesat on-demand ad blocking (4OD/ITV Player)

I recently switched from Sky to Freesat and was keen to retain the recording and on-demand features of the Sky+ box so I invested in a Humax HDR-1000S freesat+ with <free time>.

Last night the on-demand feature was tested to catch up on Homeland and to my dismay I was forced to watch 3 adverts at the start and up to 6 each break. When watching on the Sky platform there was 1 advert per a break tops and it was often too short to even bother skipping.

After packet sniffing using my MikroTik router I managed to locate the source of the adverts and successfully block them.

It was as simple as rejecting access to "ll.http.anno.channel4.com" by sending a TCP reset packet. Once this was done the adverts just skipped one after each other. You can also use the same technique for ITV Player by blocking "mp.adverts.itv.com" at the network level too.

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