This is going to be a little technical, but it shouldn’t be too bad. You can follow me on Twitter as @WISELEO.

By the end of this post, you will accomplish the following:

1. Watch flash content on one monitor full screen while work or tweet on another
2. Watch foreign country video content without being told “You can’t see this”
3. Split your Firefox browser into multiple sub-browsers
4. Add custom routing table entries to keep your local Twitter access quick and direct

Here is a sample of what we are trying to achieve

Pretty cool, isn’t it? I got BBC iPlayer on one screen displaying Spa 2010 Grand Prix and Formula 1 live timing, TweetChat, and Twhirl on the other. By the way, I am in USA.

Full screen flash patch

There is this really interesting tool called Ignoflash and you can download it at http://deve.loping.net/projects/ignoflash/. It corrects one annoying “feature” of Adobe flash player. If you have two or more monitors and ever tried to watch a video full screen while working on another monitor, you discovered that Flash player exits full screen mode as soon as you click.

1. Download the tool
2. Unzip it and launch the tool (if you use Vista or Windows 7, please run it as Administrator)
3. Click the down arrow on the drop-down box above the big “Browse” button (ignore it, you’ll never find these files manually) and select the line containing NPSWF32.dll (NP is Netscape Plugin)
4. If you do not have that line, you need to install Adobe Flash player from Firefox.
5. Ensure that Firefox is not running by checking in Task Manager and ending the process if necessary
6. Ensure the radio button points to Netscape and not ActiveX
7. Select at least “Ignore focus changes” and click Apply.
8. It will probably say failed to patch 10.0 but success patching 10.1. That’s normal.
9. Your Firefox is now patched. Start it up, go to Youtube, and test full screen video.
10. Optionally, feel free to patch your Chrome and IE flash players as well. The .OCX file needs to be set to ActiveX, the rest are all patched as Netscape.

Watch foreign country video content (USA, UK, China etc)

I use a service http://usaip.eu which provides me with custom VPN. They have US IP addresses, UK IP addresses, China IP addresses and so on. I’ve been using them for 2 years now and the service absolutely rocks.

You can test it in 7 minute increments with a free demo account user/pass demo.

Once you verify it works in either or both L2TP or PPTP mode, buy an account. It’s about $9.63 per month. The account takes about 5 minutes to activate.

Follow their instructions, and you should be able to access BBC content now. I recommend connecting to UK 2.

You need to be running on VPN for the rest of these instructions.

Fox Splitter / Split Browser for Firefox

This is a lovely little extension. It allows you to split your browser window into multiple sub-windows. And even then there is a trick that took me a while to figure out. You will find it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4287/

1. Install the extension
2. Restart Firefox
3. Open http://www.formula1.com/live_timing/live_timing_popup.html – register and login if necessary
4. Open another tab and open http://tweetchat.com/room/F1 – authenticate to Twitter to participate in #F1 chat
5. Right click on the and choose “Split to the left” – this is important as otherwise you’ll have “interesting” time trying to stack sub-frames properly on the left
6. Right click on the TweetChat tab and click New Tab
7. In the new tab, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/default.stm – we’ll use this tab for the new real-time car position window.
8. Right-click on the BBC F1 tab and choose split to the left
9. Now, right-click BBC F1 tab that is now next to the timing tab and choose Split to above.
10. Choose whatever the link is that says “Live – ____ Grand Prix”
11. You now have F1 Live Timing at the bottom, F1 live video at the top, and TweetChat to the right
12. I also keep a Twitter client Twhirl underneath my Firefox window, but that’s up to you.
13. Click File -> New Window and drag the new window to your other monitor
14. Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/default.stm and click the “Live – ____ Grand Prix” link
15. You might as well activate BBC One video full screen at this point and continue your setup on the other screen.
16. Choose the real-time driver position above living timing after the start and be sure to click mute on that feed.

Whew… That was a LOT of confusing clicking, wasn’t it? Imagine trying to figure it out the first time!

Final settings – custom routing table

Once you are up and running on VPN, every request goes through VPN, which can be ridiculously slow.

If you have XP, simply launch a command prompt

1. Click Start
2. Select Run
3. type CMD and click OK

If you have Vista or Windows 7, you will do some extra steps.

1. Click the start orb
2. In the “Search” portion of start menu, type CMD and wait a second
3. Right-click the CMD it finds and choose “Run as Administrator”
4. This will launch a command prompt with elevated privileges

What we want to do now is bypass VPN for our Twitter clients.

Let’s first find out what is our default gateway.

1. Go to our command prompt
2. Type “ROUTE PRINT” and press Enter
3. At the top you will see some entries similar to
   IPv4 Route Table
   ===========================================================================
   Active Routes:
   Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
   0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.1.1    192.168.1.136   4250
   0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0         On-link     172.31.46.181     26
4. See the 192.168.1.1 value after the first set of a couple sets of quad zeroes? Whatever that number is in your case should be what you use in the following commands. 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 are very common.
5. The following IP addresses correspond to various Twitter-related services so just run them as is.
6. What you want to see in response to entering your commands is “OK!” or something similar.
   C:\Windows\system32>route add 168.143.162.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
   OK!
7. Simply type these commands very carefully and press Enter to activate the new routes
8. route add 168.143.162.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
9. route add 70.86.182.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
10. route add 128.121.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.1.1

This configures your computer to use Twitter outside VPN so it’s going to be much faster.

Speaking of configuring TweetChat

1. After you login to http://tweetchat.com/room/F1 with your Twitter credentials, it becomes a fairly full-featured Twitter client
2. It automatically appends #F1 to the end of your tweets
3. Click refresh rate and set it to 5 sec
4. Click “toggle font” to fit more tweets on your screen
5. Reload the frame if it becomes too slow

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this article. Formula 1 is streamed without commercials online. You also have full access to all BBC content, such as the iPlayer.  After the race you can also watch the BBC Forum (Red Button) by simply waiting a few minutes after the race stream finishes.

If you are using VPN for security so your data can’t be intercepted while you are at an unsecured Wifi location such as Starbucks, please do not enter these route add commands to ensure that the entirety of your session is encrypted.