Chromecast, Netflix and Unblock-US

Netflix has quite a bit of content which is not available in the US, as such having the ability to switch which region you stream Netflix opens up a whole lot more. The Unblock-US service makes switching regions very easy by simply choosing which region to stream from in the Unblock-US control panel. Moreflicks also makes it easy to search content and tells you what region program are available in.

Unfortunately my new Chromecast would not stream content from the regions I had set up Unblock-US for. It turns out the Chromecast ignores your DHCP assigned DNS settings and uses the Google public DNS servers (8.8.8.8 etc.)

I have successfully worked around this by modifying my IPTables rules to forward DNS requests from the Chromecast to the Unblock-US servers

 

$IPTABLES -A PREROUTING -t nat -s 192.168.10.40 -p udp -d 8.8.8.8 --dport 53 -j DNAT --to-destination 208.122.23.23
 $IPTABLES -A PREROUTING -t nat -s 192.168.10.40 -p udp -d 8.8.4.4 --dport 53 -j DNAT --to-destination 208.122.23.22

I’ve also heard reports that blocking outbound traffic to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 will force the Chromecast to revert back to using the DHCP configured DNS servers, this is likely the easier option for most users.

Enjoy!

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