Sonos with VPN

Hoping the hivemind can help…

I’ve just got a Sonos, and was hoping that I could use my existing VPN/ DNS setup to listen to BBC radio stations through it (I’m outside the UK).

Sadly it’s not working; my PC and Roku still get the relevant regional content, but the Sonos seems to be bypassing the DNS redirect and so unable to get BBC. Anyone had this experience or any solutions?

Much appreciated!

Depending on which SONOS you have , can you play it in the usual way on the PC and use the aux in on the SONOS, choose the source on the Sonos app. It’s not cable free obvs. But you can still catch the Archers.

My Sonos works when I take it to France and connect it via France Telecom Orange wifi. I can get all the BBC radio stations on it just fine.

Hmmm… thank you. It’s a Play 1, so no aux in, although I’ve heard there are accessories that allow you to do something similar.

I’m still noodling around with the settings and router, so may stumble upon the answer, but for now it looks like Sonos bypasses any VPN/ DNS and so there’s no real way around region restrictions. Ah well, still a good bit of kit

Could you run the sonos off your phone or tablet using the sonos app and select the bbc stations from the tunein radio menu ?

Why would you use a VPN when you can use the “Radio by Tunein” service on Sonos to listen to the BBC stations? I use this and it’s fine (I’m also outside the UK).

The only BBC I can’t get normally is some sport which is not put online due to licensing/geo blocking. Rest seems fine.

Yea built in Radio stations the way to go.

As MWS says, it’s generally only sports (and TV) that need jiggery-pokery to get them to work overseas

Though as that jiggery-pokery is usually highly trivial, I really don’t know why they bother

The bbc radio stations, except for some sport on 5, aren’t region restricted so you shouldn’t need to do anything different to the UK.

The reason they bother is because the rights holders require it.

Yeah, the sport is what I’d love to get on there – you can’t beat waking up to a bit of TMS; the music stations are fine. I’ve got my router set up with a DNS service for UK TV content, but seems like the Sonos ignores that, sadly.

I was listening to tms during the ashes down here in Oz easy enough with no proxy. I couldn’t get the sa commentary from then thought. I know some stuff doesn’t go online at all so not just as straightforward.

The reason they bother is because the rights holders require it.

Alright. I don’t know why the rights holders bother.

MWS – if you yearn for more than just TMS and are happy to pay, the search for Unotelly. We now have access to pretty much any TV (or radio) service on the planet that’s free to air, and could presumably subscribe for things like sky sports if we really wanted to also. Works effortlessly.

It sounds like this may be similar to using a Chromecast with a VPN. There the issue is that the Chromecast is hard set to use Google’s DNS settings rather than your router’s settings. The way around this is to set a static route on the router to direct traffic destined for the google DNS server IP addresses to your router so it uses the router’s settings instead. To do this you need to know the IP addresses that the sonos is using for its DNS.

Hope this makes sense and helps?