My first blog post in three years has been a crazy ride. It blew up all over the web, and I’m humbled. A big thanks to everyone from HackerNews, Reddit, and most recently YouTube. Really glad this helped a lot of you guys.
The biggest question I’ve had so far is “how can I get this to work on Windiows?”, and I am back to answer that. I’ve written a guide how to block the CDN IP ranges from the command prompt on Windows, so it should work on all versions (Windows 7, Windows XP, and others). That said, I run a Mac as my primary computer and I welcome any feedback from the Windows gurus out there.
Just like yesterday’s post, you will have blazingly fast Youtube streaming (and Twitch.tv) by running a few commands to reject certain IP addresses. Also, remember that this will cause the stream to take 1-2 seconds to start because of the IP block handling, but then you are greeted with a silky smooth, ultra fast experience.
Enough talking. Here’s what you need to do:
- Click the Start button, type “cmd”, and right click the icon to ‘Run As Administrator’ (Screenshot 1)
- You will likely see a UAC prompt, hit “Yes” (Screenshot 2)
- The command prompt window will open, this is where you will type in the commands to set your firewall rules (Screenshot 3)
- Enter the following command and hit Enter. If it works, you should see a big “OK”.
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="MITCHRIBARYTUBE" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
Rules can be easily removed too. Just get back into the command prompt in the same way and run this command, hit Enter again:
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="MITCHRIBARYTUBE"
Did this trick work for you? Let me know in the comments below, Windows users!
EDIT (Feb 27, 2013): I’ve updated the blog with a new add rule command that’s lets you use one line instead of two. Thanks to Darren for the tip!