Does anyone know if purchasing a chromecast from America, will allow me to cast Hulu in the U.K. don't have the option to change my router settings, hope it's not a stupid question, just remember reading amazon U.S. selling them to the U.K., before they realised they were country specific

Short answer. No.

Longer answer.
The American and UK Chromecast sticks are basically identical. It is, as you suggest, IP addresses which determine if the streaming service will work.

Chromecast, as you also know, can not have any network settings changed, so you will have to do this in your router. If you can't do that you have the following options:

a) Buy a new router.
b) Buy a second, cheap router/wireless access point to sit in between your current router and the Chromecast, and modify this one.
c) Try to buy a really old US Chromecast which can be hacked (almost impossible).
d) Look for an alternative platform.

Here are some alternatives that can have the DNS servers changed directly.

a) Samsung Blu-Ray player. This has to be changed to a US Hub which is easy, but I am not sure which models have the Hulu app. I think the F-6500 will do the job - but I'd check this first. A UK model can be purchased.

b) Apple TV. Cheaper, smaller, and can easily be set to the US with Netflix, Hulu Plus, PBS and more. Network settings can easily be changed.

c) Wait until this comes out (and supports Hulu)

d) Connect a laptop to your TV.

Personally, I think (b) is the easiest if you can't access your router. The other advantage of the Apple TV is that it has a really cool back door that makes it easy to pay for Hulu Plus if you don't have a US credit card. Most other platforms require the US credit card. See the "Signing Up" tab here for instructions.

You will of course need a DNS service that supports Hulu Plus on this platform.

Hope all this helps.

Brilliant informative reply, thanks for all your help,

Option b gives a lot of flexibility, with little risk. I have a sky router which I could not change dns settings. Git round this by insatlling second router,

I set up a new gigabit router lan from sky to wan of new router. My internal network really motors now. Can be a bit tricky having two firewalls - but port forwarding solves most problems.

If you choose this route make sure new router can set up static ip routes to bypass chromecast dns settings.

Indeed a great answer to a question that's really pis...g people off.

It seems that Hola, and paid for VPN's are trying to get around Google's hard codding of their Chromecast by giving different DNS e.g. Hola Primary DNS is "8.8.8.8" and the Secondary DNS as "8.8.4.4" I've tried that but with little success. I live in the UK and while useing these DNS's I have no difficulty watching American Netflix on my devices but try to 'Cast' them and you're hit with the error message!

Services like Unblockus suggest adding in iptables commands such as iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 8.8.8.8 -j DNAT --to-destination 208.122.23.22
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 8.8.4.4 -j DNAT --to-destination 208.122.23.23
but to be honest I have't a clue what that means or even if my Netgear DG834G can take these things!!

My thinking at the moment is to wait and see what happens at the next Chromecast update. There seems to be such an uproar on the net about it that I think they are going to have to do something, especially if Google want to have a major stake in the hardware market.

The rumoured Firefox dongle would seem to be a possibility (Im a great Firefox fan), but is their dongle only a rumour?

Two routers - for me No at least not at the moment. I don't think I'd know how to set them up to work with each other. My tech skill are limited to say the least

Anyway that's my two-pence worth

Kevin

You do realise it's like that quite deliberately to stop the likes of Hola, no?

Of course. But I'm also thinking that Google is interested in getting into the Hardware side of the business and if the piss people off with Chromecast well maybe the punter will think twice about buying Google in future.

More likely that all devices that get legit services will mandate the Chromecast model in future.

Actually, it's not.

Google have openly stated that the main reason was due to them wanting to keep the Chromecast as simple as absolutely possible. They didn't want to include any complicated settings, and this includes Network settings.

When some people complained that not being able to choose DNS servers was causing issues, they compromised by allowing any non-Google DNS servers to be used as long as they were reached first. This was not possible before.

There is no reason why Google would want to stop DNS services from unblocking content, especially since their competition doesn't block this. With the exception of Roku boxes (which also have very limited network settings), most other set-top-boxes allow personal DNS servers to be used. The Apple TV, Android, iOS, Blu-Ray players, even Smart TVs where this would be most useful. A whole pile of new platforms, especially the gaming consoles such as the Xbox One and PS4 take this even a step further by not only allowing you to change your DNS servers, but also to mix and match apps from multiple countries onto your single smart hub - so you can have the BBC sitting right next to Hulu and both will work via Smart DNS.

So no, it is not Google's intention to block people from using DNS services to watch watch foreign television. After-all, Google doesn't seem to mind this on their Android devices.