Awesome p2p TV and Movie Streaming from China

Let me show you the latest killer software that has taken over all my media needs – I haven’t touched a single tv or movie torrent for months now, it’s so good. The software is called PPStream, but it’ll take a little work to get running and registered, and it’s not perfect. But if you need a reason to download, then let me just say “The A-Team”.

What PPStream is:

- An incredibly easy and fast way to stream popular tv shows (new and old), music videos, and movies; for free, from China.

The downsides:

- The interface is in Chinese and cannot be changed. However, if you memorize some key locations you really dont need to worry. I’ll show you where the important bits are.
- There is a 15 second flash based ad before most items play.
- Chinese subtitles on everything, of course. Stop reading now if this bothers you.
- The quality isn’t great. Most movies are DVD quality (I expect HD streaming soon), but TV shows are very much “TV-quality” and will ofcourse look pixelated unless played back through a TV (which will blur it).
- Searching for TV shows is easy because the name is written in english, but movie names are not. It’s easy enough to browse through the latest movies or by genre to just find something you like the sound of; but searching for a specific movie is not easy unless you look up the chinese title or use the online interface. Having said that, I’ve never been too bothered by that, I just watch what is new or what is available. Think of it as a giant un-navigatable free video rental store – you’re going to walk out with something.
- Windows only. I was holding off on writing a tutorial for it as it wasn’t compatible with Windows 7, but the latest release fixes this. Still, OsX users are stuck having to use Parallels.

So if you have any complaints, please keep quiet about them. You have been warned.

Click on any of the images for a full res version if you can’t read the chinese characters.

Prepare your computer

Because the interface is only in Chinese, you’ll need to install the East Asian font if you’re using XP, and change the default-language for non-unicode programs to Chinese (PRC). This is simple under Windows 7 – just go to the language section of control panel, and then click on the last tab labelled “Administrative”. There should be an option for “Change System Locale”.

Download, install, and create free user account:

Download the .exe installer directly from the site and run it. The default options should be fine. It works on x64 version of windows too. Open up PPStream and look for a button in the top right hand corner like the one I’ve labelled in the screenshot below. That’s the login button, click it to bring up the login dialog, then click on the link for create new user (check the screenshot):

That’ll open a new screen in Internet Explorer (even if your default browser is Firefox). Fill in the form by referring to the translation below. You needn’t put your real email address – there is no verfication – but as yet I haven’t got any spam either if you’re worried.

Once you’ve done that, you’re registered as a free VIP user and the English tv-series option is open to you. If you skipped through the tutorial and just went straight for the main interface translation, you won’t be able to find them because the option isn’t there.

Main interface:

Go ahead and click on the same button again to bring up the login screen, then type in your new username and password. Check the little checkbox to have it login automatically from now on (though it does forget your password sometimes). Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see a screen similar to this one, with your username in the top right instead. It might have automatically expanded one of the lists already, so click on the mius sign to collapse the list, and you should see this screen. Here’s what all the Chinese means on the left sidebar. If you know some Japanese kanji, you might be able to recognise some of the characters, like the 日 for Japan, the 欧 for europe, 音楽 for music. If not, just remember pictorially – you’ll probably only ever use.

(Can’t see any chinese characters? Only got gibberish and punctuation? Then your system locale for non-unicode programs is set wrong – go back to step 1)

TV shows:

TV shows are easy, you don’t a screenshot for that. Just click on the plus sign next to the characters I labelled above as “western dramas” and a long list will come down. It’s not in alphabetical order, so just scroll to find what you want. They even have the A-team, and Knightrider (the original). You can also use the search box up the top to find a particular show, but I find it’s not so reliable and searching by hand is best. The numbers next to a show indicate how many episodes there are, and the number next to an individual episode indicate how many users are available to stream from. 2 or more users is usually enough for smooth streaming. You should be able to figure out the labelling of series number and episode number, it’s not too hard. Double click to start loading, and your episode will play after a short advertisement. The player will automatically move onto the next in the series once the episode has finished.

There’s also a sports section under the main interface, if you really want to watch the Superbowl… but I’ve never bothered to look in there and doubt I ever will, so you can figure that bit out for yourself.

Movies:

Click on the dvd-rips movie section to bring down the following list.

Figure out what genre of movie you want to watch, then expand that list. Hovering over a title will show you a DVD cover. Double click if you find something interesting.

If you really want to find a specific movie, head to the main PPS site, and type in the movie title keywords into the search box. The link will lead you to an example where I search for “pride and prejudice”. The results will usually contain both the english and chinese title, so if you copy and paste the chinese title back into PPStream software, you can search directly for that. Here’s one of the results from my example search:

pride and prejudice傲慢与偏见（注意：英文字幕，供学习英语所 351 M SWF 2:05:39 1082

See where the chinese title (傲慢与偏见) is listed next to the english? Copy that. You can also use the web interface to watch the movie file online, so look for a result that looks good. The number next to the M (351 M) is the size of the file, M meaning Megabytes. SWF indicates the file format – it’s a flash file. Next is the total length of the movie, obviously some of the results are split into two parts, so try to find a long full-length version for no fuss.

So there you go, free tv and movie streaming from China. Awesome. Post any problems you have in the comments, and I’ll try to be helpful.