Do chinese people not use torrents? if so what p2p programs do they use?

[deathtrap]

With verycd.com getting sanitized it's becoming increasingly difficult to obtain Chinese media, and with most video sharing sites being incredibly slow to access outside China I was wondering if Chinese people used torrents or other p2p sharing programs(besides edonkey).

Anyone have any torrent sites/trackers they would like to share?

[Iriya]

eDonkey seems to be the most popular.

[Areckx]

I just do all my watching and listening streaming live. tudou.com is very popular, and youku, and I'm a huuuuuge fan of the xunlei player.

eMule and winMX maybe, although MX is usually for Japanese stuff.

[feihong]

Although not directly supported, there are various methods to download videos from all the major Chinese video portal sites. In the past, I used the Mason Firefox extension and found it pretty effective.

[Ludens]

For torrents of Chinese movies I recommend http://asiandvdclub.org

[joshuawbb]

Please delete if this post breaks any rules regarding links to copyrighted material

I don't know how many people know these websites, but since I've almost never heard any non-Chinese mention them I presume them to be unintentionally-kept secrets. I've used skyme.com, tom365.com and tom53.com since 2008 (sorry, been bad, but back in the UK I always used to buy DVDs anyway), and I can say they are amazing. The sites are semi-clones of each other - each site has a database of what looks like thousands of films, TV shows and various other media, usually in DVD quality at minimum (varies).

The sites look rather old-school, have plenty of ads so take a little while to get used to, but don't knock it 'till you try it. To use the website, select what you want to watch from the home page pictures or select a category to browse. You can also search by film title (in Chinese) or by actor/actress/director (English/Chinese). Once you've selected a film you'll be brought to its info page. Near the bottom of the page will be either a number ([1]. [2], etc) or something written, like 全集. Click on that to go to the streaming page.

You have to download the media program Qvod to watch, there's no way around that I'm afraid. But from 3 years of using it I've not found a virus from it - the only annoying thing it does is pop up an ad on your desktop which can be closed. The player is alright. Once installed, you're good to go. The video should begin streaming (P2P I think) automatically. At the same time, it will download whatever you're viewing onto your computer whilst it streams - usually in [drive name]/Media.

Media on the website is usually at a minimum of DVD-level quality, though can be lower. There are also plenty of videos with higher resolution and quality that look great, even on HDTVs. As for new films, I haven't to date seen a cinema camera recording copy on Skyme.com. Tom53 however, does upload these. Note that on rare occasions the connection to the media may fail. If it does, try a different site.

www.skyme.com

www.tom365.com

www.tom53.com

As I said, please delete this if it infringes on any forum rules.

[bulers]

From my experience in the 3 days I've had internet in my apartment (just moved to China three weeks ako), I actually think Chinese people use torrents a lot. My internet connection is fairly good (2.5 Mbps download speed on speedtest.net which is higher than promised). But direct downloads are unbelievably slow. When I download files, the rate is usually below 10 Kbps and so even a 100 MB file takes ages. Torrents are quite fast though, and I normally reach 250Kbps. I cannot for the life of me understand why this is so, but if I had to download something, I'd wish it were available on torrent sites.

Am I the only one experiencing this? Any suggested solutions?

[Brian US]

迅雷 will be found on every college student's computer for torrents.

[m000gle]

Torrents are extremely popular here, just maybe not as popular as overseas since other platforms/protocols are also commonly used.

Edonkey is popular, while uTorrent/BitComet seem popular on my campus. 迅雷 (Xunlei) has been mentioned above and is also extremely popular, while being able to use both the Bit Torrent and ED2K protocols in one piece of software. Many browser plugins have also been developed to download copies of the flash videos on sites like Tudou, Youku etc.

A word of advice when looking at 迅雷, though... Popular as it may be, upon installation it will also install a trojan. My guess is this is merely the adware which is built-in, and could also be a false positive since my anti-virus software is western. However, its at least good to know.

[Matty]

迅雷 aka Thunder, but when installing I always untick all boxes so nothing extra gets installed, it seems to work well so far.

[Donaldo_77]

I get pretty good torrent speeds in Shanghai...I just use Utorrent and google for whatever I want + 'torrent'. Sometimes it takes a while but usually get there in the end.

direct downloads are unbelievably slow

This has also happened to me recently, and only for direct downloads, they start off OK and then dwindle away to nothing and stop. Very odd and very frustrating.

[Benignant]

http://www.asiatorrents.com

This one is pretty cool as well Check it out.

[Finger Monkey Wire]

http://www.asiatorrents.com

Couldn't agree with you more torrents on that site are good.

[jollibee]

vip.xunlei.com, i use this. pay some money for a year(about 100 rmb). Download file fast and easy to use on Mac. There is no good torrent client on Mac.

[icebear]

There is no good torrent client on Mac.

Never had troubles with Transmission [ http://www.transmissionbt.com/ ].

[yialanliu]

Part of the reason why Chinese usage of torrents is less than abroad is because of the fact that youku/tudou and others have most media without torrenting. If you can stream it why torrent? It's only the foreigners who are not in China that can't access it. This means that the demand is only overseas chinese along with a very very small minority of foreigners who are interested.

With that said, emule and xunlei should work but even they are not going to be as good as something like the major torrent peers for american tv shows and the like.

And another thing, China's broadband is not as good as abroad meaning most people don't have the bandwitdh to torrent. Thus many just buy discs for 5RMB each rather than torrent them.

[Neil_H]

On the subject of Chinese films is there somewhere to go to see what films are out there to get in the first place. Some sort of list or section so you know what to search for?

[Igor Antunov]

Tudou is very slow, at least when I access it from Australia.