Jumping More Paywalls
J. Zhang & C. van Gog, 08 October 2019
In the previous post, Chung showed how to find paywalled articles and books online. Here we will share one method (out of many) to avoid movie paywalls. This method assumes the watcher is comfortable with double Chinese-English subtitles; non-Chinese speaking viewers may simply ignore the Chinese subs. The same disclaimers as those in the first paragraph of How to Jump Paywalls apply.
First, we recommend using an adblocker such as Fair Adblocker to prevent accidentally clicking any hyperlinks on the websites which host the movies. Optionally, one may wish to use a VPN. We don’t recommend inputting any personal details on the websites below.
Streaming movies
The key words of this method are 在线 (Pinyin: zai’xian), which means “online”. You can simply input [Movie title in English] + 在线 in Google to find websites which host the movie. If you’d like to be more thorough, try ([Movie title in English] OR [Movie name in simplified Chinese]) + 在线 The simplified Chinese name of a movie can be found by finding the movie on Wikipedia. Try [Movie title in English] + site:zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn and copy-pasting the Chinese movie title. If you want to watch shows, better type the season number in your search, such as 第一季, 第二季 (first season, second season…; the middle character indicates the number; use Google Translate to translate numbers bigger than two).
As an example, we tried to find Inception (2010). We inputed (Inception OR 盗梦空间) 在线 in Google. The first result is from haitum.com and we click it. Haitum usually works well but in this case seemed too slow to load. Also, they only had Chinese subtitles: it said 中字 (meaning ‘Chinese subtitles’). Different mirrors on a given website are indicated as 线路一, 线路二…(route one, route two..); we tried the second link in Google instead. We visited duonaolive.com and clicked on the button under the tag 线路1 and after activating Flash Player the movie started! Drag the time bar to check if there are English subs…it worked!
If you didn’t get any luck after one or two clicks, just continue. Usually haitum.com, duonaolive.com, wandouys.com, zxzjs.com, 91mjw.com are solid. 91mjw.com focuses on American shows and movies. If you use Google Translate to translate this website and there are numerous options for watching American shows and movies. Usually the English subtitles are included and the quality is top notch. And if sometimes you see 中英双字, 中英字幕, 双语字幕 or 中英双语 (Chinese and English subtitiles), you are guaranteed to have English subs. If you didn’t find any above-mentioned websites, just try other ones listed on Google.
Downloading movies
Though downloading is possible (use 下载 in your query), one usually needs Xunlei, Baidu Wangpan or other software to download the torrent.
Image source: still from Ex Libris: the New York Public Library (2017).