What is the easiest way to get hold of Japanese drama? It's seems that unlike for anime, torrents of complete series just don't exist for dramas. All I can find is raws of single episodes all of which are about 3 times the size they need to be. Downloading individual episodes is a pain. The streaming sites all have crap quality and are unreliable. If this kind of topic is a forum no no, please delete.

I used to go to Geo and just rent the whole series I wanted. For 80/y a DVD it was a steal.

In terms of being illegal, it seems I've lost my touch over the years. What you're looking for is a torrent of the entire series that is all in small files (ie. low quality). In my experience, you're just simply not gonna find it.
I found a 37 gig torrent of the entire Sailor Moon series, and a lot of people actually finished the download. Seriously, wtf? Just download them one by one, watch them, and I'm sure you'll get sick of the series before you even get to 15 gigs.

As for drama, what I do these days is google "[drama name] raw megaupload"

It's probably not the best way, but a lot of times you'll find blogs with links to megupload with the episode you're looking for. The trouble is finding raws, or soft subs -- everything is hard coded. Again, wtf -- there's no real benefit to hard coding subs -- its a pain in the ass for everyone. Except for those people who use windows media player classic to watch their anime and don't know how to load subs...

tl;dr: 1) why would you want to download the whole series? 2) google it 3) why the eff do people waste their time hardcoding subs????

OK. I take it Geo is a rental place like Tsutaya? Haven't been to a rental place in ages so I might be a little out of touch, but 80/y a dvd sounds way too cheap.

The reason I like to download wholes series is it's just a lot easier to search and download something once and then have it there on your hard drive to watch at leisure and one after the other without interruption. Getting bored halfway through isn't really an issue for short series (26 episodes or so). As for file size, anime is typically 200-400mg per episode and the quality is fine so they don't take that long to download. Subs don't bother me too much as it's easy enough to cover a portion of the screen.

Yep, it's a DVD rental place. I haven't been to a tsutaya, but Geo is usually 100/y per week, but sometimes go down to 80/y. New releases are more expensive, but...

Yeah, I guess my post was more of a rant than helpful. What I usually find is that on the megaupload blog site things, its usually about 300 mg per episode, and so what I usually do is start downloading episode n+1 when I start watching episode n.
Usually works out fine.

Then again, some of the rarer series' are gonna be hard to find, but I usually do pretty well.

Alrighty, thanks for responding. Was kind of hoping to be pointed to some treasure trove complete series torrents but oh well, I'll give megaupload a try.

Another one of the great things about torrents is you can just leave them running at night or when you're out, so you can very build a big library of Japanese media with very little effort. Most of the anime torrents originate outside of Japan. I have a feeling Japanese people have been a bit slow getting on the torrent bandwagon.

You're probably not going to be able to find a torrent of the entire series, but on http://d-addicts.com you'll probably be able to find a torrent for each episode... so.. download them at the same time?

nadiatims Wrote:What is the easiest way to get hold of Japanese drama? It's seems that unlike for anime, torrents of complete series just don't exist for dramas. All I can find is raws of single episodes all of which are about 3 times the size they need to be. Downloading individual episodes is a pain. The streaming sites all have crap quality and are unreliable. If this kind of topic is a forum no no, please delete.

Downloading single episodes is not as bad as you say.
Just deal with it and be happy that we even have j-drama at all.

Drama episodes (48 minutes) are twice as long as anime episodes (24 minutes).
So of course they're much bigger. The smallest drama files you'll find are the
hard subs. The groups that encode these episodes usually compresses it heavily.

These days many drama eps are encoded in H.264, which gives
the best quality at the lowest file sizes. For anime with limited
animation (a lot of shoujo), episodes can be compressed to very
small sizes with H.264. That's just not the case with j-drama,
since the scenes are not as static.

Most drama today are broadcast at 1280x720 or 1920x1080, but
many are still shown at 704x396. RAWs will always be larger because
they are direct copies of the TV shows and released right after the
show is broadcast.

So in your case, find a raw "704x396" (you can type that in your search) episode.

chamcham Wrote:For anime with limited animation (a lot of shoujo), episodes can be compressed to very small sizes with H.264.

I hear they're thinking about making a special "stock-footage aware" codec to give even better compression for magical girl anime :-)

Speaking about the d-addicts torrent portal i suppose mentioning the Japanese P2P networks, such as perfect dark, share (or even winny?!), utatane should help everyone acquiring j-dramas at any rate. (needs open ports, otherwise it will definitely not work, i tried it. get the TCP version of the clients and install an english framework if your japanese is too weak reading messages and buttons - is available somewhere on the nets)

thanks for the replies everyone.

@cham cham
thanks for explaining about the compression issues. It makes sense that anime can be compressed smaller because there is less detail in each frame. However I've downloaded an american drama series for a Japanese friend and each episode was less than 250mg while still maintaining excellent quality and including soft subs.