Apps and websites where you can watch Japanese programs for free

If you don’t watch much news or variety shows and don’t mind the fact that the app is in Chinese or the ads and subtitles, the following apps are also recommended.

人人日剧TV

https://apkpure.com/人人日剧tv-—-日剧动漫电影综艺随意看/cn.fighting.rjtv.classic

今日影视

http://www.jinritv.tv

TV影院

http://www.sharerw.com/a/ziyuan/351.html

Such an app may suddenly become unavailable.

It doesn’t necessarily contain Japan content, but you can find similar apps on the following sites. (Beware of malware)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/125425698076973

http://www.sharerw.com

http://zntx.cc/downloadlist-2368.html

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCslnC57qKNae-La7N97hvKA/videos

https://t.me/s/tvbox001

http://beatsingdrama.blogspot.com

There is little information, but you can find it here.

https://egg.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/android/1571740200/

https://mevius.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/avi/1558350246/

I apologize for the poor English.

Ryotaro_I · March 9, 2025, 2:39pm

Thank you for this information. I used to download a lot of Japanese shows off of bilibili with jiji. If you change the lang.ini file you can load the program in various languages. I like the option of downloading 1080 in jiji at max speed from my ISP.

You need to use an https/socks proxy from Japan with tver or just use a VPN. That is also true for most of VOD from gyao, RCC, fujitv, etc…

linusl · March 9, 2025, 2:39pm

is this method still working? would be very good to have methods like this documented in guides.

if you have the time to make a post with a basic guide it would be very appreciated. doesn’t have to be a perfect guide, if there is interest then I’m sure people will comment if they have issues and you or anyone can help out with additional information to make the guide more complete.

Ryotaro_I · March 9, 2025, 2:39pm

I am a bit reticent to give out too much information. I can tell you that tver is quick to ban IP addresses and that many of the https and socks proxies I’ve used in the past have been banned. I was lucky to have a proxy last a week or two at most.

I’ve read a lot of posts and noticed quite a few of the VPNs have been IP blocked as well. My current VPN does not give me fast speeds, but I am able to download from tver, gyao, RCC, etc… I have not been able to get abema to work with proxies nor VPNs. If I give out specifics, then a lot of people will use the same VPN and hence it will get blocked as well from overusage.

I will give some advice as what extensions to use though. I do have ant video downloader in both firefox and chrome. Some people have purported that some video cannot be downloaded in tver and that is incorrect. If you download the mp4 stream then the m4a stream, you can easily combine them in ffmpeg. There are times where ant video downloader does fail, and that is where I use another extension. I have Stream Recorder - download HLS as MP4 version 1.1.3 in chrome. The newer version does not support HLS encryption, so I have the old version loaded.

Jiji for bilibili is amazing. I tried various methods to download from bilibili before and they were a mess. The newer URLs in bilibili did show up as unrecognizable in jiji last week, but I was able to ameliorate the situation. Just do a view source on the bilibili page or control + U to view the real URL of the bilibili page where it has something like content="https://www.bilibili.com/video/av\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*.

_Suppaman_1 · March 9, 2025, 2:39pm

Can you confirm for view video from tver all need to do is configure the browser for use a proxy? I made some quick test some days ago but didn’t work so well as expected. I was able to see the initial screenshot of the video but when start play some other check inside the page was able to know I was out of contry and stop playing…

Ryotaro_I · March 9, 2025, 2:39pm

Not any Japanese proxy will work. It has to be anon and either SOCKS or HTTPS proxy. You can configure a SOCKS 4 or 5 into firefox directly and it will work provided it hasn’t been banned already. An HTTPS proxy will work as well, but an HTTP proxy will NOT work. The videos are on brightcove and it will do a check.

I would recommend the VPN option, but won’t mention my specific VPN. Rather than use tver, you can always try to get the video off VOD from specific Japanese tv station sites. You can easily google for stations like MBS, RCC, etc… There are also options like yahoo’s gyao and テレ無料 https://cu.ntv.co.jp/ which are free as well. News系 records like 8 channels and you can download the shows from uptobox.