Old Fashioned Peer-to-Peer Networking

In the movies, you often see visitors (Space aliens, foreign exchange students, mermaids, etc) learn our language by watching TV. Having learned a foreign language, I wondered if this was really possible. I remember all the hard work I put in to study and learn all the vocabulary, grammar, and characters. Any of you who know me will remember that while I am a native English speaker, I do a fair job of speaking Korean. I thought it would be fun to brush up on it by watching TV in Korean. However, like most Americans in rural America it's absolutely impossible to find TV in a foreign language other than Spanish.

So, I turned to the Internet. It didn't take me long to discover that there is a huge underground exchange of TV shows that have been "Fan Subbed" into English, with the audio still in the native language. The quality of both the video and the translation varies markedly.

You will find everything you would normally find on a peer-to-peer sharing network and a whole lot you wouldn't. What I am explaining is really nothing new and actually from the technology being utilized, I expect it pre-dates most "peer-to-peer" sharing software. The forum is one we all know and love, IRC.

I ran into six issues in this arena that made things a bit difficult. Three of them technical, and the rest just a result of the chaos that is IRC.

1. IRC Client -- You need an IRC client that will handle DCC chat and DCC file receive. Not really an issue as most any irc client you use will have this function. My favorite is xChat.
2. dccserver -- This is a feature of mIRC that isn't readily available in any other IRC client. mIRC uses dccserver to share files and it uses port 59, which on Unix is in the restricted range and you have to be root to access it. However, some coders have gone through the trouble of creating an open source version of dccserver that will handle the features needed to download files. It's a command line application, so it will operate independent of your irc client.
3. Video Player -- Because of the wide variety of video codecs and the randomness of who decides to record and "fansub" a TV show, you never know which video codec you will need to watch the show you download. I do most of my video watching on my Mac OS X laptop and Quicktime just doesn't do the job. First, it never seems to have the right codecs and 2nd, you have to pay for the pro version to watch things in full screen mode. Recently I discovered an open source video player called Video Lan Client. It claimed to have BSD and Linux versions, but it also had a native Mac OS X version. And the best part is that is has never complained of not having a video codec and it does full screen mode without me paying a dime.
4. Its IRC. Things aren't organized at all. Its also very hard to find anything. There are more IRC networks than you can count on both your fingers and toes. To solve this problem, I found IRC search engines. It's an IRC search engine that spiders the different channels on IRC and does what it can to organize them into a searchable database so you can find the channel you want. Finding the right IRC network and channel makes all the difference. I went looking for Inu Yasha, a Japanese anime that had been playing on late night Cartoon Network and found it on irc.aniverse.com #inuyasha
5. Knowing what things are -- If you know what you are looking for, this is a very easy forum to find stuff. A bit of searching and you end up on a channel with people interested in the same stuff. The hard part is figuring out what shows you want to watch. The most obvious way is to just start downloading stuff and see if it is what you want. Usually, each show will have a website explaining what it is, however many I have found are only in the foreign language and difficult to decipher if you aren't fluent. My only advice on this topic is to do your research and ask your friends.
6. Learning the channel rules and commands -- Every channel has its own set of rules and rule breakers are quickly banned from the channel, hopefully not permanently. Usually the quickest way to make friends on these channels is to setup your own file server and start sharing files.

I found what I was looking for, access to Korean TV dramas that I can't find here in the States. I expect that all the same legalities apply to this forum as apply to most peer-to-peer sharing networks and I expect all of you will be using it for educational purposes only. ;-) I've watched the last 100 episodes of Inu Yasha already and I think my Japanese vocabulary has grown by at least 10 words.