UUSee TV

December 30, 2007 2:52 AM

Anyone ever use the Chinese streaming software UUSee?

If you go to there download page, you'll see links obtain the latest version of "UUSee". The software and installer are all in Chinese.

What is UUSee? Well, I'm not totally sure myself -- which is why I'm asking if others have any experience with it. One web page explains: "UUSee users download an application for their desktop, allowing the machine to become a node in their peer-to-peer network. A press release in January claimed an installed base at around 30 million. They offer over 60 live channels, including China’s largest network, CCTV. " It actually seems to offer much more than that. Lotsa sports, news and old movies.

It's a slick program that works very well. One thing causes concern however -- when I run the program my Symantec firewall constantly alerts me to intrusion attempts. I don't know if these are genuine hacking attempts, government monitoring -- or maybe something entirely innocent; some by-product of their coding that doesn't follow the usual protocol. I dunno. Another reason why I'm asking if anyone else has played around with it.

posted by RavinDave to technology (9 answers total)

If it's peer to peer, I expect those "intrusion attempts" are actually just incoming connection attempts from your peers, and therefore completely normal.

I'd expect to find a port number allocated for these in the software, possibly documented or possibly configurable as a preference; and if you set that properly, and then configure the unspeakable Symantec firewall to allow incoming connections to that port, it should stop nagging you.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on December 30, 2007

The software and installer are all in Chinese.
There's a link to download an English version, handily marked only in Chinese :D
posted by Abiezer at 3:50 AM on December 30, 2007

Looking elsewhere around the site, it doesn't seem particularly sketchy - for what it's worth it has all the official registrations listed (not that I think they'd be an absolute guarantee against dodgy practices). Their "About Us" confirms it is a p2p programme and claims they're in "close collaboration" with the various channels they offer, including Disney and ESPN. A quick Google shows some tech wire stories that appear to back that up.
I'm not qualified to comment on the tech issues but flabdablet's seems a good explanation to my limited understanding.
posted by Abiezer at 4:05 AM on December 30, 2007

Thanks for that tip, flabdablet; I'll give that a whirl.

Another curiosity about this program. By all accounts this is an upfront and popular program seeded with international venture capital. They go to great pains to obtain proper licensing and forge agreements with various media groups.

Yet, last night I (somehow) watched "I Am Legend" with Chinese subtitles.
posted by RavinDave at 4:10 AM on December 30, 2007

How did you manage that, RavinDave? So far, all I've found is snippets of movies, and the search box doesn't seem to turn up anything for "I am Legend."
posted by Estragon at 7:27 AM on December 30, 2007

I'm looking at the link right now. 我是传奇 (I Am Storied(??))




And it's not previews -- or even extended previews. I just watched the ending for the second time. Curious.
posted by RavinDave at 7:54 AM on December 30, 2007

Ooops ... thought I could post an image.

Here it is.
posted by RavinDave at 7:55 AM on December 30, 2007

It looks very much like other p2p tv networks. http://www.tvunetworks.com and http://www.sopcast.org seem to be the big ones. I guess it depends what you're looking for but I've never had much luck with them. I doubt that they are really legal if they are distributing movies or live channels that are not otherwise available.

flabdablet is correct about the "intrusion" attempts.

Perhaps a little off topic but if, like me, you're interested in watching English language news and documentary channels online from other countries. These links might be interesting:

http://www.france24.com (Go to English and then there's a link for live stream).
http://www.russiatoday.ru (live stream link on the right)
http://www.presstv.com (From Iran. Live stream link at the top).
http://www.ibnlive.com (CNN in India. Scroll down on left for live stream).

For CNN International (a completely different channel to CNN US) follow "Video" and then "CNN Live" from cnn.com or put this directly into Windows Media Player.

mms://wmscnn.stream.aol.com/live/cnn/cnnlive_1
posted by tetranz at 8:32 AM on December 30, 2007 [2 favorites]

Eh, I could go on about these for ages. Yes, it's p2p but it's streamed p2p. Your client is in contact with a bunch of other peers and obtains an ongoing buffer of eg, 30 seconds of video from them and then shows it to you. While you're watching it, the next 30s is downloading and so on and so on. If the connection is good enough, there should be little or no buffering.

Much of the content has some Chinese or Asian subs or dubs. UUSee is similar to PPLive, PPStream, MySee, SopCast (mostly used for sports), TVAnts (ditto), and a bunch of others. Google was part of their last investment round. But as you say, there's an awful lot of pirated material present on the sites. The homepages always tend to have the latest Hollywood movie. Most of that content is user generated - someone will create a 'channel' and your client can then tune into that and join the stream. A lot of the content available on the services are 'live' tv streams though (which is why they're often used for sports - get around the pay-tv issues by streaming it from a country where there are no blackouts).

There are good guides on places like myp2p.eu and football4less.info - sports centred but if you need to know how to go about setting them up, they can help.

Personally, whatever you can stream from these sites you can get in full English through bittorrent or elsewhere. Oh, and try MaxTV.cn if it's still around. Same sort of concept but a lot of older tv and movies.
posted by humuhumu at 2:57 PM on December 30, 2007