Jbox Download Tutorial (cheap Korean dubbed anime):

If you are trying to learn Korean (as I am) then you are possibly on the hunt for new Korean media to immerse yourself in. Kdrama’s are fun, but can get repetitive. If you are a fan of anime, then you may desire to watch anime dubbed in Korean. However, this isn’t the easiest thing to come by, especially without paying a high price and/or fighting with DRM, which prevents us from using useful language learning tools like Kimchi Reader on it.

I am not actually a huge fan of anime. I have watched a few, which have been entertaining, but I am not into anime as so many others are. I do find it is easy and fun to watch, even when I don’t fully understand the language, making it perfect for immersion. So I spoke to a Korean friend about it. He pointed me to a site called jbox where I discovered on my own that you could simply right click any video on the site and save it through your browser. Since the monthly fee to access all the Korean dubbed anime totalled to about 5 USD, I used paypal to send my friend the money and he set me up an account with a one month subscription. From there I was able to easily save DRM-free copies of whatever series were available and of interest to me.

However, since that time the site has added a measure against this. Now if you try to right click it brings up an alert stating “보안상 오른쪽 클릭은 작동이 중지되었습니다.” Right clicking was blocked. I did some digging around and believe I have found a way to still download video on this site. I am not good at making payments on Korean sites, so I can’t give any suggestions on how to get an account with a subscription outside of asking a Korean person you trust, and who trusts you, but assuming you can figure out a way, here is what you can do to download DRM-free Korean dubbed anime such as My Hero Academia, One Piece, Fairy Tail, and more.

How to download Korean dubbed anime:

This tutorial assumes you have access to an account with at least one month subscription, however, if you just wanna test this out, the site allows you to watch as many previews of episodes as you want for free, but you will need to log into a free account (you can do so with email, Google, Naver, or KakaoTalk) so you can use that. I don’t have a subscription myself right now, so this tutorial will be written using the previews, but the player is the same so this method should work on the actual full length episodes.

This tutorial also assumes you are proficient enough in Korean to navigate jbox’s website. If you aren’t you may need to use a translation tool or a friend to help you.

Finally, the only prerequisite software to be used is VLC Media Player

This tutorial has been tested on Linux with both the Firefox and Brave browsers (Brave is essentially a reskin of Google Chrome, so it should work on all chrome based browsers).

Step 1:

On the home page of jbox, press F12 to open your browser’s developer tools. If you have never done this before, it might seem a bit overwhelming, but don’t worry. You can ignore most of the buttons and whatnot in the developer tools.

Step 2:

In the developer tools panel, click on the tab labeled as network. Once in the network tab, find the input box labeled as filter (it should be in the top left). In that box type “m3u8”.

Step 3:

Now that our network panel is now checking for m3u8 files, load a video on jbox and play it. Once the video loads and/or starts playing, you should see some things pop up in the network tab.

Step 4:

Examine the data that has been loaded in the network panel and find the entry where the data in the “file” column ends in “.m3u8” with the largest size in the “Transferred” and “Size” columns (generally called chunklist.m3u8).

Step 5:

Right click the file in the network panel and move to the context menu option labeled “copy” or “copy value.” From there, you want to click something that says either “copy url” or “copy link address.” The names of these menus vary slightly across browsers, but if you paste what you have copied and it is a link that ends with the file name you selected, then you should be good to go.

Step 6:

Open VLC player.

Step 7:

In the top left click on the menu labeled as “Media” and then click “open network stream.”

Step 8:

Paste the link you copied earlier into the box labeled as “Please enter a network URL.”

Step 9:

Locate the button in the bototm right labeled “play,” but don’t click on it yet. Instead, click the small arrow button next to it which will open some options. Click the option labeled as “stream.”

Step 10:

Hit the “next” button until you enocounter a screen titled “Destination Setup.” You will see a drop down menu that says “File” and an “add” button. Click the add button and it should take you to a screen where you can choose where you want the file to be saved. Make sure the file name you give it has the proper extension for the media format you want (e.g. .mp4).

Step 11:

Continue hitting the “next” button until you come across a menu with a “stream” button and click that.

Step 12:

Wait for the progress bar at the bottom of vlc-player to finish.*

Step 13:

Once the stream is complete, navigate to your chosen file destination, and play the file in your media player of choice (You can use VLC if you’d like). If the video plays correctly, you are done!

Congratulations! You just unlocked a wealth of new Korean immersion material! It should have only costed you about 5 USD and some time. You will only have a month to download what you want, but a lot can be downloaded in a month.

If you encounter any issues with this method, or discover a better way, feel free to reach out to me through my fediverse account linked at the bottom of the page (or any other means you know to contact me).

* I believe what VLC is doing here is literally streaming the video as if you were watching it. That means that the process of streaming the whole file could and probably will take as long as the video itself. This isn’t ideal, but you can go ahead and add another stream for another video while this one streams, and vlc will start streaming that one immedieately after. It should be easy enough to queue up a lot of videos and let them stream in the background while you do whatever else you’d like to do.

P.S.

This site also hosts Korean subtitled anime. These are hard subs. If you want dubbed anime, make sure either that the title has the word 더빙 in it, or watch some of what you are about to download to ensure that you selected a Korean dubbed version, and not a subbed version.