How to legally enjoy free Korean Drama series, movies and more

I will be honest, I tend to brand Korean drama series and movies as infantile, over emotional crap productions. There are lots of tears, hyperbolic plots that are as predictable as sunrise and sunset and worst of all banal captions (subtitles) in questionable English.

My wife, sisters and sisters in law cannot get enough of them though. I, having made a blanket promise to always strive for my wife’s happiness, indulge her oddities as should every man when it comes to his wife. So while I do not partake  early this year I had to find a good source of Korean/Asian Entertainment.

I tossed out my DVD 6 years ago

Here is the thing though, I stopped using a DVD player 6 years ago. I have not used the DVD tray on my last three laptops. As a video connoisseur I find the quality of DVDs on our streets abhorrent. All “latest releases” found on the streets of Harare tend to be rubbish Cam releases where you have to squint to see the characters.

It’s hard to find a good DVD on the streets

Korean Drama series and movies tend to be shoved on 7 in one DVDs that come with screeching sounds. Often the disks are mislabeled, episodes missing or will not play and the picture quality plain horrible. Then there is the fact that given the market Korean productions are hard to find even for pirates. Files are often poorly seeded and less popular shows are not available on scenes.

My solution

As part of my going legal exercise I decided to look for free legal sources for Korean TV shows. I discovered two websites that offer both free and premium Drama Fever and Viki. You can get access to vast collection of free drama series and Asian movies from Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia etc. The problem both sites only allow people from certain countries.

Requirements

In order to watch content from these sites you need:

• A decent Internet connection with speeds of at least 1.5 Mbps, connections such as Powertel, Telone, ZOL Fiber, Aptics, Aquiva, Telco. This is video so avoid using your mobile Internet connection unless you can afford to pay for the data.
• A subscription/free trial from Smart DNS Proxy
• A device with Chrome Browser or Download the Drama Fever App from the Google Play or App Store
• An email address to sign up

Configuring your device

If you haven’t already, sign up for Smart DNS Proxy and choose your device to learn how to set up their DNS service. This involves changing the DNS servers on your laptop, phone, TV, router etc to those of DNS proxy. Detailed instructions for most devices can be found here. For the purposes of this article we will assume you are using a Windows 10 machine with Google Chrome and that you live in Zimbabwe/Southern Africa.

• Follow the above instructions but change your DNS servers to:
• 154.127.57.224 and
• 129.232.164.26 instead of the ones in the video
• Once you have done this visit the account activation page and click on activate
• You should see green ticks like those shown below if you have done this right:

  

• Visit the Drama Fever website and sign up for a free account, while this is not required it will ensure that you will be able to resume paused episodes on another device or at a later date.
• Login in to the site, now this site requires Flash ( I am sure that will change as the site transitions to other technologies) but for now you need to allow flash access to this site specifically as it is (rightly) disabled by default
• To enable flash click on the word secure in the address bar ( to the left of the green lock) and select site settings:

  

• Select Allow flash in the list of options and close the settings tab. Please know that while Drama Fever is safe you need to know that Adobe Flash has been a constant source of pain and security breaches in the past

  

• Reload the Drama Fever site and you are good to go
• Free movies are ad supported but in my experience the ads are shorter than those on Hulu, or YouTube and also less annoying and in the world of online tracking likely relevant

NB With Smart DNS Proxy you have to reactivate your account every time your IP changes one work around is to download the VPN app and connecting to a South African server every time you need the service.

If you have followed the above steps you will be on your way to enjoying (or in my case being tortured) Korean Drama series and movies. It’s all legal too (might be a gray area) unlike the bootlegs pirate disks on the street at least the creators of this content get paid something and the picture quality is decent too. You can get HD streaming by buying a Drama Fever Pass for around $5/month but that is strictly optional.

So if you all don’t mind I have a convoluted Korean series I have to get back to.

P.S If you have any questions you can leave them in the comments section or chat with the staff at Smart DNS Proxy website or talk to them via messenger.