Thai PBS info & recs

My thoughts on ratings. I dislike being the first person to rate something of what is essentially a  handful of watchers.  I maybe more prone to leave a comment. Others maybe of the same mind.

ThaiPBS  cc (close captioning) titles and found translations are an ongoing  project (multi). Good to check back in for your language.  

I finished Once a Doctor, Always a Doctor. It has okay-ish subtitles: In episode 8 (last minutes) and 9 (first minutes) and episode 15 (last minutes) the timing is off. There is the occasional untranslated sentence, but doesn't hinder understanding. At times, the subtitles are more flippant than the original Thai, but that is also negligible.

For the next Thai PBS, I plan The Summer We Met -- when I next have the urge to watch something in the Thai PBS style^^

 Elisheva:

uBlock Origin on Firefox

seems to sometimes work with VIPa, and sometimes not. Since there are no distracting elements, I switched it off for VIPA.

But even without adblocker, I get an error message, whenever the site wants to go to the next episode -- "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)." I switched off all other extensions I could think of, and it still gives me the error message. I don't understand what the browser console is trying to tell me, tbh.
Does anybody have a  similar problem?

 Anusaya:

My thoughts on ratings. I dislike being the first person to rate something of what is essentially a handful of watchers. I maybe more prone to leave a comment. Others maybe of the same mind.

Hm, somebody has to be the first.
But on the other hand, if there are only few viewers, even one single rating can shift the number by a lot, so it's questionable how reliable a rating would be. (Not that ratings on MDL are very reliable.)

I love to read comments or reviews, whichever others prefer. I myself tend to write reviews for almost everything anyway.

 Elisheva:

There are some titles from a while back with single digit viewers and very high ratings. (Maybe it's changed since then, given the number of recent ones with more viewers and "N/A" in the ratings box?)

Anyway, I tend to make every effort to chase those down when I stumble on them because good marks from people who watch niche Thai titles is an excellent sign. I consider them in that context. Basically, the reverse of the sky-high ratings of currently airing BLs. =D

The personal ratings are also useful when I've found custom lists to go through. Like some of yours, or Biloba's Hidden Gems . All of that was helpful to finding my way out of the GMMTV and BL bubbles. Someone's list, may have been Thai Drama Club favourites?, led me to The Broken Us and Thai PBS too.

Understand that. Most likely Thai Drama Club. <3

Looking forward to Mac from "The Broken Us" in this; No synopsis but the cast looks amazing. I trust PBS too. xD

"How to Suffer 101" ( Sep 28, 2025);
https://kisskh.at/795662-how-to-suffer-101

 Elisheva:

Yes, that cast.

Though I did have a moment of "that can't be Nont from Dew, too young, it IS Nont from Dew" =D
Looking forward to seeing how his acting has developed now that he's reached the ancient age of, erm, 24.

 Jfi  "How to Suffer "101 (2025) - airing. Sadly can't  watch now.  =( Hope good reviews. =) <3

Recommending The Caved Life, which is four documentaries presented as a whole. This isn't about the cave rescue. Instead it follows a few individuals and their concerns for a short time. It's atmospheric, slice of life, and VERY local. No talking heads, just people.

I've just submitted it to the database so it's not listed on MDL yet. Don't be concerned by the absence of the CC button we all look for - English subtitles are baked in on this one. Also central Thai subtitles where speakers are using Northern dialect.

https://vipa.me/en/contents/6557/thecavedlife

Edit: Accepted to the database https://kisskh.at/801100-the-caved-life

 Elisheva:

Is something going on with Thai PBS? For the last few days I've been getting Error: Geo Restriction every time I try to watch a programme, including ones which have worked fine before. Exact same behaviour whether it's from the UK or with a VPN set to Thailand. I've tried a few browsers too, including one with less security, in case that was the issue. Can't figure this one out or a work around.

Really hoping we haven't lost access to this resource.

I can play Corruption2 in phone browser (duckduckgo) but not comp (firefox; opera; geo unavailable). Will play with it later.  mmm =/

ThaiPBS upload to YT too. 

 Elisheva:

For the last few days I've been getting Error: Geo Restriction every time I try to watch a programme, including ones which have worked fine before.

On android, it doesn't work at all, whether with Firefoy or Brave, vpn or not -- I always get the Georestriction error. App will try to play but then just give me a black screen and the runtime is shown as 0:00.

On Windows Firefox, I get the same error, but I managed to get it to work on Windows Firefox with the vpn set to Thailand (yesterday and today).

A few days ago, I tried to send a message to Thai PBS and asked about this, but I think I made the mistake of using the English version of the contact form, which is, I think, not finished and might not work. I'll wait two more days, and if I haven't received a reply, I'll ask again with the Thai language form https://org.thaipbs.or.th/service/contactus.

So, I mailed the admin team of VIPA, and just got this reply:

สวัสดีค่ะ

ทีมงานต้องขอขอบคุณที่สนใจเข้าใช้งาน VIPA นะคะ

อย่างไรก็ตาม รายการบางส่วนของเรามีข้อจำกัดเรื่องลิขสิทธิ์ในการเผยแพร่ในต่างประเทศ ทำให้ไม่สามารถเปิดให้รับชมได้ค่ะ
แต่ไม่ใช่ทุกรายการนะคะ รายการของไทย เช่นรายการที่ผลิตโดย Thai PBS เอง สามารถรับชมได้ตามปกติจากทุกที่ทั่วโลกค่ะ

ขอบคุณอีกครั้งสำหรับความสนใจ และหวังว่าเราจะเป็นส่วนหนึ่งของการเผยแพร่วัฒนธรรม และความสวยงามของไทยกับสายตาผู้คนทั่วโลกต่อไปค่ะ

ขอบคุณมากค่ะ
ทีมแอดมิน 

They say they are happy that I (we) are interested in their programme, but everything produced by Thai PBS themselves should be available worldwide (if they bought a license from foreign productions, then you can only watch from Thailand).

So, I guess there's something wrong. I would like to follow up, and give them a more examples of what we tried, like:

• Which dramas/films did we try to start
• Which operating systems did we use
• which browsers did we use / did we use the app

The more examples we have and the better we can describe the problem, the easier it is for the team to look into it, so I'd like to ask for your help. Thank you!

Edit: I would be interested in your experience with a Chromium based browser, and any OS that is not android or windows. And if you could try some series that definitely worked for you before that would be good too.