Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Technical Help and How To's I don't understand BitTorrent at all. :(

Can someone please point me in the direction of a comprehensive tutorial? The one at their site's Double Dutch to me. Thank you!

It's actually pretty simple if all you want to do is download files.

Get a good bittorrent program - I'd recommend uTorrent from
http://www.utorrent.com/

it's free, it's teeny, and it's very good, with excellent online help pages. Mostly you don't have to make any changes to its settings, or to anything else, apart from telling it where you want files to download on your PC - the exception is if you have a hardware firewall as part of a modem or router, you may need to get into the settings for that enable something called "pnp handshaking", which means that your computer tells the firewall to give you a fast channel - if you don't do that, it will run very slowly.

Once you've got it installed you need to find what they call a seed - this is a small file that begins the download. A good place for current TV shows is an italian site (english language), eztv

http://eztv.it/

Find the show you want, by looking at e.g. the show list (link at the top), then click on the show's name and it will show you the episodes that are available. For example, if you wanted an episode of NCIS you click on NCIS and see that they've got links to most of season 7 and some earlier episodes. You find the episode you want and look across to the right to see an icon for downloading it - in the case of eztv there will usually be at least three representing different mirror sites that have the seed. Click on one and uTorrent will show you a list of what's in the torrent (usually the episode only, sometimes also a preview file or a readme with some information about it). Once you've clicked OK the rest is pretty much automatic - if you have a fast internet connection it can be incredibly fast with a really recent show that has thousands of people downloading it, e.g. ten or fifteen minutes for an episode, much slower if you're getting older stuff.

Remember that this is two way traffic - any bits of the file you've downloaded are available for download from others, so after a while you might see that the file is downloading at 300K and uploading at 10K. All that takes a lot of bandwidth, anything else you want to do on line will run very slowly.

It's considered good etiquette to let torrent programs continue to "seed" (upload) your download for an hour or two after you've finished.

Things to watch out for - eZtv seem to check files for problems before making them available, a lot of the other sites don't. Usually there will be some indication if there are problems, e.g. someone posts a comment saying the file is corrupt or has bad sound.

Hope this helps.

@Marcus Rowland: thank you so much for your help! i think i'm golden now. this looks really easy. Have a good one!

I'm by no means trying to be the intellectual property police, or trying to tell you what you should or should not do, but many people genuinely don't realize this until the FBI comes knocking. Just be aware that using bit torrent for file sharing in this manner is considered copyright infringement and illegal within the United States, and because bit torrent also shares whatever you download with other users who are also trying to download the same files, you could also get nabbed as a distributor.

oh, i'm just trying to find a movie that's ages old and not available on DVD here where i live. if i could buy it on DVD i would've.

Don't count too much on it - Bittorent isn't very good for really old stuff unless there's a cult following.

Have you checked if the film you want is available on DVD in another region?

As Aria quite correctly points out, you need to be careful about BitTorrent because of copyright issues.

I like old movies and radio shows. I go here: Internet Archive to look to these types of things. If it's available through this archive, I believe it is going to be legal to download.

I love the old radio shows and movie serials. Even if they don't have your movie, there is a lot of good stuff here.

Bob

@Marcus - yeah. no dice.

@bob - thanks for the tip!

I wouldn't bank on legality, archive.org doesn't check whether the uploader had the rights to upload under whatever license they have chosen and for websites archive.org just grabs everything they can without any thought towards copyrights, unless you complain or dig around in their FAQ to prevent them from copying your files.