Torrenting - How To

Overview (Skip to instruction)

The basic process in downloading torrents is:

1) You go to a web site, search and select a torrent file. The torrent file contains the details of whatever you want to watch, but not the video itself.

2) You then open the torrent file in another application, (A BitTorrent Client) to do the actual download of the video you wanted. BitTorrent is a kind of Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing protocol.

BitTorrent allows individuals to work together to distribute a single set of files.

Most home users can receive data faster than they can send it, Bit Torrent networks can sometimes be slow - but often, people continue participating in the distribution of the file long after they have finished downloading, because more people are uploading than downloading, download speeds are good for popular content and reasonable for less popular content.

Bit torrent is not suitable for rare content - at least one whole copy must continuously exist amongst the current peers, otherwise the torrent is useless.

As a guide, on my machine an episode of a popular TV show takes about 20 minutes on a 6Mbit/sec line. (About 450KByte/sec).

Advantages

• TV shows Available same day/day after showing(in the US.
• Low Quality "cam" Movies available on release to cinema. A High quality versions as soon as the movie is release to DVD anywhere in the world.

• Very good variety of content (old and new).
• Zero advertising. (no skipping. Yey!!!)
• Almost Free (requires a PC and decent Internet connection).
• Near on demand (must start downloading in advance).

Disadvantages:

• You cannot stream the content.
• Computer needs to be online a few hours a day
• Illegal, possibly unfair to actors, etc. (but extremely unlikely to get noticed/caught)
• Setup can be complicated/expensive
• Requires some effort to maintain. Once you are comfortable with it and have everything setup, it takes about 5 minutes a week to manage.
• To watch on a Tv, the Tv must be connected to PC during playback. (There are various ways around this).

So, to work

(preparation time: 1/2 hour; cooking time: at least 1 hour)

1) Download and configure uTorrent. Make sure you start the program at least once and carefully go through the wizard let it associate .torrent files and configure the connection settings.

(Good instructions can be found here on the uTorrent site.)

2) Go to The Pirate Bay or another torrent site and search/browse for what you want.

If you want to download, say House MD, try searching for something like this:

House MD season (the word season helps narrow down to a TV show season).

or

House MD s02e07 (if the season isn't complete yet or isn't available in whole season format) (s02e07 is short for season 2 episode 7).

3) Sort the listing by clicking the SE heading (seeds - number of people who have the complete file).

4) Pick the torrent that has a title matching what you're looking for, with the highest SE number . As a rule of thumb, this number should be at least 10.

You might want to start with a single episode with an SE of 100+ because it will download quickly. The file size should be about 350Mb. Just to make sure it works.

5) Scan the description and comments, most people are honest and if the file is rubbish, it will say so in the comments. Click download torrent.

6) The torrent should open in uTorrent in a few seconds (or there should be an option to save it to your hard drive).

Then you will see the files it contains (if it's a series), you can select the ones you want/don't want or just click Ok. If you save the .torrent file to your computer, open it for download in uTorrent.

7) Optional step (recommended) when downloading a whole season:

It's a good idea to pick just one or two of the video files in the torrent.

Pick only the video files, these have the ending .avi or .mkv - these are the only ones you need. If the torrent contains files like .zip, .exe, .rar or r01 - discard the whole thing - downloads contains rar archives are usually OK but not worth the trouble if you can easily find a non compressed version.)

Downloading a whole season can take up to 1-2 days, and a few hours at best. Because a single episode takes about 20 minutes in best case scenario, get the first one or two files and if you like them you can tell uTorrent to get the rest later.

8) Optional, To get better download speeds, it's usually a good idea to have 2-3 different torrents going at the same time, this utilises your Internet connection better. The program will also queue additional torrents and start them sequentially, all this is configurable in uTorrent.

9) You should also cap the amount of bandwidth being used to send and receive.

Uploading: About 10-20Kb/sec. Too little will slow downloading but more than this doesn't usually help unless you feel generous.

Downloading: Set this limit to suit your needs, faster if your not using the computer/Internet, slower if you want to do other things.

10) Download and install CCCP from http://cccp-project.net/ (this program allows you to play pretty much all video files).

The setup wizard for this look a bit complicated but just click through it and don't change any of the defaults.

11) Open the video by locating the file in explorer and double clicking on it.

Watching Downloaded Video on your TV.

One more thing to consider is how to watch the video on your TV. If you have a laptop it's usually easy to connect it to the TV.

Ideally the TV should have a VGA, HDMI or DVI input. It is usually possible to connect to older analog TV from some laptops.

In any case, a cable should cost no more than £5 on eBay.

You can also get remote controls that allow you (with suitable software) to select the show, pause, etc (works a bit

like playback on a PVR (e.g. Sky+). Windows Media Center is included with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and is my favourite.

You can purchase a Windows Media Remote control for about £30-40. A small wireless keyboard also works well (you don't need a mount with Media Center).

There are Linux based PVR solutions but i found using Linux as a PVR didn't work very well and was a lot of work to setup and maintain.

I don't have any personal experience of doing this with a Mac OS, but from what I've read this doesn't work very well. (A Mac Mini running windows with Boot camp + external HDD would probably be ideal though.)

There are other ways of getting the shows to the TV but these are usually more expensive and less convenient. The cheapest option is probably a DVD player capable of playing divx files from a USB stick or a DVD created on a PC.

Useful Search keywords:

File Quality:

CAM/Screen - a low quality copy of a recent movie.

DVDRIP, BRRIP - Usually a near dvd quality movie - about 220mb for 22 minute shows, 350mb-550mb for 40 minutes, 700mb-1000mb for films.

720p/1020i high def video - much larger (2-3 times)

ipod/psp - a video encoded to be suitable for playback on hand held devices such as Ipods and PSPs. Usually very small files.

Other:

Dimension/HDTV - name of the group / person who "created" the torrent.

vostfr, sub, ITA, FR- subtitles or foreign languages, caution! these are usually in .srt files - deleting them gets rid of the subtitles - however, some content has subtitles hard coded into it which can't be removed and are very annoying - try to avoid torrents with any of these words.

XVid/x264 - technical video formats - not important.

Note about HD files. If viewing on a pc or if your TV is connected to a pc via a digital link, it might be worth getting 720p or 1020i versions of video files (where these exists). Just add 720p to your search string. These are not as commonly distributed as standard def (DVD quality) and are usually only available for certain shows, on a single episode basis - and for a short periods of time. The improvement in quality is noticable but not hugh, also, many PCs, especially laptops, stuter during playback of these files

Dell XPS 710 and 30" Dell LCD

I have recently purchased a new desktop, this was a DELL XPS710. This is one of dell's high-end machine's and it was quite an investment at about £2500. I got mine with a 2.7gHz Dual Core 2, 4GB ram and a NVidia 8600 graphics card, a 30" dell LCD and Vista Ultimate.

The case is black and silver, a large and very heavy tower which runs close to silent.

It also came with a Dell bluetooth keyboard/mouse - this is very nice except that there is a delay of a few seconds in it coming to life from standby where the mouse and keyboard don't respond. The keyboard has a volume dial which i love. It takes 4 AA batteries in total which last for a few months. The Bluetooth dongle that comes with the keyboard/mouse set is a bit basic, it supports data sync with my phone but i was unable to get a bluetooth headset to work.

I have found that playing games isn't really for me. I don't know why but it feels too much like work and not much fun, maybe i'm playing the wrong games. The games performance in this configuration is good but you would probably want more powerful/dual graphics if you were seriously into gaming. I use the machine mainly for desktop work and as a media center. In those tasks it is a joy to use, very quick and responsive - no waiting for software to start and dialogs to open. It could still be faster, but not much. Startup still takes about a minute from off and about 10 seconds from S3 Power save.

I use Media center on Vista a lot, it is easy to use and rock solid. The menus layout is logical and quick, mostly, and the visual effects work well. For example the program guide is displayed as a semi transparency over live TV. I have a Haupage dual tuner and this works well with a sperate Microsoft remote control. The whole exprience of this is terrific - it's really slick and polished.

I'm not crazy about the rest of vista. It feels a bit flackey and i have had a few BSOD. Occasionally it stops recognizing some of the hardware and reinstalls the drivers. It's not serious but still annoying. Overall, other than the media center, there are no advantages to vista, and i suspect the machine would be even more responsive with XP, especially for games.

I installed Ubuntu on this machine to see what it was like. Most of the hardware was easy to get going though i didn't feel it was worth the effort to get it fully configured. Video playback quality of hidef MKV files was poor under Ubuntu and I couldn't see any real advantage other than the freedom aspect.

Excluding the monitor the machine cost about £1,400 which is not much more than a similare configured machine would cost to self-build. The price includes 3 years next day support which gives me a bit of peace of mind. I don't think i would have been able to put together a machine of this quality - mainly bacause of the bespoke dell case so overall i am very pleased with this machine.

ASCII Generator

I don't know why i find these generators so irresistible, but I do - I will keep on posting these till I don't. So stuff it, because:

From the Mighty Wombat

Stripe Generator 2.0

This background comes to you from the crazy people at the Stripe Generator 2.0 I LOVE THIS!!!

Bialetti Brikka Coffee Maker

My 4 cup Bialetti Brikka Coffee Maker is by far my favourite kitchen device. It’s a coffee maker that is cheap, reliable and easy to use but whose produce is second to none. The coffee is rich and strong without being bitter.

My Beloved Brikka
The coffee maker has a special valve which makes the coffee in high pressure. You use it be filling the lower section with water, then the middle section with Coffee Grounds. You screw on the top section tightly and put it on the stove for about 3 minutes. The pressure builds up inside the lower chamber and when ready is released at once with a loud hiss. The result: coffee similar to espresso with a beautiful layer of crème (coffee froth).



No messing around with learning how to use a complicated machine (not to mention the cleaning). The flavour IMO is better than what you would get at any coffee chain (and almost free) and better than what you could produce at home with even a fairly expensive espresso machine.

When making the coffee, keep three things in mind:

1. Measure the quantity of water precisely
2. Use coarsely ground coffee (Filter grind if buying packaged)
3. For best results, screw the top section on as tightly as you can

This post is an experiment in selling via the blog, I picked something that I know is great, wrote my opinion and put a link. If you fancy one of these please buy it by click on the Amazon link at the top of this article.

eBay to purchase StumbleUpon

How come eBay buy all the cool sites on the internet, I though they were about selling? Skype is now the de facto VOIP on the net, miles ahead of the competition on quality and functionality, PayPal too. eBay buys these things at just the right moment, just before the network effect kicks in and crushes the competition. Clever that.

If you're lucky you could pick up some of my cool second hand junk on eBay (until 21:00 on Tues)

I Just couldn't resist

Physics in video

Physics is a strange subject. It deals with the most fundamental properties of the physical world, yet unlike many such ideas, it doesn't seem to give me any insight on the day-to-day experience of the world. At school I did Ok in physics by going through the motions of solving the problems, without understanding much about what i was doing. This left me with a very bitter taste. It was boring and seemed to comprise of meaningless symbol manipulation. The symbol manipulation in Physics is a key problem. It's inconsistent and in-expressive; the "clever" bits aren't in the representation, it's just short hand for the real explanation, an agreed way of referring to a specific idea. Like notes for a talk, but pretty meaningless by itself, Gerald Sussman IN The Role of Programming says it sucks.

Contrast that with computer languages which are completely self contained, any discussion about a computer program will always be less complete then the source code itself (assuming it runs on an idealised machine). What is computer science?

Particles and Waves, a PBS TV program has finally given me a glimpse of what Physics is really about. It's about giving humans, who can never experience the very large and very small, a way of visualising these things which doesn't involve drugs or psychotic hallucinations. This program explains the conflicting views of light as either wave or particle and shows how physicists in the 20th century resolve this dilemma in a very elegant way. But more interestingly, it shows how the ideas came to be. How people working together and over several generations brought together bits of the puzzle, sometimes adding a new element, sometimes extending or reusing existing ideas to refine and deepen the understanding of matter and energy.

Regardless of how this relates to reality and the very practical implications of these ideas, I am bewildered by the power and elegance of the methods used to construct them. Solutions to problems that seem fundamentally beyond the ability of humans are gradually teased out and shaped in a way that is accessible to us at an almost intuitive level.

This talk by physicist Murray Gell-Mann, a rather nasty man about creative thinking, is a bit dull. When asked about the practical implications of something, his initial response is that there are none (and ridicules the asker). But some of his talk is about how the "business" of physics is done. This is from someone in the "trenches" of physics which is why I find it so interesting.