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