A guide to torrents for total newbies

Abstract

This guide is intended for people who don’t know how to download stuff at all. I am not trying to impress all you k-rad 1337 people and I would appreciate it if you feel like adding any constructive criticism please do but don’t give me hell over this because you already know how to do it, some people don’t have any idea and they need help. This will not explain to you the theory behind how torrents work it will just make it easy for you to use them.

Introduction

So you went out and spent a bunch of money on a CD, DVD or game and you come home to find that your disk is scratched to hell. Still want to listen to your music, watch your film or play your game? What can you do about it? Well using the wonders of file sharing you can download a brand new copy of the disk and use it. Note; if you don’t already own whatever you are downloading you will be breaking several laws in your local area and could end up in a lot of trouble so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Right now I am going to give an introduction into how to download files using torrents. I will not talk about using file-sharing network programs like Kazaa or Ares as I find them to be pretty useless as you never end up with what you want nor will I talk about using IRC.

Using torrents
In order to download a torrent you first need to find yourself a client. My favorite and the one I recommend is bitcomet. Once you have installed your torrent client you then need to download a .torrent file. These are small files (typically between 5 and 50kb but they can reach 250) that tell your client where it needs to look for the different files for the game, film or album you are looking for. When you download them put them in a folder labeled ‘.torrent files’. This will make everything easier for later. Torrent files can be downloaded from all over the place. Lots of companies release demos of games via torrent (F.E.A.R. did this with an official torrent of both the single player and multi player demos). The best places I find for trying to get torrents from are torrent spy and pirate bay, but there are many others such as torrent reactor, mininova, torrent portal etc.

When you go to open a torrent file you should select to open with bitcomet. This will then give you a screen with the save location that you want to save the files to at the top. Click browse and then choose which folder you want to download the files into. For example you could put any mp3’s into your music folder. In this window there will also be a bunch of tick boxes with file names next to them. This allows you to decide what files from the torrent you want to save to your hard disk. This is useful if you only want one song from an album but could only find a torrent for the whole album. Only files which have an X in the box next to them will be downloaded. Next click ok and you will start downloading your desired files.

Configuring BitComet to work better for you

First things first, go to options/preferences and you get a new window to appear with a bunch of sections down the left hand side. The first one you are going to modify is connection (this should be visible by default, if not click connection on the list of stuff on the left hand side of the window). The first thing you should do is to change to max global upload and download rates to ones that better apply to your internet connection. You do not want you max speeds in the program to be faster than your connection can handle because this will slow your downloads down. Now this program monitors speed in kilobytes per second but your internet service provider will tell you your max download speed and upload speed in kilobits per second. Changing from to the other is easy you just divide the number of kilobits your connection can handle by 8 to give you the number of kilobytes it can take as 8bits=1byte.

A worked example

Let’s say you have a fairly standard ADSL connection of 2mbit. A lot of people have this in their houses now and I consider it to be a normal working household connection in the UK. This means that you are able to download data at 2mbit or 2048kbits of data per second. When you got your information pack from your internet service provider it will have a maximum upload value. For 99% of the 2mbit connections I have seen it is 256kbits up but you may have 512kbits up if you are very lucky. Now it is highly unlikely that you will actually be able to use all 2048kbits down and 256kbit up. Most 256kbit systems have a real max of 244kbits per second so you have to take a little bit off just to be on the safe side.

So you take your max download of 2048 and divide by 8 to give you:

2048/8 = 256kilobytes per second down

And you do the same for your up connection so 256 divided by 8 to give you

256/8 = 32kilobytes per second up

Next you should take 5kilobytes per second off each way to account for the fact that that real speed never equals theoretical speed. This give you max global upload and downloads values of:

250kB/s down and 27kB/s up

These are the values that you should enter into the spaces in the connection tab. The more you upload the faster you will be able to download but we will get to that later.

More setting changes

Next if you are using either an ethernet or wireless router you will need to forward the ports that BitComet will be using. You need to forward the port which it says is it listening port on the connection screen that you just adjusted your up and down speeds on. If you are running Windows XP then you can go to advanced options/connection and check the ‘Enable UnUP mapping’ box and this will automatically forward the ports needed if your router supports it (not recommended unless you know what you are doing and you know your router can take it cause I’ve had problems with it before). If you don’t have a router and are the only computer on you home network then you need not worry about this step as it doesn’t apply to you.

If you click on the task option below connection on the left hand side of the window then you will be able to change the default download directory meaning that every time you download a file you won’t have to change where it is going to and it will end up somewhere sensible and usable.

Once you have managed to do all of this you are ready to start downloading files via torrents.

So what sort of file should I be downloading?

One thing that does happen very frequently with torrents is that people put large files into what are called .rar files. These are essentially archive files so that the single larger file is broken down into many smaller files. This helps prevent loss of large chunks of data if you get corruption which is sometimes inevitable. To use the files contained within these archives you need to download a copy of WinRar which is free from somewhere like here. When you download these multiple .rar files you will get a file called nameofmovie.rar and a bunch of files called nameofmovie.r00, nameofmovie.r01, nameofmovie.r02 etc. You need to extract the .rar file not any of the .r00, .r01, r02 etc files as they wont work. If there is no .rar file at all then open the first numbered .r00 instead and it should work

Well if you want to get music then you have 2 choices. The first is real CD audio which weighs in at around 700mb per CD or you use mp3’s which are much easier and smaller. There are other types of audio encoding such as AAC (apple audio codec – used for when someone encodes a CD using I-Tunes), WMA (Window Media Audio – when you use Windows Media Player) and Ogg Vorbis (a better quality encoding system than mp3 but not so widely used, often used for 5.1 surround sound encoding on video files).

If you want to download a film or video clip them it can come in all sorts of different file types. Primarily you will end up with files with these sorts of extensions: AVI, WMV, MPEG, RM, RMVB. These are media files will all happily play straight away using windows media player if you have to correct codecs, .rm files need real media player. You should get both the Xvid and DivX codecs by clicking the links provided. This will let you see far more types of films. If you have trouble viewing a particular file I advise that you get hold of the Video Lan media player from here. This is an awesome bit of software that will play almost any type of media file you try with it (I have never had one it couldn’t handle) and its open source.

If you go to download a movie and you find that you have downloaded a .bin and a .cue file, a .mdf and a .mds or an .iso file then what you have got is a copy of the data off the CD/DVD. These are known as image files and can be viewed by mounting them in a program such as alchol120% or daemon tools or they can be burned to a disk using a program like Nero. These types of files are designed to be burnt to disk and then played back using a DVD player hooked up to a TV. If you downloaded an .iso it is probably a rip of the exact image of the retail DVD of the film you want. This is best for replacing a damaged DVD that you own. They normally are either 2.85 or 4.6gigabytes in size which is very large and can take some time to download. If you get 700megabyte files then they are either VCD or SVCD and will play in most resent DVD players. Most movies which come as .cue and .bin or as .mdf and .mds are either VCD or SVCD.

As a general rule the bigger the file the better the quality however a 700meg dvd rip will be better than a 1.4gig ‘cam’. There is a fairly standardized naming system for movies that you have:

CAM - which is some guy in a cinema using a hand held camcorder to record. These are usually rubbish. Not worth downloading unless you are desperate

TS – Telesync - the video is recorded using a camcorder and the soundtrack is added later. These can be ok but are normally pretty poor with audio synching problems, that’s when the audio doesn’t match the images on the screen, its normally up to 1 sec behind. VideoLan includes a feature to compensate for this delay.

TC – Telecine – shot in an empty cinema using a proper camera and directly linked to the sound source. If done well can be very good. The way that films used to be transferred to VHS for mass distribution.

DVD screener – a rip from an early DVD release of the film that is intended for awards viewing. They are normally good quality but have messages come up on the screen every 20-30mins saying that they are screeners and go black and white for a couple of minutes at random intervals.

DVD rip – a full rip of the official DVD of the movie. These are normally very good quality and if you go for a 1.3gigabyte the difference from DVD is almost impossible to make out if you have it running through a normal TV.

Downloading games is just the same as with movies except that you normally get an .iso or a .bin and .cue along with a crack and a readme.txt file. I will go over all the different ways in which to install games in a later walkthrough if I ever get around to making one.

Problems that occur when using torrents

Occasionally you will download a torrent that is in multiple .rar files and it will claim to be 100% complete overall. Then when you try and unrar it, it will say that it is unable to because one of the rar files is incomplete. What you need to do is select the file in the bitcomet and select files from the list which goes summary, trackers, files, peers, chat, log, statistics. You will then find that one of the files has got to 99.99%. This happens because someone has sent you a bit of corrupt data and the file has been unable to finish itself but it thinks it has finished. What you have to do is delete that file and then let it download the file again. This is the only major problem I have ever come across and is easily solvable once you know how. To delete the file right click on it and go to browse download directory and then delete the corresponding file out of the download directory.

Some tips and common courtesies

When you download a file please make sure that your download to upload ratio is 100% or higher. If everyone only uploaded half as much as they downloaded then the whole thing would fall over and stop working. It's about file sharing people not taking data and not giving anything back. Torrents work by limiting your download speed in direct relation to your upload speed so the more you upload the faster you download.

Also there are many other different torrent clients that you can use. I know that some torrent sites have issues with bitcomet due to the ability to spoof seeds in order to improve download rates. Many people choose to run azureus, and many sites recommend it, but as this is coded and runs in java it can cause problems on slower machines (ive had difficulty performing basic multitasking on an AMD 1ghz with 128meg ram with win98 running it).

End stuff

I wrote this so don’t pass it off as your own. You are welcome to send this out to people and pass it on to anyone you think might benefit from any of the information contained within. Feel free to put this on your webspace or do whatever you want with it as long as you make sure that I get the credit for writing it.

Have fun

U2


links
bitcomet - http://www.bitcomet.com

torrentspy - http://www.torrentspy.com/

piratebay - http://www.piratebay.org/

winrar - http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar351.exe

xvid - http://www.xvid.org/downloads.html

divx - http://www.divx.com/divx/play/download/

videolan - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/


happy downloading Smiley