Goobimama's guide to "download stuff"

I’ve been asked on more than once occasion, “how to download stuff” from the internet. That being said, I thought I’d write a small little guide on how it is that I download stuff. I’m not saying this is the most perfect way to download stuff, but it works for me. Please don't pawn me if you find this to be the most useless guide out there.

As of now, there are two ways to download stuff. The ever popular torrents, and there’s the “Warez Boards” like Projectw.org (which recently shut down) where you get direct links to download stuff from a http server or an ftp server. Warez boards are rare and ftp servers are only for the Uber Geek...

Let’s look at torrents.

Keep in mind that this is not a technical guide, but a home cooked thought into downloading ‘stuff’. A torrent is the new Peer-to-Peer (P2P) filesharing system.

The bittorrent protocol was designed for sharing large amounts of data over the internet. Since there is no actual data on any of the trackers, they can’t be taken down for piracy. It is also universal, as in, you can use any client across any platform, unlike say, Limewire. The torrent system also makes sure there is error correction in case one downloads corrupt data (fed by MPAA maybe).

Here’s how it works.
I will not go into the technical aspects of how it works, but torrents are divided into two camps. The Seeders, who have the complete file with them. And the Leechers, who have the partially downloaded file. The ratio of seeders to leechers is crucial as to decide the speed at which one will be able to download.

Basically, a Seeder, who has the full file, uploads at his max speed to numerous leechers. But the beauty of torrents is that even leechers can share. Say if a leecher downloads 50% of a file, and another leecher has just 10%, he could download from the seeders as well as the leechers with more data than him. A leecher can download as well as upload at the same time.

A torrent also doesn’t download sequentially. As in, if you are downloading a song, it won’t download it second after second. Instead, it grabs random data from leechers and seeders, which increases the speed of downloading.

Where do I start?
Start by choosing your torrent client. Its your torrent manager from where you’ll be controlling all the aspects of your torrents:

uTorrent, which is currently only for PC is in my opinion the best. Its light in weight and has some amazing features like the WebUI (maybe later). There are those who think Azureus is also good, but its a memory hog.

Transmission is the current best for Mac. There is xTorrent which looks beautiful for a torrent client, but it is a paid software. uTorrent port is in the offing, with private BETAs floating around.

Get to the good stuff…
Now, the speed that a torrent offers is decided by the number of seeders to leechers on that particular torrent. Say a torrent has 50 seeders and 5000 leechers, it will obviously offer a very low download speed. But a torrent with 40 seeders and 2 leechers would offer considerably better speed. This also depends on the quality of seeders. Sometimes two seeders with 100mbps upload speed can feed a large number of leechers.

Here’s some sites where you can download your torrents:

• mininova.org: Music, Movies, Games. Family friendly torrent with no paka-puku content.
• thepiratebay.org: Software, Movies, Games. Some Paka puku.
• torrentz.com: The google of torrents. Searches most public torrent sites.
• keitex.net: Formerly mvtorrents.com, it is exclusively for music videos. It had a mixture of torrent links as well as direct http links via Rapidshare.com.
  

Then its just the matter of downloading your .torrent file, and loading it in utorrent or whatever client you might have.

Private Trackers
This is the real good stuff. While mininova and thepiratebay.org can give you a lot of torrents without any problems, they are plagued by leechers which in turn means slow speeds. Enter Private Trackers. A private tracker is one where you register with the torrent tracker, and maintain a good ratio which is what differentiates it from public trackers.

While you can leech endlessly from public trackers, and not bother about seeding, private trackers insist that you need to upload as much as you download. Most have restrictions of a minimum of .5 ratio to be maintained. Which means that for every 100MB I download, I have to upload 50MB in return. Of course, this does not mean that one has to do it for EVERY torrent, one can have a ratio of 0 on one torrent and 2.0 on another...works out to be the same.

Getting a higher ratio means one gets more features and less restrictions like “wait time” where one has to wait for say 24 hrs before one can leech a torrent.

Good public trackers to get into are:

• torrentleech.org: Movies, Games, Music, Software, everything
• torrentbytes.net: Currently offline, but good speeds. Movies, TV shows, everything.
• x264.eu: Good for movies released on x264 codec which looks better than your average Xvid/DivX movies. Exclusively movies)
• hdbits.org: I live here. Its the best HD tracker out there. It maxes out your connection and has the widest selection of HD content. Don’t know what I would do without it. (also, bit-hdtv.com)
• demonoid.com: Its the biggest private tracker, spanning over a million users. This doesn’t have the real speeds that true private trackers have, but it is better than public trackers. Currently shut down due to server problems.
• Oink.me.uk: A very popular tracker for music and movies alike. Is currently down due to site attacks.
  

You will need invites to many of these trackers, as membership is kept tight to ward off the leeches. You will have to ask someone for an invite, maybe a geek friend or a roadside hooker.

Releaselog
Here’s a site for all your release information. Instead of visiting Mininova.org to find out what’s the latest movie release, go to rlslog.net. Its a blog of sorts which reports all scene releases. Its useful as the guys comment on the quality of the video/audio as well as provide screenshots/samples to decide the quality for yourself. They cover everything from Movies to TV shows to Games.

The W!zard has posted a guide for the "key" to what terms for scene language used to define the movie release.

Geeks: Any contributions to this post (not torrent site links) are welcome. Send them to my gmail id...