Remember Napster? It was the original P2P (Peer-to-peer
or computer to computer) software that folks could use to
share files. Well, Napster got sued by so many music companies
that it went under and finally arose from the dead as a totally
legal ‘file distribution’ system. Companies can
use it to share files within their organizations. You see,
Napster’s computer had all the information about what
users were sharing what files. So, it was easy for a court
to require Napster to hand over all their information and
thus, prove they were illegally sharing software, movies,
CDs, etc. So, now enter BitTorrent.
Bit Torrent takes a different approach. After you download
the BitTorrent software and install it, then find some files
to share, no one computer has the information about who is
sharing what. Instead your computer only knows about other
computers that have all or part of the file you want to share.
It works like this: imagine you have an album of music; the
BitTorrent software breaks it up into tiny pieces and sends
these pieces to other computers that want the software. Each
of these computers is both receiving and sending the information,
little piece by little piece. Another computer doesn’t
even need to have downloaded the whole file before it starts
sharing. As soon as it has even one piece of the file, that
computer can start sharing that piece with other users. That’s
what makes BitTorrent so fast; your BitTorrent client starts
sharing as soon as it downloads one chunk of the file (instead
of waiting until the entire download has been completed).
But first, you have to find and download a torrent file (which
uses the .torrent file extension) and then open it with your
BitTorrent program. The torrent file does not contain your
files. Instead, it contains information which tells your BitTorrent
program where it can find peers who are also sharing and downloading
the file.
But, let’s back up a second. First let’s leave
aside the legality of ‘sharing’ music, movies,
software, TV shows, etc. Let’s just talk about a way
to share these things. Here’s how.
You need to download a small piece of software. Chose one
of these:
uTorrent (uTorrent.com) for Windows <<my favorite one
Transmission (transmission.m0k.org/download) for Mac
Azureus (azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php) or KTorrent
(ktorrent.org) for Linux
Install this software and you’re almost ready to go.
Now you just need to find some things to ‘share’.
There are many, many, sites out there. You can ‘google’
for “best bittorrent download” and be rewarded
with 1,000’s of web sites.
(mininova.org, ThePirateBay.org, isohunt.com, and Torrentz.com
are some of the top rated sites)
My favorite is btjunkie.org. Now search the site using their
search box like you’re using Google—just type
in the name (or part of the name) of what you’re looking
for. You’ll likely get several results, but you want
to choose the torrent with the highest number of seeders (indicated
in most BitTorrent search results under a field labeled ‘S’).
Seeders are people who have already downloaded and are sharing
the entire file. The more seeders, the faster your download
will be. Some sites also provide you with a health meter,
which is generally a measure of seeders vs. active downloaders.
Despite the fact that BitTorrent has been around for a good
6 years now, the lightning fast file sharing protocol hasn’t
completely taken off in the mainstream.
Now Download the torrent. Once you’ve found a good and
healthy torrent, find the download link and download the torrent.
Your browser will ask you what you want to do with the file,
so be sure to tell it to open the torrent in the BitTorrent
program you downloaded above.
Your BitTorrent program will open and (possibly) ask you where
you want to save the file(s). Pick your save location, hit
OK, and that’s it; your file will begin downloading.
If you’re not impressed with the speed at first, be
patient. It can sometimes take a minute or two before the
download ramps up to full speed. If you’re still not
happy, try searching for another torrent with more seeders.
