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How To Automate & Organize Torrents with Transmission [Mac]

Jeffry Thurana — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:00:30 +0000

The best things in life are free, but human in general – myself included – have the tendency to take free things for granted. One of the examples of great and free things that I took for granted is the torrent downloader known as Transmission.

I’ve been using Transmission forever. It sits dutifully in the background ready to fetch any torrent downloads that I throw at it. It never complains, it just works; while I never really pay attention to it.

It turns out that Transmission is a torrent downloader that has more convenient features under its hood. All the user has to do is dig a little deeper into its Preferences (Command + Comma). And oh boy, it is rewarding.

Automating The Downloading Tasks

All this time, I stuck with the mundane manual torrenting tasks. Everytime I wanted to download a file via torrent; I would download the torrent file, manually add it to Transmission, wait until the download finishes, then move the file to their respective foldesr: movie files to Movie folder, mp3 files to Music folder, png and jpg files to Picture folder, you get the picture.

After looking into the Preferences options, I realized that I can automate the process using Transmission’s built-in features.

Our first stop after opening the Preferences is the “Transfer” menu. The “Adding” tab is the place to set the default location of downloaded files. You can also tell Transmission where to put the unfinished downloads and whether Transmission should show the “Adding transfer” option window.

But the automation magic is in auto-add setting; you can automatically add torrents from a specific folder to the download queue. If you combine this with default download setting from your browser or download manager, you can really simplify your torrent life.

You can take this automation concept further by utilizing the “Groups” feature. Basically, Groups allow users to categorize files based on some specific criteria and set a specific location for each group. Users can save their time considerably because they don’t have to manually move the downloaded file over to a new location.

To set a group, select one color from the available options on the left pane. Rename the label, tick the “Custom Location” checkbox, and set the download location for this group.

The next step is deciding on the filtering criteria for the group. Upon ticking the “Assign group to new transfer based on criteria” checkbox (and later by clicking the “Edit” button), you will see the familiar Finder-like filtering system.

Click on the “Plus” (+) button on the right to add more rules, and if you want to delete a rule, simply click the “Minus” (-) button.

The last automation option available via Preferences is bandwidth usage automation. If you have an internet connection with a fair-use policy, you can schedule specific transfer speed limits at certain times here. Just tick the checkbox and set the time when speed limit will occur.

Subscribing to torrent?

For those who love to download TV episodes, it would be nice of you could subscribe to the series so that it will be downloaded automatically without the need to add them manually every time the new episode is out.

Transmission doesn’t have that kind of feature, yet, but that doesn’t mean that users can’t do anything about it. The same result can be obtained by using a help from another application called Automatic which will automatically download RSS items based on a preset criteria.

If you “subscribe” to the RSS torrent of a series, it will be added automatically to Transmission and downloaded to the specified location. All that’s left to do is to enjoy it.

Do you use the Transmission torrent downloader? Check out other posts about Transmission and the comparison to uTorrent. And don’t forget to share your thoughts and opinion using the comment below.

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The Guide to Biggest File Sharing Networks: Pros & Cons

Mark O'Neill — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:01:35 +0000

Have you ever wondered what are the biggest file sharing networks out there? Have you ever wanted to know the pros and the cons for each but didn’t know where to look? Want to know which file sharing network gives you best download speed or highest level of privacy? In that case, this short manual should be just the thing to help you out.

Here today for your viewing and educational pleasure is the MakeUseOf Guide To The Biggest File Sharing Networks. Written by Stefan Neagu of TuxGeek and put together by our very own Manuals Editor, Simon Slangen.

We look at what P2P is, the popular file sharing networks and how to use them as well as the pros and cons for each. We also look at privacy issues and share some excellent tools helping you to protect your privacy on these networks. By the end, any questions you have about file sharing networks should hopefully be answered. If not, leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can answer it for you.

Download: The MakeUseOf Guide to Biggest File Sharing Networks

If you enjoyed this release, you should also check out other available MakeUseOf manuals.

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Top 6 Torrent Alternatives To The Pirate Bay

Will Mueller — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:01:31 +0000

With The Pirate Bay losing its previously ever-loyal crowd due to being sold out to the Global Gaming Factory, and possibly requesting certain users to pay for its operations, many users are now turning to alternative torrent trackers to fill their needs to file share.

Here are 6 of the best alternatives to Pirate Bay torrent downloads.

Mininova

Mininova is one of the most visited and most used torrent trackers on the web, formed after the split of SuprNova. Mininova tracks .torrent files from numerous websites across the web, including those that are private and commonly requires invites.

Mininova also has a large, dedicated base of users that consistently makes Mininova one of the higher quality moderated torrent trackers. At the time of writing, Mininova had over 8.9 billion downloads – definitely credible.

isoHunt

Another extremely popular torrent tracker is isoHunt with over 1.3 Petabytes of data (1300TB) of files and over 1.6 million active torrents. So you can be pretty sure you will find what you are looking for.

One good feature of isoHunt is that it updates all of its torrents seeders and leecher numbers hourly, unlike many other torrent trackers, which occasionally updates on a 6 hour or even daily basis, allowing users the ability to get accurate information consistently.

btJunkie

A lesser known torrent tracker, btJunkie is quite an effective alternative to more popular trackers. Boasting that it has over 3.6 million torrents and 80 million peers (seeders and leechers), certainly puts it up there with some of the top torrent trackers.

Similar to Mininova in that btJunkie also has a spider that automatically searches public and private trackers for the latest and greatest, makes it definitely worth checking out.

NowTorrents

Although NowTorrents is not a tracker, it is one of the best, if not the best, torrent search site. By searching over 14 popular torrent trackers, and allowing you to vary your searches based on the relevancy, number of seeders, number of leechers, seeder to leecher ratio, etc. really helps making finding torrents that much easier. NowTorrents even allows users to register for the site and change various preferences to your liking.

VerTor

VerTor is one of the best torrent search sites on the web, and that is not an exaggeration at all. The main feature that separates VerTor from any other torrent search engine though, is its ability to scan and verify all of it’s torrents and individual files.

Furthermore, when searching for a movie, for example, VerTor will automatically show you the different virus scanner results for the individual files and give you 9 screenshots throughout the movie as well as a 30 second audio preview for quality purposes, and can even tell you when there is a password protected archive file.

The only downside to VerTor is the number of torrents it has (around 650,000 at time of writing), but make no mistake VerTor almost always has at least 5 different versions of the latest kind of torrent, just not the variety you would get from a traditional torrent tracker. (VerTor has been previously covered on MUO here.)

(For more torrent search engines, see the MUO directory for the tag “torrent”.)

Is this the end of the famous Pirate Bay tracker? How long before Pirate Bay downloads are a thing of the past? What torrent tracker sites, or torrent search engines, do you use for your torrent sharing needs? Tell us in the comments!

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How To Hide Your Torrent Files Inside Pictures

Simon Slangen — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:01:24 +0000

Torrents are one of the greatest branches of file sharing today, but they can be quite a bother at times as well. When using torrents, aside from your webbrowser, you’ll need a torrent file and a separate application.

In the end, all of this is superfluous next to the vast advantages, but sometimes we still dream about torrent files – or the rest of the internet – being more flexible.

If you’re looking for added flexibility, or simply secrecy for your torrents, do read on.

hid.im

With hid.im, you can encode your torrents to an image file – this allows you to hide torrent files inside pictures beyond recognition. Simply surf to the website, upload your torrent file and wait for your png. You can save the image to your harddisk, or temporarily reach them on the website.

The png file will look like a rectangle of electronic noise, as you can see below (ubuntu-9.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent).

So what’s the use of this technology? Besides being able to ‘hide’ your torrent files inside pictures, which will be increasingly difficult once this technology gets more well known, TorrentFreak puts it on ease of use.

That’s right, with your torrent file in picture format, you can simply upload it to otherwise restricted forums, mail them to your friends, or embed them in a MakeUseOf article. Exactly how many people will need it remains the question, but it’s a beautiful concept, and I can imagine a multitude of situations in which it’d be useful.

Decoding your Torrents

Obviously, you can’t just open the png files in your local torrent client, they’ll need to be decoded first. There are two ways to do this.

The easiest, perhaps, is by using the bookmarklet which you can find on the webpage. For those of you that don’t know, a bookmarklet is a bookmark that executes a small piece of JavaScript in your browser. Once you activate your bookmarklet, you can simply click on the image for a download link to appear, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

The bookmarklet works on Safari, Firefox, but not yet on Chrome. Internet Explorer is not specified, but you could give it a shot.

An alternative – for Firefox users, that is – to the bookmarklet is the hid.im add-on. With this one installed, you can simply right-click on your torrent pictures, and save them to your computer. Less work, but only if you’re using Firefox.

Have a Go

Below we’ve included a sample coded torrent. The torrent file in question is, of course, 100% legal. Its identity, however, remains unknown. Install the Firefox add-on or bookmarklet, and see if you can decode the torrent.

Do you think you know which torrent it is? Tip: its got to do with a popular MakeUseOf subject.

What do you think about hid.im? Advancement of the century, or useless technology? Let us know what you think – or how you plan to use it – in the comments section below. Share your ideas with us, and your fellow MakeUseOf readers!

There are plenty more cool torrent articles. Read how to download torrents with your console and mobile, or how to download them on a Windows computer without using a client. Check out other torrent related articles – I bet there’s plenty of stuff you haven’t heard about!

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Download Torrent Files Hassle-Free with BTaccel [Free Invites!]

Tim Watson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:00:37 +0000

I’m a big fan of the BitTorrent protocol despite its bad rap. Devised as a method to distribute large files without using up too much bandwidth, it’s become a hit for all the right and wrong reasons. It’s unfortunate that using BitTorrent can be so difficult: Tracker? Seeding? Port forwarding? Why did my ISP block my download, even though the files were legal?

BTaccel, a browser-based and remotely hosted BitTorrent client, can help to make things far easier. Feed it a link to a torrent and it does all of the P2P wizardry automatically, downloads the file and prepares it for you to grab off their servers via HTTP.

In order to use it to download torrent files, you’ll need to sign up with an invitation. Lucky for you, I’ve managed to get 150 free invites just for MakeUseOf readers! You may get it at the end of this article but continue reading to find out what BTaccel can do.

First, the user interface is Google-simple. You have an account link at the top, and a box in the center where you enter a URL or keyword. You can search by keyword, browse a website by proxy or paste in a direct link to a .torrent file.

Browsing torrent tracker sites via the proxy is a bit hit-and-miss in this alpha release. Sometimes, it will pick up a clicked torrent link, but not always. Your best bet is to browse the tracker in a separate window, copy the torrent link’s location and paste it into BTaccel.

After you’ve chosen a torrent, the next screen you see will be a summary of the torrent’s contents. Once the download from the swarm is complete, you can be alerted by email, and then you may download torrent files individually, or download a single compressed ZIP of all the files packed together.

To view the torrents currently in your download queue, hit the Home page and you’ll be presented with a list of your torrents and their progress.

What makes BTaccel so great is the fact that your system won’t be bogged-down with uploading and downloading. Once the torrent is finished, you’ll have a direct download from BTaccel’s servers (which must be completed within 72 hours). Another advantage is the fact that you can start a torrent from any computer with a browser and then finish the transfer at home, when it’s convenient.

In comparison to using a traditional BitTorrent client, BTaccel offers users an advantage on ease-of-use. For those interested in the protocol, we have plenty of BT-related material on MUO, especially The Big Book of BitTorrent, which I consider a must-read. How do you like your BitTorrent? Let us know in the comments.

We’ve got your hookup for the first 150 users to sign up with alpha invite code “100GBmakeuseof150”. If you’ve missed out, follow @btaccel on Twitter for a chance to score a code.

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Download Torrents Without A Client Via Torrent2Exe [Windows]

Jeffry Thurana — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:00:30 +0000

Maybe you’ll find it hard to believe but there are a great number of people – especially in my part of the world – who are still not familiar with the whole concept of using and downloading with torrents. This popular file-sharing method has been around for sometime but I still get a lot of questions such as: “What now? I downloaded the torrent but nothing is happening.” I assume it’s because of the fact that downloading files via torrent is not as straightforward as downloading files directly from the server or from the web.

You can help those poor souls who are still unfamiliar with torrent by using Torrent2Exe. A few readers mentioned it in the comments of my previous torrent article. Using this service, users can download files with the torrent protocol without the need to install a torrent client.

How it works

Basically, what Torrent2Exe does is combine the “.torrent” file and a small torrent client into one single stand-alone EXE package. Users then can execute this EXE file and immediately start the downloading process.

It also means that anybody can just create an EXE file of a torrent, copy it onto a thumb drive (or send it via email to friends) and download it on another computer. There’s no need for a separate torrent client! Perfect for one-time torrent downloaders who don’t want to install additional software.

How to make the EXE file

Enter the link to the torrent or select a torrent from your hard disk
Choose whether you want a small or normal size EXE file, the difference is stated below
Click “Start Download” to get the EXE
Share the EXE or the link to download the EXE to with your torrent-illiterate friends
Run the EXE to download the files

Please note that the “Small EXE” file is smaller but require extra components to be downloaded the first time it runs. “Normal EXE” file on the other hand, is bigger in size because it already has all the components needed built-in. Since the difference in size is not too significant compared to the size of commonly-shared files these days, I personally would choose the “Normal” one. But maybe those who would like to attach the EXE in email will prefer the “Small” one.

To draw you a picture, in my experiment on downloading Fedora (691MB), the small EXE is 96.3KB and the normal exe is 592KB – insignificant compared to the downloaded file.

Extra Functionalities and Limitations

Torrent2Exe goes one step further by providing users with extra functionality to share torrents, such as:

Users can publish the EXE file on their sites or blog by just providing the visitors link to the EXE file. This link will appear after user adds the torrent files to the Torrent2Exe site.
Users can also insert direct links to the downloads together with links to the torrent files. A special script is provided to help automate the process.

Still, there are some limitations.

First, the fact that the stand-alone has the “EXE” extension on it said that it can only be run in Windows computers.
Second, even though you don’t need a torrent client to download the torrent-shared files, you still need a torrent-friendly connection. So if your admin block the lines, there’s nothing you can do (except try to bribe the person).
Third, if you plan to share the EXE files via email, it’s recommended that you archive the EXE files into ZIP or RAR (or other compression formats) before doing the emailing. Some email services (such as GMail) don’t allow the distribution of EXE files. Plus, compressing the files will give you smaller size.

Want to learn more about using torrents? Check out our MakeUseOf Big Book of BitTorrent: The Torrent Guide for Everyone.

Have you used Torrent2Exe or do you know other alternatives? Share your thoughts in comment below.

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3 Easy Ways To Preview a Partially Downloaded Video Files

Damien Oh — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:30:10 +0000

If you are one of those who download videos from BitTorrents site on a regular basis, you will know that the quality of the downloaded video is sometime not what you have expected it to be. After spending plenty of hours downloading only to find that it is a poor cam quality video can indeed be a frustrating experience. I know how that feels cause it happened to me all the time.

Now, while you are downloading the movies, wouldn’t it be great if you can preview it, check out its quality and then decide if you want to continue the download?

VLC

We all know that VLC is a versatile media player that can play almost any media format you throw to it. Well, another thing that you can get it to do is to repair and playback the partially downloaded video.

Open your VLC and load the video file. It will automatically detect that this is broken file and will prompt you to repair it. For instance, it can open broken avi files.

Click the Repair button to start the repair process. It could take quite some time depending on the file size of your video.

Once the repair is finished, it will automatically playback in the player.

To avoid damaging the integrity of the partially downloaded torrent file, it is best to first duplicate a copy of the video file, then use VLC to repair and playback the duplicated copy. When you are done previewing, simply delete the duplicated copy.

DivFix++

DivFix++ is complete rewrite of the “DivFix” application simply because the developer feels that the original DivFix program is too slow and take up plenty of CPU power. What DivFix++ is capable of doing is to fix broken AVI file, rebuild the index of the video and allows you to playback in a media player.

Indeed, after using DivFix++, I do find that it is much faster (than DivFix and VLC), not CPU-intensive and able to reproduce the AVI file in good shape. The best thing is, it doesn’t require any installation. Karl has written a well explained article about DivFix++, so I will not go into great detail here.

One thing that I like about is the ability to fix a file to a temporary location so you won’t hurt the original file. Similarly, you can preview the fixed video with a media player and then delete it once you are done.

Like VLC, DivFix++ works in Linux, Windows and Mac and it is a great software worth trying out.

GOM Player

On the frontend, GOM player looks just like any of the media player in the market. It allows you to play videos (of various format) and have great subtitles support. However, what really distinguishes GOM player from the rest is its patented technology that allows you to play broken AVI files on the fly.

Don’t ask me how the patented technology works, I know nuts about it. The only thing that I know is that when I playback the partially downloaded file, it doesn’t show any error message, nor a prompt to ask me to repair the file. What it does is to repair the file quietly on the backend and playback when it is done. It is just like streaming video on the Web, the initial process might be slow, but if you pause the video and wait for the streaming (backend repairing) to complete, you will get smooth playback in no time.

GOM Player is currently available only for Windows platform.

The above three software have helped me a lot when I was downloading bitTorrent videos. What about you? What software do you use to preview partially downloaded video?

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Wyzo Beta – The Web Browser for Downloaders

Simon Slangen — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:14:03 +0000

It happens more and more, people trying to merge several items into one. We see it happening in the mobile phone sector, where nearly every phone is a camera and a radio as well, and in the software industry as well. This being good or bad is something for you to decide.

We’ve seen multiple applications, trying to expend the reach of Torrent clients and the like. The Vuze and xTorrent clients both implement the web in their applications, allowing you to browse torrents as well as downloading them.

However, why is it that the web should be integrated in a Torrent client? Why not integrating torrents into a web client? Well, Wyzo manages to do just that, and the results are astounding.

Wyzo – The Media Browser

Wyzo’s long-term aim is to make web browsing smarter and more enjoyable. They want the user to feel home and to have the tools he needs, at any given time.

Most of this reflects upon the ease of downloading, but doing so without repressing the global browsing experience.

The browser is based on Firefox, and many things remain the same. Other things however, got a real makeover. You can read about the features of the browser below.

New Look

This third version of Wyzo has been completely restyled. You’ll notice that the tabs and buttons have adapted a slick chrome-like appearance. It’s a professional-looking skin that’s easy on the eyes – nothing too graphical, like some of the things we see these days.

Torrent Downloads and Acceleration

In the area of downloading, Wyzo comes with two major trump cards; FireDownload and FireTorrent, two great addons developed by the guys behind Wyzo.

FireDownload is a simple download accelerator. It doesn’t do anything particularly fancy, except speeding up your downloads. A lot. By using multiple connections with the server, FireDownload can accelerate your downloads up to ten times their original speed.

FireTorrent handles, as you might’ve guessed, the torrent integration. All torrents are simply added to your browser downloads. You can download in multiple sessions, and seeding happens automatically. Using FireTorrent, torrents become as easy as direct downloads.

FireDownload and FireTorrents are also available as Firefox add-ons via FireAddons.com.

Search … Everything

Wyzo comes with a customized startpage, which allows you to search the interwebz for almost everything, including torrents, images, video, news, blogs and maps. Each section gives you access to multiple search engines (e.g. you can search for torrents on YouTorrent, Mininova, Vuze and Torrentz).

Loaded With Add-ons

Besides FireDownload and FireTorrent, Wyzo is pre-loaded with various other Firefox extenstions, that enhance the user’s browser experience.

Remember your OS’s alt-tab function? Ctrl-Tab does the same in your browser. It’s a slick and easy way to visually navigate between your open tabs.

Cooliris - previously covered on MakeUseOf – gives you a visual representation of web content. On supported sites, it crawls for pictures, videos and articles, and presents these as a picture wall. It’s an extremely beautiful, and addicting way to surf the web.

FireGestures allows you to perform simple actions through mouse gestures. Hold a trigger and draw simple shapes to navigate and interact with web pages. You can also add new gestures, by using user-scripts.

So what’s your take on Wyzo? What do you, or don’t you like about it? Tell us, and your fellow MakeUseOf readers, all about it in the comments section below!

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The Big Book of BitTorrent: The Torrent Guide for Everyone

Aibek — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:45:07 +0000

There are tons of ways to download files, be it pictures of last Christmas party, or that new cinema flick. Amongst them are the conventional direct download, FTP, and of course Peer-to-Peer.

BitTorrent, an example of P2P, is a great, perhaps even the best way to download files, both in concept as in use – that is, once you’ve got the hang of it.

Because all of it seems pretty abstract to innitiates, many people experience difficulties at the start. Even those that would call themselves ‘advanced users’ often don’t know even half of what’s possible.

MakeUseOf proudly presents to you The Big Book of BitTorrent. All you think you should know, and more.

In 28 illustrated pages, Saikat Basu from The Things I Do takes newcomers by the hand and guides them in their first steps. Initiates, but also the more experienced users get their fair share of information.

Read how to start, and advance is the world of BitTorrent. Download The Big Book of BitTorrent here for free, in PDF.

Please pass this manual around and help us spread the word.

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How To Use RSS Feeds To Download Torrents Automatically

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:00:47 +0000

There is a lot of content available on BitTorrent these days. Normally you would go to a torrent site, look for the torrent you want to download, download the torrent file and then add it to your torrent client for download. You can automate this process by using RSS and µTorrent (or any other torrent client with RSS support).

So, how to download torrents automatically:

First and foremost you will need µTorrent. You can download it from here.

RSS if you still don’t know is a way to keep track of when your favorite site has been updated with new content. Using something called a feedreader you can get these updates delivered to you. Now whenever a new torrent is added, the torrent sites would update listing it and thus the new torrent would appear in the RSS feed. We can use this RSS feed to view/download interesting torrents automatically

Get the right Feed

So how can you find a feed listing only the torrents you want to download? After all the torrent sites would show every new torrent file in its feed and you couldn’t be downloading them all. Well as it turns out, a lot of torrent sites provide several RSS feeds and ability to create your own feeds as well.

Lets look at mininova for example. Apart from separate feeds for different categories you can also get feeds for your searches. Let’s say you are looking for releases by aXXo, so you search for aXXo and then click on the RSS button that appears on the top and there you have your RSS feed. You might want to refine your search to get the results you want. Now whenever there is a new aXXo release, you will get notified and/or can start download automatically. You can use the same approach to get feeds for TV Torrents. Also check out tvRSS for the same.

Setup µTorrent

Now its time to set up µTorrent to take the feed you have created/searched and do its thing! Follow these steps to setup µTorrent the way you want:

Grab the feed url and open µTorrent
Click on Add RSS feed and paste the put in the feed URL. You can choose to automatically download all the torrents that appear in the feed or just view them and then decide which ones to download and which ones to skip.

Make sure you have the sidebar visible else you will not be able to view the feeds.
There you have µTorrent setup for downloading via RSS, you can stop here or you can take it one step further by adding filters to download only specific files that specify a set criteria.
Right Click on the feed and choose RSS Downloader, Click on add and then specify the filter options. You can specify all kinds of options here including download folder, labels, specify episode numbers to download, the priority to start the download with, the acceptable filetypes and much more.

You can also right click on a feed entry that and choose “Add to Favorites” so that you can then filter entries similar to it and tweak the settings if you would like a bit of finetuning.

You might be wondering why not just use something like Miro or TED to download torrents automatically? That’s because I am a huge fan of µTorrent and would recommend it highly. Lightweight, feature rich, an awesome web interface for remotely starting downloads, set out to do one thing – “BitTorrent” and does it best. Your views may differ, make them heard! Shoot them in the comments section!

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OneSwarm Makes P2P File Sharing Private And Personal

Simon Slangen — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:44:12 +0000

Torrents are one of the most used file sharing networks at the moment, and becoming more and more popular by the day.

As all of you probably know, torrents make every user into an uploader as well as a downloader, sharing the load amongst peers instead of burdening one server.

Most people only know torrents as a program for piracy though, used for downloading games, music, and music. Torrents are all that, agreed, but also so much more.

OneSwarm

OneSwarm is a project of Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson, students at the University of Washington. They’re trying to renovate the concept of Peer-to-Peer, introducing increased privacy and user friendliness.

Welcome to Friend-to-Friend.

OneSwarm is a web-based F2F (read more below) client, that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Scroll down for a more extended function overview.

Increased Privacy with F2F

The Peer-to-Peer protocol relies on everybody for both uploading and downloading. Although this makes for an incredibly efficient way of file-sharing, it also buries your privacy-bucket deep in the backyard.

Perhaps you don’t know, but while connected to other peers, everybody can see your (raw or resolved) IP address, allowing them to track you and your online actions.

OneSwarm resolves this by deploying a net of trustees, ‘friends’ as one might say. This way, you can choose to connect only to the people, who will be the only ones able to view you connected and your IP-address.

That doesn’t mean you can only access packages from friends, though. When a friend doesn’t have what you’re looking for, OneSwarm triggers a domino effect, and will start looking with your friend’s friends, and their friends after. Each level you further will exponentially increase your results.

It is said that two random people can nearly always be connected in under eight steps, a principle which OneSwarm puts to good use with its F2F protocol. Because all packages get passed on by friends, and nobody can see past the next link in the chain, no one knows what is going where, only in what direction it’s heading.

User-Friendly Through The Roof

All of you who’ve ever tried cooking up a torrent know it’s not an easy task by far. Especially a beginner can easily get lost in this intricate maze.

OneSwarm reintroduces userfriendlieness to Peer-to-Peer (or Friend-to-Friend). Sharing files or folders is as easy as selecting them in the application, and choosing who to share it with; no more digressions for you, sir.

Check the embedded video below for a complete overview.

Make sure you’ve got the right files. By using OneSwarm’s Media Preview, you can watch parts of a video or collection of photographs even before it finishes downloading.

All content is transcoded real-time in OneSwarm, so you don’t need any additional applications or even codecs. And we’re not only talking flv’s here, but also non-web encoded content like avi’s!

If your computer is turned on, you can remotely access OneSwarm and your files through a browser. Just log in with the right username and password, and you’ll feel like you’re sitting behind your system.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is that you can use this to stream any downloaded media directly to the another browser.

Check here for a video tutorial that will walk you through the process.

Conclusion

To be honest, F2F isn’t ready to replace P2P yet, for the simple reason that this cancer hasn’t spread far enough yet. For the moment being, OneSwarm’s F2F is best used as a simple file-sharing system amongst friends, but as more and more people install the software, the available content will surge as well.

However, as OneSwarm is able to double-function as a regular P2P agent, I’ve already made the switch. Have you? Drop a comment below.

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Check If Your ISP Throttling Your BitTorrent Downloads

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:00:47 +0000

So the cat’s been out of the bag for a while now that ISP’s are throttling or in some cases even blocking your BitTorrent downloads or seeding.

Comcast came out and admitted to it’s practices in the United States last year. You can read about it here on wired. Since then there has been lot’s of speculation on if other ISP’s are doing the same thing…

What do you think?

Yeah we do also!

Now there is a free tool that will simulate BitTorrent activities and let you know if your speed or activities have been effected and to what extent. This program (aka bittorrent throttling test) and group have picked up momentum since 2008 and now have the backing of Google and other big names.

Are you curious as to if your ISP is throttling your torrent downloads and doing you dirty?

Well so are we.

Run the tool below on any web browser on any operating system and post back what your results are in the comments. It is strictly web based and nothing gets installed. So you can try it pretty much anywhere.

I tried this in the office on my Cogent circuit. It is a 100mb Ethernet handoff so I was not really expecting any throttling. All you need to run the test is browse on over to:

a title=”http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php” href=”http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php”>http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php.

You will be greeted by a web page that looks like this:

Simply scroll down on the page until you see the Start Testing button. You can run the detailed or the simple test. The only difference is the intensity of the test. Some ISP’s are believed to only throttle torrents after a certain period of time (greater than 5 minutes) so this will have you covered.

After you hit the Start testing button your test will begin and you will see a count down in a window that looks something like what you see below.

When the test is complete you will get your results. They will also look something like mine which you can see below. My ISP is NOT throttling my BT downloads or seeding activity and they go into detail on each point they checked as well as the speeds they were able to achieve with the transfers.

I love geeky statistics. Here are my results:

I had a buddy of mine run this against his machine on Comcast in Manhattan and his results came through with Throttling and max speeds of only 25kbps… Whoa that’s slow! Thanks for the tip El Di Pablo!

Post your results in the comments. And if you have another method of testing if your ISP is getting it’s grubby hands on your torrents post that as well. Don’t be shy kids

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Who Needs The Amazon Kindle When You Have A Netbook?

Mark O'Neill — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:01:51 +0000

There’s not many things in life that I ardently desire from a materialistic point of view but the Amazon Kindle is definately one of them. I am a huge reader and the thought of putting my enormous library onto it and carrying it around with me in my pocket is just something that I really want to have, regardless of the price. But once again, I seem to be suffering from the curse of living outside the United States where the Kindle doesn’t work.

But when I bought an Acer netbook a few weeks back, I realised that I didn’t need a Kindle to carry my books around with me. I just needed to find a software program to open e-books, find the books I wanted on either torrents or Project Gutenberg and then read them on my netbook.

After a bit of searching, I settled on Microsoft Reader as the app of choice. A lot of people seem to scoff at Microsoft Reader because it’s 9 years old and it’s Microsoft but so what? It works and as far as I’m concerned, if it works, what does it matter how old it is and who’s made it?

What I really like about MS Reader is that they have a conversion tool for turning Word documents into Reader e-books. So if you have say a text file from Project Gutenberg that you want to read in MS Reader, you can transfer the text to a Word document, press the Reader button which sits in the Word toolbar, then after 30 seconds or so, you have a nice new Reader file to open up as an e-book. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

After installing MS Reader on my netbook, I opened it up and the first thing you’ll see is your library. (Please note that some parts are in German because I have a German language computer) :

Now it’s pretty empty because I’ve just installed it. If you want to buy more books, it goes without saying that Microsoft encourages you to buy books in their own file format (.lit). Their online store starts here and the book links are redirected to stores such as Powells, Diesel, Fictionwise and so on. Prices start from $10.

But this is MakeUseOf and the emphasis with us is always on free. So I want to show you the conversion tool to make your own e-books. It really is pretty good. Now if you want to grab the latest Steve Berry or John Grisham book from torrents then that is up to you. I am not going to condone it or take any stance on it whatsoever. That’s just going to get me and MakeUseOf into trouble. Instead I am going to play it safe today and talk about a copyright-expired book. Let’s take one of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures.

Now when you install the MS Reader conversion tool, it will perch itself on your MS Word toolbar like so :

Now let’s say for example that you want to read The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes in MS Reader. It can be found here for free in Project Gutenberg. All you need to do is download the text file, copy (CTRL+C) the entire text and paste (CTRL+V) it all into a Word document. Make sure the margins are all OK, your fonts are all OK (I personally detest Times New Roman so I always change the font) then hit that conversion button. Within 20-30 seconds, you’ll see the converted file in your computer which you should then drag over to your Reader library folder. Double-click the file to see it in your Reader library page :

Now the conversion tool is good but it isn’t perfect. So you’re going to get the odd paragraph here and there which is going to get pushed out of whack. As you can see below. But look at the excellent quality of the text. Very readable wouldn’t you say? I chose Arial size 10 as my font but you can choose any font and size you want.

The conversion tool apparently also converts pictures so you can also embed the images into the Word document and Reader will also move them over.

Now what if the original document isn’t a text document but a PDF file? A lot of e-books are PDF files these days. Well you have two options as far as I can see. You can either convert the PDF to a Word document or you can use an OCR scanning service to turn the PDF e-book from an image into text (a bit like what Project Gutenberg does. Varun highlighted an OCR tool called JOCR a few days back). Your fastest option is probably to convert the PDF into a Word document. We’ve covered quite a few of these services on MakeUseOf. Karl has covered HelloPDF. There’s also ConvertPDFToWord, PDFUndo and many more.

Anyway, to come back to MS Reader, once you have your custom-made e-book installed inside, there are options you can take advantage of. You can have it read the book back to you (although the voice sounds like Hal from 2001AD). You can bookmark a page (obviously an essential requirement) and if you right-click on a word, the following menu pops up -

Add Bookmark – By highlighting a word or phrase, you can bookmark that page in different colours and automatically come back to that page at any time by clicking a bookmark icon in the right margin.
Add Highlight - You can highlight a word or phrase as if you would with a highlighter pen on a normal book. Again, you can automatically go straight to a highlighted word or phrase by clicking on the annotations icon in a pop-up menu.
Add Text Note – you can add a personal note to a word or phrase.
Add Drawing – you can add a freeform drawing to a word or phrase.
Find - finds all other instances of that word in the e-book. Not sure how useful that one is.
Copy Text – no explanation needed here
Play – you can hear the word being spoken by MS Reader. Good if that language is not your first language and you want to hear how the word is pronounced.
Lookup – looks up the definition of the word. Only works if you have a dictionary installed in MS Reader.

So to sum up, the Kindle is a fantastic device but if you live outside the US and it’s not available to you, it’s not the end of the world. You can easily install something like Microsoft Reader on your netbook and have something kind of similar. As you will see, the text quality is excellent, you can go full-screen, bookmark pages, highlight text….with a bit of app tweaking and hacking, you can probably make your netbook do the things that a Kindle does. Well OK, not quite everything but you get my meaning.

I’d be interested to get your opinions on this so if you’ve done something similar, if you know of a better e-book program or if you have any other comments, start writing them below!

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Coda.fm – Music Album Torrents

Stefan Neagu — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:01:44 +0000

A great website surfaced not too long ago, and it has been a a gold mine for music lovers everywhere : a torrent site fully dedicated to music, with an UI to make Amazon envious. In this article we’ll discuss the past and future with its creator and administrator, a mysterious web developer from Europe, who wishes to remain anonymous due to threats from the RIAA and IFPI. We’ll also take a look at Coda.fm and analyze how it has changed the way you will download music.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for a music album torrents site?

A: I’m a music lover, and I always use BitTorrent to get my fix. I was disappointed with all the public indexers and the private trackers. I found the experience of searching for music in the first ones very tiresome, always having to navigate through a lot of irrelevant search results and dead torrents.

I grew tired too of the strict rules of most of the private trackers, and the elitism of some of their communities.

Those reasons motivated me to create a new kind of music torrents site, open for everyone and that offered a user experience comparable to the best e-commerce websites.

We all who constantly seek new music deserve something better, so I tried to build a website I would enjoy using, a website where:

The main content is always the music, sorted accordingly by albums, artist, and genres. The torrent files is the way to get what you want, and not an end in itself. Search and download for music was a pleasant visual experience, and not a burden. You always have a lot of information about what you are about to download, to make sure that is what you are actually looking for.

It’s not only about the search, it should help you to discover new music, always offering recommendations of albums and artists similar to the ones you like.

And above all things, that is fun to navigate freely, exploring music by genre, artist, year, similarity, etc., and always one click away to download whatever you like.

I thought that many people would share my point of view, and appreciate this new approach for a music torrents site. Being an experienced web developer, I decided to make it real.

Q: Has the RIAA/IFPI threatened to sue?

A: Yes, they already threatened us many times citing the DMCA, a law that doesn’t apply in my country, and where no other legislation is applicable to what we do. [I won’t disclose my location or name because]

Sooner or later, the RIAA, IFPI or a similar organization will try to shut us down, so, the less they know about us, the better.

Q: What would you like to see from artists and labels regarding piracy?

A: They need to realize that their old business models won’t work anymore in the digital age, […] we are living a revolution in the way the music is being consumed and distributed. They will all need to think outside the box and be willing to take risks if they want to survive, trying new ideas in order to adapt to a scenario dominated by the P2P technologies, [which are] unstoppable […].

Trent Reznor is a fine example of how the embrace the internet and thrive as a musician without a label, a middleman that should be gone soon.

Q: How do you feel about the ongoing lawsuit against ThePirateBay?

A: The final verdict will be very important and representative, to be taken in consideration by all the admins of torrents sites […], and specially those who are based in the European Union.

And I’m afraid that’s the real goal of this trial, a political trial that has nothing to do with justice as trying to serve as dissuasive propaganda.

Personally, I think that any law that see as criminals nearly all the youths of today and those who give them what they want [..] is clearly wrong. […] Of course, we’re in the same side,I could find myself in the same place, eventually. I wish we where bigger and able to do something to help them.

Q: How hard was it to develop the backend code and how long did it take?

A: The coding wasn’t as hard as defining the UI design, layout and navigation, that took me many iterations to get it right. It took me a few months to get a working prototype, that showed that the project could be viable, useful, and worth to be finished. In total, the development of the platform took me one year, working the first seven or eight months part time besides my day job.

Q: Why not let users report bad albums rather than hand picking by administrators?

A: I believe it’s safer this way, stopping torrents with spam and viruses before they are available for download. Besides, although the process that gets the metadata for the albums is automated, it requires supervision and manual approval, and that could be tiresome and boring for the users, leading them to upload less torrents.

Q: How do you plan on monetizing the site?

A: For now, we’re focusing on building a community, drive more traffic and add even more features that could put us ahead other competing websites.

I guess that the obvious choice would be putting ads, but I’m reluctant to do that. In the meantime I will try to find another way to monetize the website.

Q: Would you like to tell us about your favorite 3 albums of all time?

A: Wow, this is by far the most difficult question. So hard that I’m going to cheat, and list a few of my favorite artists instead:

Johann Sebastian Bach, by far my most listened, since I was a kid.
Other classical composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Paganini, Vivaldi, Handel and a few others. Astor Piazzolla, Björk, Portishead, Nine Inch Nails, The Mars, Volta Morphine, Sonic Youth, Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, Tricky, Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists, Mogwai, Tool.

Q: What can you tell us about your audio gear and listening patterns?

A: My gear is nothing too fancy, a moderately good sound system with the aux[iliary] input connected to my iMac, from which I play all the music with iTunes (I don’t use or buy CDs anymore, and I don’t listen to the radio either). I worry more about convenience and compatibility, than absolute sound quality, for example I don’t use lossless audio formats, and neither do I want the ultimate audio gear.

I listen to music every day, all day long, at home or on the road with my iPod: it’s the cornerstone of my life.

I hope I asked all the questions you wanted – but if not – leave a comment and I’ll pass along the questions. Visit Coda.fm music album torrents site and experience a new kind of music downloading – then come back and tell us what you think about it. We thank the Coda.fm Admin for this great interview.

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10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads

Saikat Basu — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:01:33 +0000

Imagine being on the autobahn with the accelerator down and then you realize that you are driving a wrecked car. The plight is not so uncommon on the information superhighway too.

Torrent users would attest to the fact that half of our time is spent looking for ‘healthy’ torrents and the other half trying to download (and a bit of upload too) at the maximum speed. The former is mandatory; the latter thankfully is within the realm of tweaking.

If you are the one who thinks that your torrent download speeds could do with a boost then keep reading. Below, you’ll find a few tips on how to speed up torrent download speed.

Your ISP is where it starts

Check the maximum download and upload speeds allowed by your ISP. Most ISP’s have specific bandwidths for both uploads and downloads. Obviously your torrent download speed won’t cross the cap set by the ISP. Go over to this article on Speed.io for broadband speed test and this one by Tina on ways to increase your connection speed. There are many other bandwidth testers like DSLReports which is included in the speed test within uTorrent.

Choosing the right BitTorrent client

Use the better clients out there like uTorrent, Vuze or the BitTorrent client itself. Wikipedia lists about 51 of them supporting the BitTorrent protocol. The choice of client used should always be updated to the latest version. The screenshots here depict uTorrent. The settings should be similarly configurable for other clients too. Mac users shuld also check our Transmission vs. uTorrent post

Go for healthy seeds and peers

A peer is any computer participating in the download and upload of a torrent file. A seed (or seeder) is anyone who has one complete copy of the file being shared across the torrent network. A leech (or a leecher) is the person who does not have the complete file yet but has joined the network to download it. A leecher becomes a seeder when he downloads the entire file and then shares it across the network.

For high torrent speeds, the best bet is in numbers. The greater the number of seeders, the healthier the torrent and the better the chance of higher speeds. The rule of thumb says to choose the torrent files with a high number of seeders and preferably lesser number of leechers i.e. a higher seed-leecher ratio.

Get through the firewall

Firewalls can block all incoming BitTorrent connections coming through. To ensure otherwise, a firewall should be manually configured to accept the connections and let it through the client. Windows XP has the Windows Firewall. Configure the firewall installed to accept the connections by checking the BitTorrent client on the allowed list i.e. Options – Preferences – Connection – check Add uTorrent to Windows Firewall. Also, check the Windows Firewall exception (if you keep it enabled) in your client too. Shutting down the firewall is not recommended as it leaves the computer open to attack.

Note: If the home computer is behind a router, it also should be configured through the feature called Port Range Forwarding to enable torrent traffic. The router documentation should have specific information on this.

Limit your upload rate

A peer to peer network is all about sharing alike, but an unlimited upload rate hits the download rate too. Using the speed tests, find out your maximum upload speed and then set your client’s upload rate (Global Upload Rate in uTorrent) to about 80% of your maximum upload speed. You can also try varying your upload speeds – keep it high initially and then gradually bring it down towards the middle of the download.

Note: Mind the speed units – it may be given in kilobits per second (kb/sec) or kilobytes per second (kB/sec). 1 kilobyte = 8 kilobit

Go to a different port

The default port for the BitTorrent protocol is any between port numbers 6881-6999. ISPs throttle traffic on these ports as BitTorrent sharing involves high bandwidth usage. It’s easy to configure a different port in your torrent client. Use some number above 10000 to get around ISPs and also avoid problems with other applications. By default, the uTorrent port is randomized each time it starts. Set a specific port by not enabling the Randomize Port setting.

Increase the number of Max Half Open TCP connections

This figure specifies how many connections a torrent client should attempt to establish simultaneously at any given time. Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or newer, limits this to a default of 10 as a barrier against virus multiplication. But that’s a bummer for torrent speeds as torrents too need a large number of simultaneous connections.

A patch has been available for a while from LvlLord which modifies the TCPIP.sys file in Windows to allow a higher number of TCP connections.

After running the patch, you have to set the number of connections in your torrent client. For example, in uTorrent go to Options – Preferences – Advanced – net.max_halfopen. Set any number from 50 to 100. But see that net.max_halfopen is set lower than the value set in TCPIP.SYS. Always check if it is still patched because Windows updates sometimes overwrite it.

Experiment with Protocol Encryption

Some ISPs love to act like Big Brothers and constrict bandwidth for P2P protocols. Protocol Encryption in most of the torrent clients helps to override this bandwidth shaping. Enable outgoing protocol encryption and put a checkmark on Allow Incoming Legacy Connections.

With protocol encryption, ISPs find it difficult if not impossible to detect that the traffic is coming from BitTorrent. Experiment with enabled, disabled and forced options because you could be getting better speeds with encryption disabled. Non-encryption makes a torrent connection compatible with someone who is not using encryption but as a minus it makes the torrent detectable to an ISP with a bandwidth restricting policy.

Bandwidth and connections

Your BitTorrent client’s settings options will let you enter figures for –

Global maximum number of connections gives the maximum number of connections that a BitTorrent client can make for any P2P exchange. Setting this too high does NOT mean higher speeds. Setting it too high would take up useless bandwidth and too low a figure would miss out on peers. For my 256kbps connection, I have a setting of 130.

Maximum number of connected peers per torrent gives the maximum number of peers that a BitTorrent client can connect to for any P2P exchange. Experiment by setting this number close to the available peers for a particular torrent. For my 256kbps connection, I have a default setting of 70.

Number of upload slots per torrent gives the maximum number of peers that a BitTorrent client will upload to for any P2P exchange. A low setting may affect downloads. For my 256kbps connection, I have a setting of 3.

uTorrent has a Speed Guide which handily calculates the figures for a particular connection.

Some common sense

Most BitTorrent clients allow us to view the individual files in a download. You can selectively disable the download of files you don’t think necessary.

Familiarize yourself with the customization settings of your particular client available in the Help files or at the website FAQs.

Some useful resources:

BitTorrent User Guide
uTorrent FAQ
Vuze FAQ

Optimizing the speed of torrent downloads is a lot of trial & error and a bit of patience. Do you have some tips to speed up torrent download speed? Any that you have successfully tried out? Maybe we can put some wind beneath the wings with your comments.

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5 Ways To Bypass Torrent Connection Blocking

Jeffry Thurana — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:05:49 +0000

Since its first arrival, the torrent protocol has evolved into one of the most powerful P2P methods available. But due to many reasons such as copyright infringement or bandwidth abuse, not everyone embraces this convenient way of sharing files.

Many admins block connections to torrent networks preventing the users from acquiring the torrents and/or the files.

But there are ways for the less fortunate to bypass torrent blocking – and here they are :

TXTor

Let us start with the simplest. Sometimes all the lazy network administrators do is filter the “.torrent” file. Their logic says that if you can’t get the torrent, you won’t be able to get the shared file. Well, yes – and no.

If your problem is only this shallow, you can use TXTor. Basically, the service works like this:

you tell TXTor the link to a “.torrent” file.
they will download it and rename the extension to .txt
then they will give your browser the link to the renamed file.
you download the file, rename it back to “.torrent”.
open the file using a torrent client and start downloading.

Unfortunately, TXTor can’t help you if your admin blocsk/filters the torrent traffic. The TXTor site suggests users to try to use different ports in the client or encrypt the traffic. But don’t fret. If meddling with ports and encryptions is too much for you, there are other easier online solutions to try.

BitLet

A pure online torrent client and behaves exactly like a desktop one:

users put the torrent link in the box (or uses an existing torrent file) then click “Download Torrent”.
BitLet will ask where to save the shared file.
after users give the location, the download process will start.

But being a torrent client, it’s still possible that the traffic gets blocked by the admin. It might work on your connection, it might not. My tests on several different networks gave me more failures than successes. It’s worth trying, though.

Torrent Relay

We can say that this is an online torrent client with a twist; accessible via normal browser, iPhone and iPod Touch, Play Station 3, and many other mobile devices. The service has been discussed before.

Here’s the overview about how the service works:

users provide Torrent Relay with a torrent link.
the shared file will be downloaded to Torrent Relay’s server.
users will get a HTTP address to download the file from their server.

The good thing is, this service makes the process of downloading torrents accessible to everyone, everywhere. The bad things are, due to the heavy traffic (as expected from this kind of service) sometimes the process becomes unavailable, and unless you are their “Prime Users” (read: paid members) the HTTP file download is non-resumeable.

I found no problem using Torrent Relay for small files, but if you are downloading large files with an unstable connection, you might consider paying them or the process will become extremely annoying.

If there’s a web service which allows users to download a file from a HTTP address to a resumeable online server, the combination with Torrent Relay would be a perfect option. (anybody know any?)

ImageShack

One of my friends tipped me off about this service. I was not aware that other than image hosting, ImageShack also give users the ability to download torrents. You only need to open a free account with their service.

At first glance, this one looks like a perfect one: users download torrents and save the shared files into their ImageShack storage and the shared files can be downloaded from anywhere, and by anyone the users share their files with. The limitation for free users is also generous (considering you can apply for more than one account): 5 GB of storage and 10 GB of bandwidth usage.

But I still haven’t been successful in my trials of using their service. I’ve always been presented with a “try again” screen and options to upgrade to one of their paid subscription options, with more storage and bandwidth, and “prioritized bandwidth allocation”.

But then again, maybe it’s just me. Maybe you will have better luck using this service.

Instant Torrents

Another would-be winner, Instant Torrents was a perfect service. Users sign up, login and put in the torrent file address (or uses an existing torrent file). Then they will download and save the shared file to their server under their user’s account, keep the file(s) for 20 days, and they even seed the file(s) until the ratio reaches 1.0. But as I’ve said before, this kind of service will attract overflooded traffic and strain the servers.

So, Instant Torrents changes the rules. Users have to be connected first to Ivacy Network (a paid VPN service which gives 1 GB free traffic) then go to Instant Torrents dot site version to add torrent files. A bit of a complicated process if you ask me, but users can utilize their private tracker inside Ivacy VPN which provides no real IP address – total anonymity.

As an option, users can search completed torrents in the Instant Torrents site or browse their “Ratings” tab for popular files and download them instead.

So, all in all, I still haven’t found the perfect service along these lines. But if you know other good alternatives that lets you bypass torrent blocking, or just want to share your experiences, please use the comments below.

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How To Cheat With Your BitTorrent Ratio

Simon Slangen — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:01:33 +0000

There are many great advantages to using private torrent trackers. For instance, the reliability and speed of the downloads exceeds those of free trackers, mainly because of the ratio systems. These ratio systems oblige everyone to upload about at least as much as they download.

Ironically, the biggest disadvantages lie also with the ratio system. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone should upload as much as they can, but sometimes your ratio obligations can put you in some pretty nasty situations.

I remember looking for a certain private tracker invite for a few months. When I finally got in, I tried to get my ratio up as high as possible – stacking up reserves. But however hard I tried, I wasn’t able to reach an approachably decent ratio. There were just too many seeds and too few leeches.

I had my computer running day and night, trying to upload as much as I could, but in the end I wasn’t even able to reseed my first download and I got nicked.

Cheat With Your Torrent Ratio

Some time ago, I found out that there were ways to manipulate your ratio. However, the consequences are not to be excluded.

(LEGAL) DISCLAIMER

Before we go on, I want to emphasize that everyone with a decent mindset should upload as much as possible. Don’t be the parasite on the backs of this unconditional medium, try to support it as much as possible.

Also – obviously – torrent trackers don’t like you doing this, and if they find out you’ll probably get banned. MakeUseOf will not be held liable in this matter – all blame for your actions lies with yourself.

Through the use of applications, we can spoof our upload count, and hereby alter our Torrent Ratio. There are several applications that can do this, all working in the same way. They fake the tracker update reporting protocol with fake data, to boost your ‘upload’.

Tracker Pro

Tracker Pro is one of these applications, and very easy to use.

To spoof your upload count, just add a torrent to the program. One of the great features that distinguishes this application from others is that you don’t even have to download the torrent to start “uploading”.

Tips For Staying Undetected

Like I mentioned in the disclaimer, if trackers notice that you’re spoofing your upload, you’ll most likely get banned. To prevent this, you need to lay low.

Limit your usage

Don’t use this application excessively. People will notice it if you suddenly become a master uploader – try using it only if you must.

Limit your upload bandwidth

You can limit the false upload speeds in the options. The lower you keep this, the harder it’ll be to get noticed. Note that this number is in Kbits (8 Kbits = 1 KByte).

Also, change this number as often as possible. Trackers use scripts to detect cheaters. By keeping your speeds low, and ruining your pattern, you can mislead these scripts.

Changing your User Agent

This is for the paranoid people amongst us.

Also in the options, you can also define which program you’re using, by changing the User Agent code and Client ID, although I’d advise you to refrain from this if you don’t know what you’re doing – messing up these codes will be like lighting a beacon.

You can search for these codes on User-Agents or plain ol’ Google.

Do you personally have any other tricks for getting one up on BitTorrent or any other file sharing network?

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FeedMyTorrents Keeps TV Shows Downloading Automatically

Karl L. Gechlik — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:01:34 +0000

Do you watch TV? Of course you do. You just might not watch it on a television anymore like me. I find that I watch most of my TV shows on my Windows Mobile device or in front of a computer. Yes I am a geek but that is not why I do it.

Time is something that is hard to come by nowadays so I take what I can get. If that is a Simpsons episode on my train ride home or an episode of “24″ while I am commuting from Manhattan to Far Jersey then to me that is awesome.

My TiVo at home tapes all my shows and I can grab them, convert them and go. But that takes time and time is what I don’t have.

So let’s say I visit this FeedMyTorrents website. They have RSS feeds all set up already for most of the popular shows that are currently syndicated.

You can click here without signing up to check out and grab their feeds. Check it out. Here is a snip of what they offer.

Each show has its own feed. This feed can be checked via most popular Torrent applications. The files are the same files you would find by searching your favorite Torrent site like The Pirate Bay or Bitsoup.

The blue “Normal” icon shows the resolution. Normal is just that. A standard broadcast. Some of the feeds have “HD” listed (720p)

So without signing up you can utilize the already created feeds. But If you create an account, you can combine all your favorite TV-shows to a single torrent feed.

Now that you get the idea let’s check out how to make it work. This gem is cross platform and works on the following torrent clients/OS:

uTorrent (Windows/Mac OS)
Azureus/Vuze (Windows)
Deluge (Windows/Mac OS/Linux)
BitComet (Windows)
BitRocket (Mac OS)

Clicking on each of those links will take you to their own How To Guide. We will be working with Azureus on Windows.

Open up your Azureus and go to Tools – Plugins – Installation Wizard.

Next choose the top option to pick from a list from SourceForge

Scroll down and choose RSS Feed Scanner. Then click Next.

You will then see this screen :

Just click Install and you are almost done! In a few seconds you willl get a pop-up that says it is complete like so:

Now that it is installed, let’s set her up and activate it. Go to Tools… Plug-ins… RssFeed Scanner

Then simply click the Green Plus Sign on the top to add a show like I did below. You will be able to fill in the details on the right pane after the plus is clicked.

It will then ask you for the name of the feed and the URL. I entered the Simpsons URL from their website.

I used this link for Season 20 in normal resolution. I then clicked “save”.

You will need to check the box next to your entry to make sure it is enabled as you can see below:

Then click back over to the Status tab and expand your selection like you see below:

There are torrents for all the Simpsons episodes in season 20. You need to create a filter so that it knows what to download. Click the bottom + to add a new filter: Then pick a name for the filter. It doesn’t matter what it is.

In this instance I just want everything from my RSS to be downloaded so I just filled in my path, I chose Set State to be Forced Download and Checked the box next to Active: Enabled.

When I was done I hit the test button and the green bar at the bottom appeared. This means something matched my filter!

Awesome now click back to the status tab and right click on your feed. Hit Refresh and watch it work its auto downloading torrent magic!

If all went as planned you will see your torrents downloading. You can work your own magic with the feeds and filters and you do not have to refresh the feed as I showed you in the last step – but it will take a few minutes for it to check on its own.

If you get this to work let us know what client you are using! This is simply awesome. I love my torrents

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Top Torrent Search Engines for All Torrent Downloaders

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:01:01 +0000

The last few years have seen a tremendous growth in the number of BitTorrent users and the content that is available via BitTorrent. Nowadays it is no big deal if you can find a TV Show on BitTorrent before it has premiered on TV. The number of sites indexing and searching BitTorrent files have kept pace with this growth.

So much so that there is an overwhelming number of torrent search engines that only search torrent files. Here are some of the top torrent search engines and sites which every BitTorrent User must know about:

The Pirate Bay

Think about torrents and the first name that comes to your mind is “The Pirate Bay”. The Pirate Bay is the grand daddy of all torrent search engines and trackers. The guys are facing legal threats, they are been condemned, but they have a mission, a message, and boy do they kick some ass! We all like TPB, don’t we?

The Pirate Bay tracks the largest number of torrents (I won’t even bother mentioning a number here, because it is going to be miles off in a month). Not only they have a huge collection of torrents, TPB is also concerned about your privacy and constantly makes tracking users difficult.

They also have a sort of user Karma. There are VIP users, trusted users so that you can find out which of the users are trusted and you can download the files with ease and peace of mind.

Mininova

Like “The Pirate Bay”, Mininova tracks torrents and has a large collection of them. It is believed that if you can’t find the torrent you are looking for on either The Pirate Bay or Mininova then there is a good chance that the torrent doesn’t exist.

A peculiar fact about Mininova is that the site doesn’t index adult torrents. Moreover the site is clean and I don’t think I have seen “aggressive (as in family content)” advertisements to this day on Mininova. So if you are at work and want to search some torrents to remotely trigger downloads at your home computer, better check it out.

Vertor

Although not exactly a top torrent search engine, Vertor is a nice site to have in your repertoire if you are an avid torrent user. Vertor servers constantly downloads torrents and checks them for viruses, passwords, DRM etc. The site then provides you snippets that can help you identify if the torrent actually has the content you were looking for. You will get screenshots for video files, sound previews for audio files and so on.

Demonoid

Demonoid is definately up there among the best. However to download torrent files indexed by Demonoid, you are required to have an account. The account, although free to create, is not owned by everyone out there. The registrations are open only for some time and you require an invitation to get into Demonoid. If you manage to get an account you will see why this is one of the best.

Meta Search Engines

A meta search engine specializes (or is supposed to specialize) in searching a number of torrent sites. You give it a query and it will search the most popular torrent sites and return you the results. Recently, there has been a flood of such meta search engines for torrents. So which one is the best? Well it comes down to personal preference, but here are some of the better ones:

While researching for this story, I asked all the MakeUseOf geeks which one is their favorite and Torrentz came out on top with a healthy margin. What I like about the site is the simple and clean interface. You instantly get an idea what is where and it works like a charm.

BtDig and Nowtorrents are also worth checking out. The killer features: you can sort by size, seeders, leechers and health. You can also set preferences such as which sites to search and which ones to exclude etc.

Some Specialized Torrent Search Engines

Legal Torrents – With all the hype about BitTorrent and copyright laws, you never know what is legit and what’s not. If you want to stay out of trouble check out Legit Torrents and Legal Torrents which only list legal torrents.
Public Domain Torrents – Lists torrents for downloading classic long forgotten movies in the Public Domain.
Linux Distributions – Linux Tracker and TuxDistro are good for finding torrents of Linux Distributions.

The list is by no means exhaustive, there are so many BitTorrent sites out there on the web, that it is only logical that I may have missed one of your favorites. So why not share with us what BitTorrent sites do you like the most and why?

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Safe Torrent Downloading with Vertor

Jimmy Rogers — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:04:45 +0000

In the last few months, I’ve noticed more and more infected torrents and torrent sites out there. The problem with securely downloading torrents is that many of the sites are based overseas or generally don’t get the benefit of mainstream security vetting. Here is one secure torrent site that offers safe torrent downloading.

VerTor is a new site that reworks the concept of torrenting. Most torrent search engines simply track and list as many public torrents as they can find. VerTor first downloads and scans any potential torrent to make sure it doesn’t have any spyware, malware, or viruses. If the file is a video, VerTor will take a set of screenshots as well, so you can verify it is what you are looking for at a glance. Likewise with audio files, VerTor creates a short preview of each file so you can listen before commiting to a download.

By first verifying all its torrents, you can feel a little bit safer when downloading torrents online. Of course, after downloading a torrent, it’s always wise to scan the output file before opening it, just in case.

As you can see, the site is designed to be a little less like the typical “text-based search engine” and a little more like a community. The people out there downloading movies and TV shows are obviously very enthusiastic about them, so VerTor offers some reviews/news options to users who want to discuss the hottest downloads. The reviews I have seen so far are very elaborate and include many links external references.

VerTor offers an added feature for users who have found a torrent they want on another site. The Torrent Check function allows users to input a torrent’s hash code (a long alphanumeric code found alongside many torrent listings) and check to see if that torrent has been scanned previously by VerTor. While VerTor’s library of torrents is relatively small (compared to older torrent sites), it will invariably grow and this tool will become more and more useful.

With any new technology, there are a number of potential flaws. The time it takes to download all these torrents, scan them, and sample them will shave some efficiency off of VerTor’s offerings.

Also, as I said before, VerTor is new, so it will take time for its scans to soundly cover all of the files you might be interested in. That being said, VerTor is a good “first place to check” when looking for new movies or TV shows.

The security and ease of use make it a smart choice among torrent sites. There is a good FAQ about torrenting in general and each file gives the option to download directly from your browser via a virtual machine, instead of requiring a separate torrent client. It’s a great place for noobies if ever there was one.

Overall, VerTor is still a fledgling among some very large birds (The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt). That being said, no one else is offering a Vertor-stule verified safe torrent downloading service. The interface is fairly simple and the list of torrents will find just about any popular file you are looking for. Definitely add this one to your list!

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The Best Anime Sites On The Web

Simon Slangen — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:08:02 +0000

Just like most of you (probably), I like to waste time. I do this by trying to bring the nerd in me to a higher level, discovering new things, and watching movies. Especially watching movies and series, actually.

One thing that I’ve learned over the years, is that anime is heavily underrated. A lot of people associate ‘BeyBlade’ and ‘Pokémon’, with anime – which it is, but anime includes so much more!

All kinds of stories exist in the anime world, both good and bad ones, serious and funny series, traditional and frotiering.

Today, we’ll take a look at a number of anime websites on the internet. These sites are, in our humble opinion the best anime sites on the internet for a particular site.

The Best Anime Info Site

How do you get to know new series? Through friends or family? Or perhaps via magazines. But there are also some great places on the internet to find information on anime. On these particular sites, you’ll be able to find plots, reviews, captures, and more on nearly all anime in existance.

So who do we think is the best anime information source, and why?

Anime News Network

The Anime News Network is one of the most complete sources of anime information.

Besides extended reviews and news articles, the site hosts in-depth information profiles exist for almost any anime you can possibly think of in their Encyclopedia and many anime trailers in their videos section.

You’ll also be able to find various lists here, like the most underrated or most viewed anime series.

Runner ups

These are also great sites, nominees for ‘The Best Anime Info Site’, but they did not win.

Anime-Planet

Also a nice place to get to know new anime. The site uses a ‘recommendation system’ to rate the anime series and also features a lot of reviews.

AnimeNFO

A big internet anime database, with all kinds of information on the anime series, characters, and such. You’ll also be able to find release dates, reviews and various lists.

The Best Place to Watch Anime Online

Once we know the good anime from the bad, we will – of course – go watch some of them. There are basically two ‘ways’ to do this.

The first one is to watch the anime online, in a web-player (youtube style). This allows you to watch anime the second you feel like it and is also better for your bandwidth. On the other side, watching anime online often results in poor quality, and all the bandwidth you put into it won’t allow you to watch it again another time.

ZOMGAnime

Anime That! is one of those websites. The website hosts tons of different anime series, and countless episodes and movies. If the anime you’re looking for can be viewed online, the chances are pretty good that you’ll find it here.

Though they’re hosted on some of the popular online video sites, the videos are streamed from within the site itself, in their own player. Loading times are decent and registration is not required.

New anime is added constantly, and there’s a forum for the socialisers among us. An anime top 100 is also available, so you can get ‘inspiration’ without leaving the site.

Runner Ups

These are also great sites, nominees for ‘The Best Place to Watch Anime Online’, but they did not win. Most of the runner ups are nearly as, or equally good as ZOMGAnime, because there isn’t much difference between these sites.

Anime Crunch

Anume Crunch is my second favourite one. Hosts tons of videos as well and doesn’t require registration. Streaming is pretty similar to ZOMGAnime.

Anime Fuel

Also a great site, and perfectly worthy as a runner-up. If there’s a video that you can’t find on the above sites, you can always take a look here.

The Best Anime Download Sites

Like said above, there are basically two ‘ways’ to get your hands on those anime series (DVD import and friends excluded). The first one was to to watch it online, like discussed above.

The second way is – obviously – to download the anime directly to your computer. This will most often result in great video and audio quality and allows you to watch it again, or after some time – hereby not wasting your bandwidth.

On the downside, the downloads can take a while (especially on computers with a slower internet connection), so you can’t click-’n-watch. Also, downloading the anime series to your computer will probably ask more of your bandwidth.

We will make another distinction in this category, between direct-download (also known as: DDL/HTTP) and torrents.

Zone Anime (DDL)

Zone-Anime is one of the biggest direct-download databases available. All download links are provided by the staff and website users, and the site requires no sign-up.

On one side, this explains the number of series available (over 600), but also because of this none of the files are available on the private server. About all downloads go through file hosting sites, like RapidShare or MegaUpload, which means that you’ll probably encounter waiting times. If you want DDL from a private server, check realityLAPSE in the runner ups.

You can browse through the anime by name, but also by genre, or by using search queries.

Next to anime series, you can also go to Zone-Anime for your daily dose of anime music and manga.

Runner Ups (DDL)

These are also great sites, nominees for ‘The Best Anime Download Spot(s) – DDL’, but they did not win.

realityLAPSE

My second favourite site to download anime. All the files are listed on a private server, though they have a much more limited collection and require registration. Several other limitations apply to free users, like slower downloads, and only one at a time.

Anime A

A wonderful site. It’s also pretty similar to Zone-Anime, as it doesn’t host anything private either, but has a somewhat more limited collection.

AnimeSuki (Torrent)

AnimeSuki shows a very complete listing of anime releases, gathered from tons of different trackers. If you can’t find it here, the chances are small that you’ll find it anywhere else.

You can either search the site for anime torrents, or browse through AnimeSuki’s releases or series.

Keep seeding the torrent after your download is completed to let other people enjoy as well.

Runner Ups (Torrent)

These are also great sites, nominees for ‘The Best Anime Download Spot(s) – Torrent’, but they did not win.

BoxTorrents

Another public anime tracker. Also hosts a great deal of torrents, but requires registration for advanced browsing.

DownloadAnime

You can expect to find about all anime releases here, but the site lacks advanced browsing. In short, a great site to discover and download new anime, but not so great if you’re looking for something very specific.

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4 Torrenting Pitfalls To Avoid – And What To Do Instead

Jimmy Rogers — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:01:29 +0000

If you’ve been browsing MakeUseOf for a little while, you probably know how much we like torrents. The Bit Torrent distribution system allows for rapid dissemination of large files to thousands of people. It’s not the most user friendly system in the world, though. If torrents are relatively new to you, you’ve probably run into a few common pitfalls – pitfalls that I hope to illuminate in today’s article.

1. Use a Good Torrent Tracker Search Engine

One of the first barriers to entry for most new torrenters is “how to find them.” With few exceptions, torrents are rarely posted out in the open and individually recommended. Official releases of Ubuntu do this, for instance, but generally, you’re going to need a search engine.

Torrents are really just tiny index files. By themselves, they have no function. Each torrent is tied to a “tracker,” which uses the indexing data to organize the network of people using the torrent or “peers.” Some trackers have their own search engine that generally searches their own files exclusively. The Pirate Bay, is a fairly good example of this. Most popular torrents are on several trackers, though, so finding them is usually done on a more general search engine.

Personally, I have a few favorite torrent search engines that I will try out separately when I’m looking for something. These include:

Why these engines? Well generally, the more popular a torrent, the easier it is to find and use. These are the most popular search engines, so the same concept works for them as well. Also, “lesser” search engines often have more obscure stuff, but are frequently loaded with malware and flagrant advertising. Popular search engines do have a greater risk of being shut down by Intellectual Property (IP) Police, such as the RIAA and the MPAA, so having multiple engines to choose from is a good thing.

If you don’t want to flit from engine to engine, consider using uSniff, a multi-engine torrent site that will look among the top search engines and show you results from all of them. Karl did a nice write-up for uSniff.

2. Evaluate Potential Torrents

Once you’ve found a torrent file you’re looking for, it’s time to evaluate it. Usually there are several copies of any given media floating about (if there aren’t it’s often very hard to find), so here is how you choose which one to actually download. First of all, look at the tracker, if you are familiar with it, that’s usually a good sign. The Pirate Bay, for instance, has its own tracker. If you don’t recognize it, it’s not the end of the world.

Another positive sign is the number of users associated with the torrent. If there are a lot of seeders and leechers on the torrent, this means that it’s not only going to download faster (probably), but it’s also been vetted by more people. If you see that the torrent only has a few seeds, this means the torrent is in danger of falling out of availability. If you have the option, go with the torrent with the most seeders (though once this number climbs over 20 or so, it doesn’t matter that much.

If the site allows you to leave comments, read them. If you want to be awesome, remember to go back and comment on the quality of the files when you’ve finished downloading.

3. Don’t Download Archives

One of the most useful tips I’ve ever picked up is as follows: don’t download archives. An archive is any kind of compressed file format like a Zip or RAR file. Compression is fairly unnecessary when torrenting a file, so whenever you see it, it’s usually a bad sign. Often the host of the torrent is trying to either provoke you into buying something to unlock the files (which you already painstakingly downloaded and found locked!) or they are trying to conceal the files from view for some malicious reason.

In the former case, it’s a business of some sort, usually someone who runs a proprietary player. In the latter, it’s probably a virus or malware. These kinds of tricks are usually fairly ineffective because users realize what they are and stop supporting the torrent, but sometimes the host will seed the torrent at high speed to help give the appearance of legitimacy.

While I’m sure there are some archived torrents out there that are completely legit, you can save yourself a whole lot of trouble by simply not bothering with them in the first place.

4. Watch Out for Malicious Sites

The last warning I would extend is for malicious sites. Don’t take this at face value. Some sites are actually out to get you for one reason or another and have encoded “on view” or “on click/download” malware and viruses into their source. More commonly, the advertising component of these sites is hijacked and used to spread malware. If your browser’s anti-phishing warnings come up when you visit a torrent site, don’t just shrug them off. Also, regularly scan your computer after visiting these sites that make up the “fringe” of the internet.

For those of you using private trackers, you are not invincible. Recently Empornium.us admitted that their advertisers inserted some nasty stuff into their code and infected many of their users. You have been warned!

Some other articles that you might find helpful in your torrenting journey:

Find Torrents Of Your Favorite TV Shows With TED
7 Apps to Make the Most of TORRENTs
How to Access your Torrent Client & Download Torrents Remotely
Plus a bunch of cool websites were mentioned in torrent section on MakeUseOf Directory.

[I CAN HAS BIT TORRENT? by Paulpod, CC | isoHunt logo from isoHunt | will never stop us by 7of666, CC | BEWARE OF RAR by seanaes, CC]

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Find Torrents Of Your Favorite TV Shows With TED

Sharninder — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:01:15 +0000

I don’t know about you guys, but I can never keep up with all the TV shows that I’d like to follow. I just can’t find the time to religiously watch a show week after week for months at a time. That and the fact that most shows running locally are a season or two behind, are the reasons I often turn to online resources to get my fix.

On one such journey across the web, I came across this wonderful utility called TED – Torrent Episode Downloader, which promises to solve this very problem that I’ve been having.

TED is basically a tool which scours the internet for torrents of TV shows that you ask it to and then lets you download them using a torrent client. TED does not download the files itself, nor does it host the files. It only searches for them. In a way, it’s an alternative tool to torrent clients that can automatically download latest episodes using RSS feed for that TV show (see tvRSS).

There are separate versions of TED available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and the Windows version is the one that I tried.

Once you have TED up and running, click on the “Add show” button and you will be presented with a list of shows that have been filled in by the creators of TED. The list is quite long and includes most famous shows running right now on TV. You should definitely be able to find the show that you’re looking for in this list.

Click on the name of the show, or search for it using the search box at the top of the window, and TED will give you some nice details about the the show, including the time it last aired and the time it is expected to air next.

Click on the “Add” button and this show will be added to the list of shows that TED will continuously watch the internet for. TED resides in the Windows taskbar and runs in the background all the time, checking back every hour till it has found the shows in its list and has the torrent ready for you. The hourly interval can be be adjusted using the Preferences menu item under the Edit menu.

Once TED finds a particular show, all it does is launch your default torrent client and hand over the actual downloading to that client, and then goes back to quietly looking for more downloads from the list of shows.

If you’re looking for an episode that has already been shown, right click on the show’s name and click Edit. From this window, you can tell TED to download a particular show by letting it know the season and the episode that you’re looking for.

Even though TED comes with a pretty exhaustive list of shows, if you still find that your favorite show is not on the list, its easy to add it to the list. Just go to the “Add Show” window and click on the “Add a custom show” button. Enter the show’s name and click on “Select from available episodes”. Now, sit back and relax while TED does its thing.

If the show is out there, TED will probably be able to get it for you.

I’m sure you will all love this awesome utility. How do you guys catch up with your daily TV viewing ?

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Transmission vs uTorrent [Mac Only]

Jackson Chung — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:01:46 +0000

BitRocket, Xtorrent, Tomato Torrent, BitTyrant, Bits on Wheels. These are some of the torrent clients for OS X. But let’s be honest, they probably don’t sound familiar to you because they’re outshone by the two gargantuas of the torrent world, Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) and Transmission, a lightweight but very capable torrent client.

Prior to switching to a Mac, Azureus has always been my torrent client of choice on my Windows PC. At that time, there weren’t many other clients for it to compete with and even though it was heavy on memory usage, I’d still prefer it over ABC or BitLord. Yes, it was that long ago.

After I got my hands on my first Mac, I was hoping to seek comfort in the soft familiar bosom of Azureus but I found myself sorely disappointed. I was running Tiger on a Mac Mini with 1GB of memory, so imagine what would happen if I opened Azureus, iTunes and Safari at the same time. Spinning Beachball galore. So, I turned to Transmission.

Back then, Transmission was still a young child yet to be nurtured. It was buggy and I had to depend on nightly builds to get the most of the application. What made matters worse, Transmission was not allowed on most torrent sites which kept a record of their user ratio. So, I had to revert back to Azureus and suffer the endless wrath of the beachball.

A lot has happened since then. uTorrent debuted as a lightweight torrent client for Windows and has been hugely successful. Azureus is now known as Vuze due to its “legal” content. And Transmission is finally usable – actually it is more than just that, it turned out to be pretty darn great.

A few months ago, I was reading about how good Transmission has become. A lot of Mac users were trying to use Transmission to trump Vuze and the other way around. I decide to investigate this myself and see how transmission compares vs. Vuze.

Finally, a Transmission I can depend on. It has been smooth sailing so far. Compared to Vuze, Transmission is so much quicker to launch, much lighter to run and causes less strain on my Mac. Previously, my MacBook would run a little slower every time a torrent completes and Vuze starts to verify the downloaded data. Transmission doesn’t even have that feature – a blessing in disguise. Nevertheless, my downloaded data is always perfectly spot on.

Then uTorrent comes along, with its strong Windows pedigree, hoping to penetrate into the Mac torrent world. Has it succeeded? Not quite.

With all the devoted Transmission fans, it is not easy for this New Kid On The Block to instantly change the minds of those who have helped Transmission become what it is today. Based on uTorrent’s marketing campaign: Lightweight, Feature rich and High Performance; being vague is not going to help it to supersede Transmission. One could also use those exact words to describe Transmission, so what’s the difference? What is the main defining quality of uTorrent that will make the committed Transmission users to switch over? As far as I can see, there is none.

uTorrent for Mac is currently in beta, which means that it is still under heavy development. It is not as “Feature rich” as they make it sound, a quick sift through its preferences reveal nothing spectacular. It is almost identical to Transmission. Have a look at their settings below: Transmission is on the left, uTorrent is on the right.

Transmission vs uTorrent (Settings Menu)

Compared with its Windows brethren, uTorrent for Mac isn’t even capable of selective file downloading from torrents with multiple files; and doesn’t include support for RSS feeds. Futhermore, it is Leopard only, a big turn off since most of the users who are looking forward to this application would probably be running it on older machines.

So, the answer is No. uTorrent is not a viable option for Transmission. At least not yet. But if you still want to give it a chance, you may download it here. Let us know what is missing from uTorrent and whether or not you’d switch over from Transmission.

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Some Of The Best Greasemonkey Scripts For BitTorrent Users

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:23:38 +0000

OK so let’s start with a quiz – what happens when you combine the power of BitTorrent with the power of something like Greasemonkey (user) scripts? Yeah! I can feel some gloating right there and can bet you are already thinking of the possibilities. Let’s just unravel some of them here. Be warned though that downloading content discovered as a result may be illegal in your part of the world!

For the uninitiated, Greasemonkey scripts provides a way for customizing the look and/or functionality of sites according to your needs. Firefox users would require this addon to add and manage Greasemonkey scripts. While it is possible to run user scripts in other browsers, it is a completely different topic. So may I suggest that GIYF (Google is Your Friend) here.

IMDB – Pirated Version

IMDB is the mother of all sites when it comes to information on movies, documentaries, video games and similar content. How cool it would be if you could watch trailers of the movies you are searching for, search for torrents and other download links, right from the IMDB page for the particular title? All with a cool ajax interface that doesn’t get in your way of browsing IMDB. This script allows you to do just that. You can get torrent link, VCDQuality reports, Rapidshare links and trailers right from the IMDB entry for a particular title.

VCDQuality Tor v1.03

This script works on VCDQuality.com and adds links to torrent searches on Mininova and Torrentz. On clicking the icons you are taken to the search results page on the appropriate site. There was a minor glitch when I tried this script and I had to add http://*vcdq.com/* to the included pages section. Hence forth the script performed as advertised.

Rotten Tomatoes Popular Torrent Search Linker

The script adds search links to popular torrent sites on all RottenTomatoes movies pages. You get a bar just above the tomatometer. Click on the icon for the torrent site of your choice and bam, you are already staring down the available torrents for the title.

Pirates of the Amazon

Pirates of the Amazon is a Firefox Add on and created much hype recently with Amazon having to step in with legal issues. The site was down for some time and when it came up it was not hosting the addon anymore. The internet however is a wild wild place and the addon is already available on ‘n’ number of torrent sites and some ftp directories. Just Google Around.

The addon searches for torrents of anything that you search on Amazon.com and provides you direct links for the torrent file if found. Of course it works with things that can be converted to digital formats. You can’t get teddy bears on The Pirate Bay. Ahem.. or can you?

The Pirate Bay Enhancer

Very useful for users of The Pirate Bay. It adds – seeder/peer ratio which, if you don’t already know about it, is the ratio of the number of seeders to the number of peers. Higher the ratio better are the chances of getting good download speeds. So it’s wise to consider the ratio as the basis for choosing torrents over the number of seeders.

The script also has a command to remove dead torrents from listing. It has some bugs in that the headings remain the same as without the script and some text overflows into obscurity. However you get used to what is what, and it’s easy to hack as well!

Don’t use The Pirate Bay? Search for a similar script for your favorite tracker on User Scripts.

What user scripts do you all use? Are there any specific scripts for torrent users that are really cool and were not covered here? Share them with us in the comments.

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Three Ways to Find Open Registration on Private Torrent Sites

Kyle Judkins — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:18:19 +0000

Invites to private torrent sites are all but non-existent unless you know someone that knows someone. Yeah, they hold open registrations every once in a while, but it is usually only open for a couple of hours or a day if you’re lucky.

Usually, you find out about the open registration once it’s over, and that does nothing but make you mad. Today, I’m going to let you in on three different ways to find your way to one of those golden registration codes.

Tracker Checker 2

Tracker Checker 2 is a desktop application that lets you check up the registration status of all those private torrent tracker sites.

As you can see, Tracker Checker 2 comes with a lot of sites preloaded. Many of them are great torrent sites, so if you weren’t sure where to look in the first place, this list is more than good enough. However, you might want to add a few of your own favorites. Tracker Checker makes it easy to add other torrent sites.

Just type in the name you want to call it and the signup URL. Next, you type in a string you want it to match. What this means, is Tracker Checker will search the URL you put in for the text you want. The easiest thing to search for would be something like “open signups,” because if Tracker Checker 2 finds that text, you know that you can signup for that torrent website.

Tracker Checker [Website]

If you don’t care for desktop applications, a mac user, or want the ease of an online site, Tracker Checker is an online utility that does just about the same thing as Tracker Checker 2.

As you can see, just like the desktop application there are already several sites added that keep track of their signup status. You also have the option to add your own trackers as well.

Invite Share

http://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/trackercheckeradd.png

InviteShare is a website that is all about the sharing of private and beta invite codes. All you have to do is register and put your name on the waiting list for the various sites they have listed. There are only a few torrent sites on this website, but they are the best of the best. If you already have beta invites from other sites, you can share them on this site. The more you share the more seniority you get when putting yourself on other lists.

This site has gotten me several private beta invites and is definitely worth checking out just for the private betas, much less the private torrent invites.

How have you gotten access to private trackers in the past? Photo by ellievanhoutte

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Top 4 Sites To Download Free, Legal Concert Recordings

Will Mueller — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:01:41 +0000

The internet allows for a huge increase in connection and community as well as media – more specifically, music. With such a demand, a wave of new file sharing was born that is now called called BitTorrent. This allows users to share files easily by storing separate files, not on one person’s computer, but multiple computers with certain pieces of files on them to allow downloading from multiple locations and thus speeding up downloading. (More information on BitTorrent here.)

Unfortunately today, BitTorrent has become the mainstream way for sharing copyrighted content. There are a few sites though (like LegalTorrents), that do offer torrents that are free and legal.

Today we will be looking, more specifically, at some of the sites that offer live concert recordings available for download. In order to download these files to your computer you will need a torrent client, like utorrent (Windows) or Transmission (Mac, Linux). Here they are, in no particular order:

Etree

Etree is a site dedicated to providing numerous free and open-source related material and media with torrents being one of the best sections of the site. More specifically located at bt.etree.org, Etree hosts an incredible amount of free, legal, concert recordings available for download and distribution. With a fairly large amount of leechers and seeders, Etree continually has a growing archive of torrents and live concert recordings from artists like Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, etc.

Etree is definitely one of the best resources for accessing the best free, legal concert recordings on the web.

Sugarmegs

Sugarmegs is one of the most famous archives of free, legal, concert recordings ever created. While currently hosting over 19,000 live concert recordings and approximately 4,000 bands, you will surely find what you are looking for. Bands range from the Allman Brothers to ZZ Top. Concerts can be streamed through their website, or on your computer with a .asx file. They also offer full concerts in WMA format. Sugarmegs is definitely has one of the largest archives of free, legal torrents on the web.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive (conveniently placed at archive.org) is one of the most incredible websites that has ever existed. The main intention of the site is to archive all available media and information available to mankind (e.g. books, movies, websites, etc.) and, yes, that does mean audio. With an archive of over 54,000 live concert recordings, you are sure to find just about any genre and any type of music that is currently available to mankind.

COTapers

COTapers, while hosting a much smaller series of torrents then Etree, Sugarmegs, or The Internet Archive, has quite a large archive or torrents that are, of course free. COTapers, actually, does not host all of its BitTorrents, but only the most recent recordings. Still, the collection is more then enough to listen to for quite a while.

Do you know of any other cool sites to download free music from? Tell us in the comments!

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How to Access your Torrent Client & Download Torrents Remotely

Varun Kashyap — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:08:33 +0000

BitTorrent is great for sharing large files. If you have been using BitTorrent for some time you know the kind of stuff you can find out there. From movies to TV to games to Stanford lectures.

Here is how you can manage and download your torrents remotely which means that you can start a torrent download on your home computer while you are at your friends place or anywhere with access to the internet. So that when you come back home the downloading is already finished and it’s ready to use.

Sweeeeet? Lets make it happen.

You Will Need:

Either µtorrent (Windows) or Transmission (Linux or Mac)
A little tweaking around.

For Windows:

µtorrent Web UI

2. You need to place the zip file as it is (don’t extract) into the Application Data folder for µtorrent. To open the folder go to Start > Run (or Win + R) and type %AppData%\µtorrent and hit enter. This will open the required folder. Paste the zip file as it is. Don’t extract.

3. Open µtorrent and go to Options > Preferences (or Ctrl + P) and then to Web UI and check Enable Web UI . Provide the necessary details.

4. Now fire up the browser and point it to http://127.0.0.1:/gui/ where portnumber is the one mentioned in Preferences > Connection . Alternatively you can enable Web UI at 8080 from the dialog in step 3. I found this to work better. You can try both the options.

5. If all went well you should see the Web UI in the browser.

For Linux:

here

2. Go to Edit > Preferences and Check Enable Web Interface, optionally you can specify a username and password, you will be asked to log in when you try to access the torrents via the web interface.

3. Remember the port number you specify or leave the default if there is no conflict.

4. That’s it, you are ready to rock! Fire up the browser and hop over to http://localhost:9091 (you may need replace 9091 with the port you specified in case you changed it).

5. You should see the interface or login screen if all went well. If not, make sure you did everything right or see troubleshooting below.

For Mac :

Transmission (see above) is available for Mac as well. So most of the setup would be similar, I presume. I have not tried it on a Mac because I don’t have one.

Troubleshooting and Additional Tips:

Entering localhost:port doesn’t show up anything on my machine
Make sure you followed the steps correctly, also check that your firewall allows access to the port. And oh yes, make sure the torrent application is running on the remote machine (i.e. the machine you are trying to access).

Entering localhost:port shows up my friends torrents
Yes, it will. If you want to access your torrents on your home computer you will have to know the IP-Address of your home computer. In that case you will have to enter : or use dynamic DNS (see below) to access the torrents.

I can access the torrents using localhost or 127.0.0.1 but cannot access from the internet
Make sure you are typing the IP correctly. You might also have to forward the port in question. Use your router’s guide to achieve this or try port-forward

My IP changes everytime I connect to the internet, is there a way around?
Great, you have a Dynamic IP. There is surely a way around your problem, it just requires a little extra configuration.

So here you go – There are a number of services that offer you dynamic DNS’s. This means that you will get a URL like yourname.xyz.com, and everytime you enter this URL you will be actually referring to your computer/server at home. DynDns and No-IP are two such services. I have been using DynDNS and there are clients for both Windows and Linux that keep your IP updated. So no matter how often your IP changes yourname.xyz.com will always point to your computer. You can use this with a static IP as well just to make it easier.

I am on Windows using µtorrent and my web UI still doesn’t appear
You might want to enable the alternative listening port from within Options > Preferences > Web UI . I had this problem in the beginning where it would only show up on the alternative port. Some users have also reported problems when using the trailing ‘/’ after ‘gui’ in http://127.0.0.1:/gui/ so you can try with and without the trailing ‘/’ and see if that helps.

Seeder/Leecher Top Image Credit – nrkbeta (flickr)

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Check The Movie Quality Before You Start Downloading

Simon Slangen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:01:45 +0000

Downloading a movie is sometimes like heading into Oblivion. You have no certainty of exactly what you’ll end up with. Be it a crappy movie in great quality or (even worse) a great movie in crappy quality.

For instance, you’ll never want to watch your favorite movie in cam format, which sounds as if you’re standing in an empty factory hall. Quality matters – higher definitions are there for a reason.

If you’re in need of a great script, check IMDB. On the other hand, if you’re looking for more information about the download itself, there are two things you’ll need to do.

Learn the different release formats and become best buddies with ‘VCD Quality’.

VCD Quality is a release news website. What does this mean? Whenever a new movie release is set free online, an info page on VCD Quality is added. This page includes the following information:

Date (date of the release)
Type (the type of release, we’ll clarify this further on in the article)
Release (the name of the film and the specific release)
JPG/NFO (a supplied JPG and/or NFO file, explained further on in the article)
IMDB (a link to the IMDB page of the movie)
CD# (the number of CD’s or files of which the release consists)
Group (the name of the group ‘responsible’ for the (encoding/filming/… of the) release)
Rating (three ratings; respectively judging the video- and audio quality and the movie on its own)

Also available, but often not filled out, are the format (AVI, MKV, etc.), the trailer and other miscellaneous information about the producer, the cast, the genre and the plot.

VCD Quality also automatically provides a link to cdcovers, where you can find your DVD covers, and an Amazon link to purchase the given DVD.

JPG/NFO

As mentioned above, most movies are accompanied by one or multiple JPG’s and an NFO file. The function of the JPG file should be pretty obvious. It’s a full size screen capture of the movie, so you can have a sneak quality peek.

Next, the NFO… An NFO (derived from info) is, as you may have deducted, a file which contains various information about the release. The NFO is always supplied by the encoders, and most often contains things like the video/audio-bitrate, screen resolution, language, etc.

You can download these NFO files from VCD Quality as an image, or in the original format. After which you can open it in a special NFO reader or in good ol’ MS Notepad.

Type

There are a lot of different types of releases and it’ll come in very handy sometimes if you know them. We’ll try to give a brief, concise explanation of the most important types. Check this forum post for more (detailed) information.

Cam (filmed with a camcorder, the video and audio quality are often poor)
Telesync (a cam with an external audio source, sometimes filmed with a professional camera)
Telecine (filmed directly from the reel, good quality)
DVD Screener (uses a non-retail DVD as a source, sometimes with a counter or other text on the screen. Most often, you’ll periodically find a “Do Not Copy” text on the screen). These copies are also produced for award ceremonies purposes such as the Oscars.
DVD Rip (uses the final retail DVD as a source)
TVRip (ripped from a (mostly digital) TV source)
R5 (uses R5 DVD’s, comparable to DVD Screeners – also has scrolling text and black and white scenes to separate them from retail DVD’s)
VCD (aimed to fit on a standard CD, most of the time its slightly less in picture quality)
XVCD (a VCD which uses higher quality rates, but aren’t recognized by all VCD players)
x264 (an upcoming video codec, which allows a very high picture quality in relation to the file size)

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How To Set Up An Instant Private Network With Remobo

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:01:13 +0000

What happens when BitTorrent meets Hamachi meets remote desktop meets networking? Well you get something similar to Remobo. Remobo lets you create an IPN which is an Instant Private Network.

Lets see what you can do with an IPN, Remobo and how to set it all up.

Remobo allows you to:

Control your own computer remotely from any other computer.
Access your files securely from work or while traveling.
Share files, photos and media with friends & family on your network.
Secure all your messages and file transfers against hackers.
Create a virtual private network (VPN) instantly and securely.
Play LAN games over the internet as if you were all in the same place.
Connect to any computer in your list securely to access files and data.
Run virtually any 3rd party application on top of Remobo.

Quite a handful isn’t it? Lets set it all up!

Download and Install

Simply download and install. It will try to install a BitTorrent client (which will be required later as you will see) so if you already have your own, you can say no to this. While setting up the virtual network driver Windows will warn you. Click ‘continue’ and you should be good to go.

Set up an account

Set up a Remobo account. Simple and easy, no fuss. Requires an email address.

Add buddies

When Remobo starts, it asks you for the account details you just set up. Log in and then click on the button labelled “Menu” and then add one of your buddies on the Remobo network. You would have to enter the username of your buddy and your buddy will have to approve your request. This is unlike Hamachi where you create a network where others can join.

Remobo actually supports more than one PC per account, so you can have multiple entries under one buddy. This simply translates to the various computers of your buddy that you can access. This also means that you can use the same account on more than one computer. So you can have your work and home PC listed under the same username.

Let’s MakeUseOf Remobo

This little menu is all you have to take note of for being a Remobo King!

Send files

Files are sent using BitTorrent. Click on “Send a File” and you will be presented with an option to choose the files and folders to share, choose them and specify if you want to share this one time only or keep it shared for longer. Remobo will now automagically create a torrent and send the torrent file to the other side (to the buddy). The other side can then download the torrent file and use any BitTorrent client to download the file. This increases in significance if you are sharing a file with a group!

View Shared files

Clicking on “View Shared Files” will open up a webpage that allows you to view all the shared files (yours and others’) and also allows you to browse the files categorized by usernames so that you know who is sharing which file..

Windows File Sharing

Don’t want to use Bittorrent for some reason? Well no problem you can try “Windows File Sharing” just as you would do on a LAN. Just that it is a lot more simple here. When I clicked on it I was hoping to go through a messy workgroup setup and complicated network settings, but what did I see? I saw the shared printer and shared docs (in other words, it’s already done and I did nothing). Yes that’s how simple it is. Depending upon your situation you may be prompted for a password or do some minor configurations here.

Play games, Stream Media

Basically you can run any 3rd party application atop of Remobo. Want to play any game with your buddy just like you would have played it on the LAN? Easy, hover your mouse over the buddy name and get the IP. This is the virtual IP or the Remobo IP. Use this for streaming media configuration or playing games over the network.

Control Computer from other computers

Click one of the computer names that you want to access. Choose “Remote Control” from the menu that shows up. Enter your buddy’s password and you’ll get remote access to that computer. The whole password situation used for Remote Control bothers me a bit. While this is fine if you are in a work/home scenario, this might not be a good idea in the “buddy” scenario as the Remobo password and the Remote Control password are the same. So if you know someone’s remote control password, you know their account password. Kinda lame?

Chat

I am not going to tell you how you can chat with Remobo. This is just for you to know, that you can chat as well!

Secure Connections

All the connections are secure and encrypted so your data is secure!

Domain Names

Don’t like remembering IP addresses? Well just use .remobo.com and you don’t need to remember any IP address. In case of multiple computer setups use ..remobo.com

Community

There is a great Remobo community over there. You can make feature requests, get skins, discuss problems and see how others are using Remobo.

All in all a great application. There is the password issue that I mentioned and some dialogs that I feel are redundant, but overall it greatly simplifies the whole process or sharing files, using BitTorrent to send files, VPN setup and Remote Desktop.

It’s still in beta and I am sure it will mature as it grows. If you thought Hamachi was easy and feature rich (or otherwise) try Remobo, you’ll have no idea!

Let us know what you think about it. Have you tried it? Or do you plan to stick with Hamachi or some other application?

(By) Varun Kashyap, who is getting absent minded and forget to mention his name in the last two articles. And before he forgets, he would like to invite you to his TechCrazy Blog, where he writes about latest on the web, tech tips, tweaks and hacks.

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