A Guide For Torrent Newbies

I’ve finally found a way to get my occasional fix of TV episodes: torrent downloads! It’s especially handy when you don’t have television at home. Like me.
And being a newbie, I had to familiarize myself with all this torrent stuff. I don’t know exactly how it works, but as long as I get my TV…who cares?

Okay. So first things first. Before you download any torrent file, you first have to get a BitTorrent client. I use uTorrent (and sometimes BitTorrent). You can download uTorrent here: uTorrent 1.6 Standalone (170 kB) or uTorrent 1.6 Installation Program (597 kB). Once you’ve installed your BitTorrent client, you’re ready to download torrent files. These are small files that you open in your BitTorrent client so you can start downloading media. There are lots of sources of torrent files in the web. I use Torrentz as my torrent search engine (isoHunt is also good). Mininova and The Pirate Bay usually offer good torrent files. A trusted uploader for TV episodes is EZTV. For movies, it’s aXXo.
When choosing which torrent files to download, keep these in mind:
» If comments are available, read them and find out if the torrent is good
» Make sure the torrent health status beside the filename is green (or high)
» If you want good quality videos, choose those with HDTV in their filenames
» Choose torrents with more peers and seeds than leeches
After you’ve downloaded your torrent file, open it in your BitTorrent client and it will start to download. Here’s a good time to be patient. Click here for tips on how to make downloads faster in uTorrent.
When you’re download has finally reached 100%, it’s time for you to open the file and check it if it really works.
To play icm.xvid files in RealPlayer, just download and install this. If you can’t hear anything, you might need an audio decoder like AC3Filter.
For files ending in .rar, .r00, .r01, etc., you need WinRAR to extract them. Get the trial version here.
Well, I think that’s it. So, enjoy watching!

UPDATE:
There are fake torrents that have been going around lately. So, how do you know if a torrent is a fake? They ask for a password when you try to extract the files. In order to get the password, you are told to download a program. DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANYTHING. There is no password. The file is a fake. You can avoid these fake torrents by not downloading .rar files.

If you have to download .rar files, make sure the torrent has a lot of .rar archives in its list of files and not just one.

Also check if the torrent includes a sample folder. These are usually the ones that are not fake.

~ by lisvn on April 1, 2007.