Torrenting tips and tricks

This article is in response to an article I found on Lifehacker recently called Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks. As you may have guessed from the title, the Lifehacker article went through 10 tools and tricks for torrenting files. I have decided to write my own version of this with tips that, are to me, more useful and important that some of the ones cited in the Lifehacker article.

Introduction (to torrents)

Throughout the entire article several pages from a blogger named “Poromenos” (an alias) were cited from his blog stavros’ stuff. stavros’ stuff is a very good website for tutorials especially, but also for all kinds of topics relating to technology. I would strongly recommend you check this website out.

That said, the first article I will cite is actually one from Poromenos’s website: How to use BitTorrent to send files. This article does go through the process of sending files using torrents, but also goes over some basics of torrents-what they are, how they work, etc. For anyone still confused about the process of downloading a torrent, How to download files with uTorrent is another similar tutorial from Poromenos’s blog and includes a very good tutorial on the subject.

Acquiring torrents

Getting the .torrent file and other methods for torrents

Feeds

Alright, now that you have read the tutorials and watched the short videos on how to download torrents, as well as create torrents, the next thing that follows naturally is to acquire the torrent files. I ran through this using my favorite torrent websites a few articles ago in my massive post Finding, Downloading, and Managing media. For those of you who have a lot of media-especially videos-or plan on using torrents a great deal in the coming months, I would strongly recommend that you check that article out. In “Finding, Downloading, and Managing media” I go over listening and downloading music for free, downloading videos with and without torrents, storing large files, archiving videos, and finally sharing videos. Again, I would strongly recommend that you read this article if any of those topics apply to what you are doing or are interested in. Incidentally, Poromenos has a very good article on his website for ripping movies from DVDs and then compressing those video files to save space: How to encode your movies.

Unfortunately Poromenos does not have an article on finding torrents, to my knowledge, so I will cite the Lifehaker article I referred to at the beginning of this post. In step three of “Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks” the suggestion is to use the Mac program TVShows or the all-platform program Ted to set up automatic downloads as new episodes of a specific show are released as a torrent. Since I do not have a Mac, I will focus on Ted.

Ted is a clean, neat little program that installs and runs quickly. I will post a download link at the end of this description. Ted allows you to go through a list of shows and select those shows that you would like to download episodes from. You then have the option to either download the next episode to be released (once it is released), the last aired episode, or an episode of your choosing. Additionally you also have the option to stipulate that the episode should be in HD quality; stipulating that the episode should be of high-definition will reduce the number of eligible locations to download from though, so I would recommend against this.

My only complaint about Ted is that as of yet I have been unable to download anything from it for various reasons; it seems every time I try to download an episode using Ted I receive some sort of error, whether that be that the episode cannot be downloaded because it can’t be found, or because the episode does not meet such-and-such criteria. I have not tried to use Ted for very many shows though, so I cannot say that this is the same for each and every show even though it has been an issue for all the shows I have tried to download with it so far.

If you are still interested, you can download Ted from the website here: Ted.nu.

Once I figured out that Ted was not all that it was cracked up to be, so to speak, and since my interest in those sort of acquisition of torrents was piqued, I decided to pursue this further. Now fore those of you who use Vuze, you may have noticed the “Feed” button near your torrents. If you are like me, then you’ve probably ignored it. Yesterday my attention was drawn back to it though by a Lifehacker article titled “Hack Attack: Get your TV season pass with Democracy”. I read through this article since it was related to my search for a replacement of Ted, and was gratified to find a very handy web service that went above and beyond my expectations after using Ted. However, I would like to speak about feeds in Vuze first, so I will not post a link to the web service until a bit later on.

Feeds were, and still are in most cases, a bit of a nuisance to me in the case of torrents. Torrent feeds are basically the same thing as regular torrents: a list of items based on a criteria or from a website that is updated with new content. For example, a torrent feed for, say, the show NCIS would most likely include all the most recent episodes of the show, and would be updated with the newest episode each time it was released. There are a number of ways to create torrent feeds, but I will discuss the most common one: searches. Let’s take a look at an example:

I go over to my current favorite torrent website, KickassTorrents, and search for the show NCIS. About 2800 results are returned, but since I only want the latest episode that is the one I click on and then ultimately download. I would have the option to do this every week (or however often new episodes are released), or I could make a feed out of this search. To make a feed for the search results of “NCIS” on KickassTorrents, click the orange feed icon near the search results. Rather than run through the steps, I will use Wink to make a tutorial, explaining the steps as I go:

Torrent Feeds Editor’s note: I apologize for the low quality, but as I have just begun to use Wink to create interactive .swf video tutorials I am not sure of the best places to host the tutorials, and this is the first site I have tried.

After clicking the “Save” button you will be shown a regular results page as it would be displayed in any Vuze search, except the results will be from the query “NCIS” on KickassTorrents.

So this is just one of the ways to stay up to date on your favorite shows, but what about a simpler way? What if KickassTorrents does not have the latest episodes of your favorite show? Yep, now is the time for me to introduce the web-based alternative to Ted: showRSS. showRSS is a website with a fairly good selection of shows to choose from which works much the same as Ted does: After signing up for an account you go through a list of available shows, pick the shows you would like to follow, and showRSS generates a torrent feed (see above) for those shows which includes all the most recent episodes available. Let’s run through the steps:

1. Once you login to showRSS you should be taken to a page in which you can add new shows to follow. This page should feature a dropdown menu with quite a number of options to choose from. These are the available shows. If you do not see this dropdown menu, click the “your shows” link next to the icon of a TV.
2. Click the dropdown menu to list all the available TV shows that you can follow. To add a show, simply click on the name of the show in the dropdown menu and then click the button beside the menu labeled “Add to my list!”.
   Alternately you can also click the button labeled “Search” to search through the list of available shows if you would prefer not to look through the dropdown menu.
3. Once you have added all the shows you would like to follow, click the “feeds” link in the same bar as “your shows”. This will bring you to a page on which you can get the URL for the feed of the shows you selected, which can be imported into Vuze in the same manner as the feed for the KickassTorrents query.
4. To download the master feed for all the shows you selected, you need to click the first button labeled “Generate”. It will be adjacent to “Your feed address:” There are two dropdown menus which you can use to customize this feed: quality, and proper/repack.
   Quality: This dropdown menu allows you to choose whether you would like to display only torrents with a certain quality, i.e. only display HD torrents and exclude standard-definition torrents, or vise-versa. My preference is to leave it at the default: “Quality: per-show settings”.
   Proper/Repack: This is, to my understanding, a method to keep from displaying multiple instances of the same episode in the same feed. However, these “same” episodes will not be totally the same: Proper’s are, to my understanding, the actual episode, not someone’s bootleg copy or the copy they lifted from their DVR. And repack is, again, to my understanding, a copy of an episode that already exists in the torrent with some changes such as picture quality and clarity. Again, I choose to leave this at the default setting: Proper/Repack: per-show settings. It basically comes down to this: do you want to be offered the first available episode of series ___ and then, regardless of whether a better quality version comes out, do you want to no longer receive updates for torrents of that episode?
5. Regardless of what settings you choose, eventually click the “Generate” button near the “Proper/Repack: per-show settings” dropdown menu. This will bring you to a webpage with two links: the “Feed” link is the one you will want to use in your torrent application. The “Feed with namespaces” link should be disregarded.
6. You can either copy the link by selecting it, right-clicking it and hitting “Copy link address” (Chrome), or clicking the link and copying the URL of the page you end up on. Either way, you need to copy the URL of the “Feed:” link. Once you have copied the URL of the “Feed” link to your clipboard, move on to the next step.
7. For those of you who watched the video I linked to above (Torrent Feeds), you already know the steps to bring a feed into Vuze. For those of you who do not or those of you who could not watch the video for various reasons, I will go through them here.
   a. Open Vuze. The other torrent application I have on my computer, uTorrent, will work too, but I am more comfortable with Vuze and will therefore use it in my example.
   b. Once Vuze has opened, look for the menu on the left-hand side labeled “Subscriptions”. Click the plus (+) button beside the label.
   c. A window will pop up after clicking the plus button (the add new feed button) with a couple buttons inside. Click the “Create New Subscription” button.
   d. The window will now have two tabs in it: Search, and RSS. Click the “RSS” tab. Alternately you can use the “Search” tab and search for feeds for particular shows or movies, but since that is beyond the scope of this particular tutorial I will not go into it.
   e. Clear the “http://” out of the textbox and then paste in the URL of the feed from your clipboard. Once that is done, click the “Save” button.
   f. As soon as you click “Save” you will be brought to the Vuze subscription window for the particular torrent feed you just inputted. This window contains all the available episodes for the series/show your feed contains. Do not be fooled by the apparent lack of seeders/peers: Most of these torrents have thousands of peers, but for some reason they do not show up in Vuze. Regardless, from this window you can choose and download any episode present.

More ways to keep track of feeds

I read an article from TorrentFreak called “Use Gmail to search torrents” yesterday after finishing most of this article, and since the idea of getting feed updates directly to your inbox without needing to open a torrenting application (especially Vuze) sounded like a very useful thing, I decided to add a tutorial on this to this post. Follow the steps below to receive feed updates to your inbox:

1. First of all, you must find your feed. I have gone over this in both the video tutorial and the written tutorial, so follow one of those guides if you are not sure how to do this.
2. Now that you have the RSS feed, you could put the feed into your favorite RSS reader, but since the goal of this tutorial is to get email updates, head on over to Feed My Inbox. Feed My Inbox allows you to input a feed URL or website address along with your email and receive daily email updates for those feeds to any email you specify. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the number of feeds you can have with a free account, five, but that is most likely enough for most people, and if not you can surely figure out a way around that restriction.
3. Simply enter the feed URL in the box specified, and your email address in the box for your email address, and click “Submit”. You will receive a confirmation email within a few minutes asking your to confirm your subscription. Once you confirm your subscription you will receive daily updates to the feed. Unfortunately, the updates are restricted to daily for the free account.

As a side note, there are definitely alternatives to Feed My Inbox; Feed My Inbox was just the only one I tried during the creation of this article, and therefore the only service I will post about.

Another option would be to use Google to manage updates to your feeds. Google Reader is already very popular, and many people use it to manage their feeds to a multitude of websites. Unfortunately though, as far as I know, there is no way to receive email updates from Google Reader when certain feeds are updated. Yet another option would be to have the feed posted on your iGoogle frontpage. Many people have a gmail account, and therefore iGoogle could easily become your one-stop-shop for torrent feeds. For example, if I had 20 torrent feeds I was attempting to follow, I could stick them all on my iGoogle page, automatically login to my gmail account, and then I would have all my feeds in one place, on one page, where I could check them out. Easy.

TorrentFreak has a great article titled “How to use RSS & BitTorrent to download TV shows” which goes through what feeds are, programs and websites to handle them, and much more.

Other websites

Feeds may not be for everyone-I get that. Sometimes you might not want access to the entire season of The Office or Bones, but instead want to download a movie, I get that. So what about it then? Well again, I ran through this in my post Finding, Downloading, and Managing media, so if you have not read that then you should definitely check it out now. However, even though I have covered this before, there is so much to say on this topic that it cannot be covered enough and in too much detail-ever.

The Lifehacker article I cited at the beginning of this post (Top 10 Bittorrent Tools and Tricks) suggested a website called YouTorrent for finding torrents to download. I was excited about YouTorrent when I read of it in the Lifehacker article, as it sounded like a very cool website that could solve the searching for torrents problem. However, when I went to YouTorrent and tried it out, I was quite disappointed. To me, a good torrent website has illegal content, plain and simple. That, of course, does not mean that I am downloading that content, but it means that enough people are on that torrent website, and that enough people think that ___ torrent website is worth the time and effort to upload their content to-legal or otherwise. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), YouTorrent did not have any illegal content on its website: the closest thing to a DVD rip of Cars (The Pixar movie) was a trailer. That isn’t to say that YouTorrent does not have its uses though. For example, there are various version of the Ubuntu ISO image file in Server and Desktop versions available for torrent download-something that is an apparently discontinued feature on Ubuntu.com. And who knows? Maybe YouTorrent will grow to incorporate MiniNova, SumoTorrents, KickassTorrents, and the like someday. Until then, however, here are the best sites to find torrents on:

KickassTorrents. Currently by far my favorite torrent website at the moment, KickassTorrents offers a very wide variety of torrents, as well as being of fairly good quality. There have only been a few times when I was looking for a certain torrent-a torrent of a rather obscure show subbed in English-that I have had to leave KickassTorrents and resort to a Google search or a search on another website.

SumoTorrent. SumoTorrent, like KickassTorrents, used to be incorporated into the built-in Vuze search tool, but has since been removed for some reason-much to my dismay. However, going over to the website allows you to search through their torrents and find well-seeded torrents available for download. I cannot think of any specific examples of using SumoTorrent, but I know I have used SumoTorrent in the past and can vouch for its validity and quality.

isoHunt. isoHunt was, if my momory is correct, also incorporated into the built-in Vuze search at one time, and like the others was lost. isoHunt is a pretty good torrent search engine that I have used much more than SumoTorrent-probably about as much as KickassTorrents-just because isoHunt seems to have an even broader selection of torrents than KickassTorrents does.

The Pirate Bay. You could call this website “the flagship” of all torrent search engines, or at least the most popular by far. Over the years The Pirate Bay has most likely been the torrenting search engine you have heard of most often because they always seem to be in legal trouble. Despite that though, The Pirate Bay remains a very popular torrent search engine. However, I have The Pirate Bay does not have as good a selection as any of the websites mentioned above; I merely mentioned it to give you a broader selection of websites to search through should you decide to delve into the world of torrents.

TorrentFreak has also published an article on this topic-titled “Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2011”-which lists some great torrent websites that even I was unaware of before reading the article; definitely worth checking out.

Clients

This will be a relatively quick section, as I am sure that my view on the best programs to handle torrent downloads are already clear. The two contenders, in my opinion, are Vuze and uTorrent. I have to bring up my previous article “Finding, downloading, and managing media” here, as I also covered choosing a program to handle torrents in that article, and did so in much more depth with more examples than I will here.

Vuze is a great program that is optimized for downloading and managing video torrents. Vuze has all kinds of built in features such as automatic torrent transcoding which make it especially adept at handling videos. However, due to the great number of features built-in to Vuze, Vuze can be slow, cumbersome, and/or clunky to work with. Overall though, since my torrent activity primarily involves videos, Vuze is currently my favorite torrenting program.

The other thing I like about Vuze as opposed to uTorrent is the handling of feeds. In Vuze all I need to do after subscribing to a feed is click an episode to begin the download. However, in uTorrent the process often becomes more complicated, although the added complication is so minimal that it really comes down to personal preference.

uTorrent is a great program because it is small, lightweight, and fast. If you are looking for a torrent program for, say, a single torrent download, to try torrenting out, or you need a program that meets the preceding criteria, go with uTorrent. Additionally, there are hundreds of plugins for uTorrent so that you can customize it in pretty much any way you want: I’m sure if I spent enough time working at it, I could incorporate all the features I prize in Vuze into uTorrent with addons. You could say that uTorrent is the Firefox of the torrenting world, I suppose.

Unfortunately, neither Vuze nor uTorrent is available on Linux, but uTorrent is available for Mac, although this is a less-advertised feature of the uTorrent platform. For Linux users out there, I would recommend Transmission, which I have heard great things about in the past.

BitLet.org-I found this program while reading an article form MakeUseOf titled “7 Apps to make the most of torrents”. I almost skipped over this neat little program, but the description caught my eye: (taken verbatim from MakeUseOf) “Bitlet is a web-based torrent client that makes it easy to download torrents in places where you can’t install your own programs (work, college labs etc.)”. Wow, what a tool! Unfortunatly when I tried out BitLet I had little success at getting it to work on my computer to download a torrent, but I have high hopes for this little piece of software. Sure, downloads would most lilely be slower through a web-based interface than thay would be through a dedicated program such as uTorrent or Vuze, but the ability to download torrents from anywhere with to software would be absolutely amazing-not to mention extremely useful. So keep your eye on this program-I plan to revisit BitLet every once in a while to check up on its progress.

Further reading:

If you would like to learn more about how BitTorrent works, or are still unclear on the whole process, check out the Lifehacker article “A beginners guide to BitTorrent”.

“How to Boost Your BitTorrent Speed and Privacy” is a pretty good article from Lifehacker which goes over some basic concepts to, as the title suggests, speed up your torrent downloads as well as improve privacy.

And continuing on the quest to improve torrenting privacy, “Optimize BitTorrent To Outwit Traffic Shaping ISPs” is a good article from WIRED which goes through some simple steps to accomplish the task outlined in the title.

The article from TorrentFreak, “20 Bittorrent Tips and Tricks”, is a very good article with some great ideas to help you improve your torrenting experience, from using Gmail to manage torrents to using uTorrent to organize torrent downloads.

Again from TorrentFreak, “Speed up your Torrents, Tips from a BitTorrent Developer” is a informative article on speeding up torrents, and if nothing else will provide you with a better understanding of how torrenting in general works.

I came across the Wikipedia article for “bad ISPs” while reading the WIRED article cited above. Bad ISPs is a neat little reference for getting a bit more information on your ISP provider’s policy regarding torrents.

TorrentFreak is a blog about news concerning the torrenting world, as well as tutorials and guides on all sorts of things related to torrenting. While I cannot say that the news stories are always interesting through, the guides and tutorials are great and very handy for learning cool, new tricks to make your life easier.

Websites linked to throughout this article:

Torrenting websites:

• showRSS
• Ted
• KickassTorrents
• SumoTorrent
• isoHunt
• The Pirate Bay
• mininova
• YouTorrent

Articles:

• Top 10 Buttorrent Tools and Tricks
• Hack Attack: Get your TV season pass with Democracy
• stavros’ stuff: How to encode your movies
• stavros’ stuff: How to download files with uTorrent
• stavros’ stuff: How to use BitTorrent to send files
• Finding, downloading, and managing media
• 7 Apps to make the most of torrents
• A beginners guide to BitTorrent
• How to Boost Your BitTorrent Speed and Privacy
• Optimize BitTorrent To Outwit Traffic Shaping ISPs
• 20 Bittorrent Tips and Tricks
• Speed up your Torrents, Tips from a BitTorrent Developer
• Bad ISPs
• How to use RSS & BitTorrent to download TV shows
• Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2011

Other sites:

• Megaswf
• Feed My Inbox

Torrenting software:

• Vuze
• uTorrent
• Ted
• Transmission
• BitLet

Other software:

• Wink