Wired: "The BitTorrent Effect"

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html' target='_blank'>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever. BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Cohen showed his code to the world at a hacker conference in 2002, as a free, open source project aimed at geeks who need a cheap way to swap Linux software online. But the real audience turns out to be TV and movie fanatics. It takes hours to download a ripped episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes. As a result, more than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application. If any one of them misses their favorite TV show, no worries. Surely someone has posted it as a "torrent." As for movies, if you can find it at Blockbuster, you can probably find it online somewhere - and use BitTorrent to suck it down."</i><br /><br />This is a great article about BitTorrent, and the guy who started it all. Great read! I'm kind of amazed at the number of people using BitTorrent though, because when I was trying it I found it insanely frustrating to use. The problem was searching - I tried several Torrent portals and it was just an awful mess trying to find the right link to download the file with.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Probably not for mainstream users like you, Jason. :wink:

[Mr. MacinTiger]

I use it to download the new Battlestar Galatica episodes that are currently showing in Britian (they don't start here until mid Jan). The trick is finding a few reliable websites that are going to be up most of the time, etc.

That said, it's not exactly possible to download most movies or tv show in minutes like the Wired article says. Most of the time, a 45 min. episode of BG takes me like 4 or 5 hours to download.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

That's about right, but I've seen some really hot shows go in minutes!

I usually use Bittorrent for fan subbed anime mostly.

[David Horn]

It's as much about finding the right client as the website. If you don't have the correct port forwarding set up, you get a download speed of about 6KB/s and nothing more.

I reccommend Azureus, which uses uPnP to get rid of the ports issue. I downloaded the free copy of GTA2 (the Rockstar site is jammed solid) last night at a constant speed of about 60KB/s, which is all my connection can provide.

Google is your friend when looking for torrents, eg:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;q=GTA2+filetype%3Atorrent

It's also been useful for getting TV episodes in the UK, but we're about to overtake the US on Stargate anyway so it's not such a big deal now.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Well, I'll jump in with my recommendation of ABC!

http://pingpong-abc.sourceforge.net/

[sub_tex]

I'll second Azureus as the best client out there. Cross platform too! I've got it up on both Windows and Linux.

I was looking to install Open Office on my laptop (running Suse 9.1) last month, and instead of using the http/ftp mirrors (only 60-100k/second) I grabbed the torrent and got it at 1 meg a second! I didn't know that my cable modem could yak stuff in that quick!

It literally came in at just over 1 minute. They must have an insane amount of seeds on high connections.

I know Eurogamer uses bit torrent for all of their video game downloads (trailers, etc) and those tend to run at a decent rate too.