How to download torrent files
Posted on December 3rd, 2008 by fizzle in How To's
Hey there! Time yet again for another one of my world renowned, wildly informative fizzle tutorials! This time I’ll be showing you how to download those newfangled (not really) fancy (kinda) .torrent files. First, a short bit of history:
torrent files are very small files in and of themselves. The torrent file is basically a shortcut, or perhaps a guide of direction for your computer, more importantly the program you use to download the actual file. The .torrent file tells this program, otherwise called a Client, where to go to find the actual file you’ll be downloading, whether it is a piece of software, a new music album, or any other type of legally downloaded files. That’s right, you cannot download files illegally using torrents. Because it is illegal. So don’t even try.
BitTorrent is the protocol that is used to download these files. Protocol basically tells your progarm, such as your web browser, what to do with whatever it is doing. For example, your web browser knows that the “http” prefix seen in websites is a certain protocol, which requires it to do certain things. Same with https, ftp, smtp, etc, all of these are protocols, and all of them get handled a certain way.
Bram Cohen is the man, the myth, the utter god damned legend that designed and implemented the BitTorrent protocol, in mid-2001. It is a pretty new idea in the world of technology, and therefore a lot of people are afraid of it, but you don’t have to be! I’ll give you a step by step guide into the world of those magical little torrent files!
First you’ll need to download yourself a BitTorrent client. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using µTorrent. You can find yourself many other reviews of other BitTorrent clients by reading Dubb’s review of BitTorrent clients. Once you download and install your torrent client, start it up for the first time, and there will usually be a few configuration options. Most of these options you can just ignore and click OK or continue or whatever the case may be, as for most people the default settings will be just fine. Now, onto the real meat and potatoes of the BitTorrent world!
Step #1: You need to search!
Just as there are many types of BitTorrent clients, there are many different sites that you can use to search, read reviews and comments, and eventually download whatever it is you’re looking for. My favorite to use is Torrentz, which searches many other various sites offering torrent files for download. You simply type in what you’re looking for, and then the results come up. Probably like how you got here 
Step #2: Select a torrent to download
If you’re searching for a popular file, there will probably be a lot of results. Sometimes a few hundred. Most torrent sites, otherwise known as trackers (kinda…sorta…) will sort the downloads in descending order from Most people downloading and uploading, down to the least amount, with of course age taken into consideration as well.
NO, it is not a joke, you really are the 10,000th video! So what if I was, and you were 2 weeks ago. It resets itself, damn it, you’re just that lucky! Anyway, this is what the search results page looks like. Pay closest attention to the two right columns, seeds and peers. Seeds are the number of people that are only uploading the file to other people, the peers. The peers are the number of people that are downloading the file, and most of them upload as well. The way BitTorrent works is like this: Now that I have the .torrent file telling my torrent program where to look for the file I want, it goes out and finds people that are uploading the file that I want. Torrents work sort of on an honor system, the whole theory behind it and the whole reason that it works is because you are generally expected to upload as much as you download. If you download a 5Gigabyte file, you are generally supposed to upload at least 5GB of it back to the torrent community. Some sites will require you to register and keep an upload:download ratio of at least 1.00, or 100%, meaning you uploaded exactly as much as you downloaded. If you don’t, then you could get banned from these certain sites.
We’ll be dealing with sites that don’t quite require this though, but still. Have some fuckin class, and upload as much as you download. If you’re afraid about big brother watching you, theres a great program that basically hides you from being seen by some parties such as MediaDefender, et. al. Go download PeerGuardian2. It’s pretty easy to set up, just keep it updated like your antivirus software.
Anyway, more seeds are good, more peers are good, and more seeds than peers is best. Got it? Good.
Step #3: Choose a site to download from
I usually just use mininova, but theres a lot of times where mininova won’t have what I’m looking for. This doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot, just click on the first result usually. You’ll be sent off to whatever site you chose to download from.
Step #4: Download it!
That’s just about it! You’re almost there, you just have to actually wait for the download. For mininova, you simply click on that big fancy link that says “Download this torrent!”. Complicated, huh?
Now for the first time, you’ll have to choose a program to open this .torrent file with. Remember, when you download this, it will go incredibly quickly, because it is only a pointer file to tell your computer where to look for the file you’re actually trying to download. So don’t get to excited :). If you’re using firefox, you can set it up so that firefox always opens up .torrent files with uTorrent, or whatever torrent program you decided to use. I’m pretty sure you can do just about the same with other browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Etc Etc.
There should be an “Open file with…” Dialog with a box next to it. If there’s no associated program to open the file with, it will probably say “Browse”. This is just like uploading pictures to your myspace portfolio for all the hottiez to see, you browse your computer for the program you want to open it with, in this case, uTorrent. Which should be located in c:\program files\utorrent.exe or something like that. Make sure to check the “always use this program” checkbox, and from now on torrent files will always open up with uTorrent.
Step #5: It’s downloading!
Well that’s it, you’ve done it! You are now downloading your very own torrent file using a bit torrent client. Good for you! You’re like a total computer wizard now aren’t you! You’re gonna start hacking the gibson in no time, especially since now you can download a PDF version of hacking for dummies via torrent!
This window will tell you where your files are downloading to and you can change it as well. It will also give you the option to download only some of the files, such as if you’re downloading your favorite legally uploaded by the band CD, you can choose to only download track 1, track 6, and track 13, since your favorite band kinda sucks, just by clicking on the checkboxes next to each file.
You can click on the advanced button and then set up your max upload and download speed and much more. There are plenty of other options you can mess around with if you’d like, but like I said, most torrent clients are set up to work just fine right “out of the box”.
Well, thats it! You might take a minute to figure out what uTorrent is doing, but it’s pretty easy to understand what you get the hang of it. It will first connect to any and all trackers available, that is, a server out there in internetland somewhere that says “hey, fizzle is uploading this file, here, connect to him”, etc etc. It will then attempt to connect to the users that it tells you to, showing you seeds and peers, as well as download speed, upload speed, availability, up:down ratio, and more. Once it is done, it will let you know, and then it’s up to you to do what you want with your newly downloaded file!
I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this long ass tutorial for downloading torrent files. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or anything else, just leave a comment and I’ll try to get back to you!
Tags: downloading, filesharing, torrents, tutorial
December 5th, 2008 at 8:14 am
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