µTorrent and What is Torrenting.

Okay! I’m going to try my best to talk about what is torrenting and what program I like to use. Now, torrenting is a type of P2P file sharing meaning the network is made up of a bunch of people sharing files. It’s a great way of getting your file out there for everyone to download without going to and uploading said file to a file hosting web site like MediaFire, 4Shared, or the now dead Megaupload. No, instead you are hosting the file from your own computer. While the previously mentioned sites are used to download a file straight from them, when it comes to torrents you are actually grabbing the file from multiple people who have already downloaded or are downloading the file, you can imagine that if you are downloading a file like this is would usually be much quicker since you are downloading from many sources. The torrent file itself is only a couple KBs big because the file is only telling your torrent program where to find the file from which users. That’s the basic of it.

Something you might ask later on about Torrenting will probably be: what are seeds/peers? Seeds or seeders are the users who have already finished downloading, they are uploading the files to those torrenting it. The peers are people who are downloading the file as well as uploading what they have too.

When you finish downloading a file you have been torrenting don’t just delete the torrent! When your file has finished downloading it will automatically be set to seed. It’s is proper netiquette to seed the file you have downloaded for a while though you might have to decide how long “a while” is. For myself it is usually until I have uploaded twice or trice the size of the file. 

You might have heard of torrenting before in a negative light and are wondering "is this legal?". Yes it is!- but it depends on what you are downloading. If you are downloading something that you could not obtain other than from paying for it- like movie, music or video game than yes- though there are indie developers who simply want to get their product out there for the world to see, who are giving their movie, music or game for free.

I recommend that you trust the source of your torrent, you never really know what your getting into since your sharing with other users. Some sites that I recommend are:

• http://www.clearbits.net/
• http://www.jamendo.com/en

I really recommend the free short films Big Buck Bunny and Sintel too!

Now if that wasn't a good enough explanation; here is a video that might do a better job.

The torrent program that I use and recommend on Windows is µTorrent. This program is simple and light. You can also stream video from right in the program; this is a useful function in that you can preview a file before it is done. You can also view comment on the torrent file as well, which can be a real useful feature, though honestly I don't see it used too often. Creating a torrent file is also very simple, just go to File> Create new torrent, choose your file or directory and that is it, it takes care of anything else for you such as trackers. This is a free program, though, there is a premium version of the program that carries with it extra features for a the price of

I hope this helped, you can download µTorrent here.