Someone Explain Bit Torrent downloading for me

Think of it as rapid exchange of mass quantities.

http://www.bittorrent.com/introduction.html

 

Is it similar to Kazaa or Napster? Any problems with security once you load that program?

 

Download the program Azuerus: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Install it and go to a search engine like mininova.org or isohunt.com to look for torrents (or finalgear.com for TopGear specifically). Open the file (you can save it if you want, the torrent is only like 26kb). It will open Azureus and start downloading once you tell it where to save on your hard drive.

 

It's not like Kazaa or Napster, there are no rampant ads/annoyances, or any chance of getting infected with spyware or viruses for that matter - period.

1) Get a bit-torrent client such as BitComet (www.bitcomet.com)
2) Install it, and if you are behind a router use this page to help you set up BitComet: http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm
3) Find your router/firewall on that page, once you click the appropriate name/model, you will see a page explaining how to open ports (it's not as complex as it sounds)
4) Go to http://www.finalgear.com/downloads/topgear/ and click on the desired episode (each listed episode has a convenient mouseover which provides a nice summary of what that episode contains).
5) Navigate to "Go get the torrent for this episode" located under the Links section of the page (near the bottom).
6) This will take you to another site known as mininova.org, where you download the torrent. I.e. Download: Top Gear - [07x04] - 2005.12.04.avi.torrent
6) Open or Save your torrent (usually no need to Save, I always choose Open). If you chose Open, this will prompt BitComet to launch, simply hit OK and let the download begin!
If you chose Save navigate to where you saved the torrent, and simply double click it to launch BitComet.

By default, all files are downloaded to C:\Program Files\BitComet\Downloads. However you can change this to whatever location you wish from Options --> Preferences --> Task --> Default Download Path

Hope this helps you guys get going, Enjoy!

 

Man I need to take a computer class.....

 

!! Oh come on man! It's all in there, step by step. You can do ittt (Rob Schneider voice)

 

Speed usually picks up after a while ...

 

Alex, glad to see that everything worked out for ya. Yes, FG.com does go down time to time, however one point to note: NEVER use the estimated time remaining as truth in bittorent. The speeds fluctuate dramatically all the time, so it's never accurate.

 

whoa - this is not really true. while there is little to no chance of getting a spyware or virus through an actual bit torrent transfer, there are dozens upon dozens of bit torrent clients out there to download, and some of them could very well contain viruses or spyware as part of their installation processes. or the site where you download it from could have inserted them even if the developer did not.

that said, the populare clients like auzureus and whatnot are apparently totally safe.

that's just a very broad blanket statement that i'd be careful about being comfortable with.

bit torrent is a 'standard' for doing these cool transfers. there are lots and lots of implementations of that 'standard'. each "bit torrent application" (as opposed to each download of a torrent) is a potential for infection of your computer. always run up-to-date anti-virus/anti-spyware software!

doody.

 

ok, bit torrent, you get a small file that is kind of like the address of the file you want, then you get the bittorrent downlaoder thing (bitcomet or others) and you search for seeds (sources with the information you need) using the address you downloaded and it downloads bits of the information from the different seeds......

 

Azureus is a resource hog... I used it for a long while but switched over to uTorrent
http://www.utorrent.com/
Sleek, simple, low resource use.

 

Let's say you are downloading one season of a tv favourite episode. Although it may seem that you have fully downloaded a couple out of lets say 10 episodes of that season, they will not play until you have fully downloaded all of them. I almost cancelled mine when I thought the files may have some defects until a friend told me to wait for the download to complete. Patience is a virtue.

 

I agree with you, but for the sake of argument I just wanted to point out it's extremely safe, especially Bit Comet. The only way I could see that happening is if someone puts psywar eor a virus into the torrent file that you downlooad, but even then I have yet to come across one in my 4+ years of BT use. Having said that, you are correct in the end.