TV Shows are one of the most popular media that get downloaded from Bittorrent. It’s very handy for viewing missed episodes of a favorite tv show or to view tv shows in their original language and not the translated version that fails to catch the spirit of the original show. I don’t want to talk about the legal aspect. It is my opinion that everyone should make the decision for himself whether he downloads TV shows from Bittorrent.

Ted, which stands for Torrent Episode Downloader, is probably the easiest way to download tv shows from Bittorrent. The application has been designed specifically for that purpose. It comes with a range of preconfigured shows (more than 100) that are displayed by default. Many popular tv shows are listed including 24, Battlestar Galactica, CSI and Lost among others.

It works like the following. The user picks a show from the list and Ted displays a description of that show along with a list of episodes that are currently available. Episodes are just listed as Season 2, Episode 4 which makes it a bit harder to find out if that is the show that you missed for example unless you want to download a full season.

continue reading "Torrent Episode Downloader"

Back in 2007 the team that developed the popular Java Bittorrent client Azureus created the content distribution plattform Vuze and integrated it into Azureus. Today, after more than a year, to consolidate their position and start using the Vuze brand name exclusive. One could say that Azureus has become Vuze which tries to be more than just a Bittorrent download client.

Vuze adds a social component to it among other things. Users can for instance add friends to the client and prioritize this traffic and share torrents with their friends easily. A torrent search engine is included as well in the client with the option to add other search engines that are not listed yet.

The old user base that was happy with just the Bittorrent client is at least partially unhappy with the decision. Many users will continue using the old Azureus client or start using another client like uTorrent.

continue reading "Azureus is no more"

The Bittorrent protocol has gone a long way since the beginning and the applications have become increasingly easy to use for most users. They do come with a lot of settings though which can speed up the seeding and downloading and configure the client exactly the way the user wants it to be but usually it’s just an install and use kind of process.

The concept however is harder to explain to users who work with a computer but are not tech-savvy. Instead of telling them to install a Bittorrent client to load the torrent file to be able to download it it would be far easier and comfortable to present an executable file to them which would handle that on its own.

Torrent2exe (via Download Squad) is a web application that can turn any torrent file into an executable. The torrent can be selected from an url or from the computer of the user creating the executable.

continue reading "Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier"

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Uploadjockey, which allows you to upload a file to many of the popular file-hosting sites at one time. I also asked readers for their suggestions and was pleasantly surprised to find there are quite a number of multiple file-hosting sites available. I decided to try out the sites mentioned and am writing about my experiences.

MassMirror: I was quite impressed with this service until I got to the end. Uploading a file was a nice experience. I got a progress bar which told me how much of my file was uploaded, the time left, and the upload speed I was getting. MassMirror has more file-hosting sites covered as well. A file will be hosted on Rapidshare, Picshome, 4filehosting, Megaupload, Fileinsanity, Fastuploading, and Zshare. File size limits are bigger too with the site allowing you to upload files up to 1 GB big. The bad part: When I tried to upload a file, it got stuck at the part where the file is sent to the other sites. I don’t know if the site was down or something but my file just wouldn’t get past the final stage.

continue reading "A Comparison of Multiple File-Hosting Sites"

A friend of mine has created his own huge home network with several computers throughout the house. Some act as servers, for example file servers and one of them is being used as a download server. It makes perfectly sense to let another server handle the downloads from P2P networks like Bittorrent or eDonkey to avoid slow downs on other computers.

He is using the program P2P Transfer to transfer torrents and hashes from all of his computers in the network to his download server. The advantage of P2P Transfer is the encrypted transfer of the files and that the files do not have to be copied manually or that a login session with the download server is required to load the new files and start the transfers.

Supported are ED2K,torrent and magnet currently. P2P Transfer can install a server and client application. The server application will be installed on the download server. A password has to be selected during installation which will later be used by the clients to authenticate themselves.

continue reading "Send Torrents and hashes from multiple computers to one Server"