This article will help you understand and employ the power of
BitTorrent, a new quickly rising standard in large files downloading. In the recent years, the downloads problem became obvious - with increasing connection speeds publishing new game demos and movies could easily lead to huge bandwidth bills for the site's owner, so users had to either click through a ton of advertisements and experience sub-par download speeds or pay money to download free demos...
Now, BitTorrent author has an elegant answer - utilise users bandwidth. You can say - this was done before, p2p clients, correct, but not quite so. Other p2p clients completely rely on user's good will for sharing files, and they are very unscalable (with terabytes of data it becomes practically impossible to find anything usefull/rare). Leeching and hacked clients are killing p2p networks like Kazaa, eMule (eDonkey), Napster, Morpheus, and many others. BitTorrent has an answer - give only to those who share, by utilizing user's upload stream while (s)he is downloading. This way, all a site needs is a special .torrent file, generated by
this utility, and a few seeds (completed downloads "seeding" others) to simultaneously allow literally thousands of downloads without using much of site's bandwidth.
But you won't need the technical details. What you would need is setup bittorrent, find the files to download, and enjoy download speeds that scale up as the download progresses depending on your configured upload speed. Note that BitTorrent author seemingly dislikes all kinds of user interfaces, so it may be not quite usual experience for those coming from GUI world. But you won't need a fancy gui, either.
Preparing your firewallIf you have a firewall running, you will need to open high ports to allow BitTorrent to connect. You should open ports 6881-6889 for it to operate correctly, if you have no administration rights for your firewall, then you might be unable to use BitTorrent.
Setting Up BitTorrent On Windowsdownload and install bittorrent 3.3. Don't worry that nothing appeared in your programs folder - it is set up. Now, when you launch a .torrent file from the web, your download with default settings would start automatically. Remember to leave it running if you can after it completes, to provide seed for other users.
Setting Up BitTorrent on RH linuxDownload a 3.2 cvs RPM, do a
rpm -iv BitTorrent-3.2_cvs_alikins-2.noarch.rpm under root.
That would install BitTorrent, now you can call it by using
btdownloadheadless.py. You would see a list of finetune configuration, which is the same as when launching BT in Windows. You can just provide a
--url link.to/torrent/file option, or read on for reccommended configuration
BitTorrent Command LineThat's where the power is. Some of most usefull options:
--display_interval sets display refresh in seconds; default 0.5 but you better set it higher if running in console ("headless") mode
--download_slice_size sets the number of one chunk, in size. If you have a good conenction (150KB +), set it to 32 or even 64K
--max_uploads maximum number of uploads; default 7 but if you reduce it, your download speed may suffer since you won't be sharing efectively
--max_upload_rate limits upload rate. NOTE that your download speed depends on this option, too. Set it to not allow BitTorrent to overwhelm your connection
--max_slice_length maximum data chunk you would send. should be about two times larger than your incoming (download) chunk
--saveas how to save the incoming file, defaults to remote file name
--url url of a .torrent file
--responsefile if you downloaded the .torrent file locally, specify the full path instead of
--urlSo, linux config for a fast connection would look like this:
> cat bt.sh
#!/bin/sh
btdownloadheadless.py --display_interval 15 --download_slice_size 65456 --max_uploads 7 --max_slice_length 65500 --url $1
And you run it like this:
bt.sh http://link.to/torrent/file]http://link.to/torrent/file
Or, for a slower aDSL on Windows:
start bt.bat
-------------
"c:\Program Files\BitTorrent\btdownloadgui.exe" --max_uploads 5 --max_slice_length 32700 --max_upload_rate 4 --saveas "C:\BitTorrent" --responsefile %1
And you would just drag a downloaded .torrent file on this .bat file
BitTorrent files and seedsNow, the most important question - WHERE to get the urls and seeds to download game patches/demos/movies/etc? Some of the most popular links below:
suprnova.org - generic site with no censorship and all kinds of downloads, from legal to illegal, so beware! you should only download legal content.
gametab.com - site dedicated to game demos, trailers, and other game content downloadable by BitTorrent. Forget fileplanet and lines, this is the way of the future.
bt.etree.org - legal concerts of artists that allow their music to be freely downloadable. latest concerts and other material.
And, if you are still looking for something, try
Smiler's BTlinks which has extensive collection of BitTorrent-related websites.
Have fun downloading! And leave that client running after your download completes - help seed for others. Post here if you have interesting tips / links / torrents
► SLF - Server List Forum
Author
