Neocrisis - What will you find next? - How Do Torrents aka Bittrrent work?

Home

Welcome to Neocrisis

We bring you a fully interactive and fun experience on this site. To this effect, we have compiled a superb collection of articles that we hope you are going to find interesting.

Main Menu

Site / Forum Login

Syndicate

Newest Added Pages

Total Users

	357 registered
	0 today
	0 this week
	4 this month
	Last: ravaz911

Other Site Info

Site Status

Tracker Stats #2

Affiliates

Chocobo Heaven

Hell and Heaven Net

Video Games Heaven

Square Union - Final Fantasy

Donate

How Do Torrents aka Bittrrent work? - Simpified 100%

(0 votes)

Saturday, 12 January 2008

Well i Torrent stuff daily. I never really knew how i was getting the files that i was downloading lol

Explaination was made by luvmoose
Basically, a torrent is a way to distribute large files (like high-quality concert recordings and video) in a shared manner. The person offering up the torrent, we'll use Amy in this example because she just offered the video, creates a torrent file and posts the link to it on a public tracker site. Other people who are interested in it download the torrent file and open it with special torrent software (more on that later) which starts to download chunks of the file from Amy. As people sucessfully download chunks of the file, they start sharing those chunks with other people trying to download the same file from Amy.

So, if there are 10 chunks to the file, I might get chunks 1, 5, and 7 from Amy directly. But if Jeff starts downloading too, then I'd get chunks 2 and 3 from him and give him my chunks 5 and 7. Brian might also be downloading and I'd get 4 and 8 from him and give him 1 and 5. Eventually we all get all the chunks from someone participating in the torrent. Then we keep our software running so that people who came to the game later can download more chunks from us, especially if we have a good network connection (not everyone does this, but it's very kind to do, so do it if you can).

Doing it distributed like this reduces the demand on Amy's computer and connection (because all of us aren't downloading the whole thing from her directly). And because it's all in chunks, you can stop downloading if you have to use your net connection for something else and start up again later, and the software knows what you still need.

There are a lot of different tracker sites. Amy set up her own at one point for some BNL stuff. Other's can be limited access or invitation only because of potential legal issues.

So, you need special torrent software to download torrents. On the Mac, I use somthing called BitTorrent (which probably needs to be upgraded). Others can tell what to use on a PC or suggest other Mac software.

Once you download a torrent file, the files within may be in formats that you need to convert before you can listen to them in iTunes or other software (the most popular formats are SHN and FLAC, google those). If you're downloading video, you'll probably need DVD burning/converting software.

Comments

RSS

Only registered users can write comments!