The three truths about Torrenting
1. Its in a greyish part of the law
2. It gets you free shit.
3. Free shit rules.
I see a lot of posts asking how to get free and 'legit' (trust me this stuff is legit, kind of) movies and games. So I decided to compile this guide to show you how to
1. Find and Download media and games
2. Not get viruses
3. Run your games and play your movies
4. Not get caught (Really easy)
5. Use the internet to keep you from ever being bored again
How it works in short (feel free to skip if you dont care)
The fastest and most effective way to get all of these things is learn to use the software wonder that are torrents. These torrents run on peer to peer networks where essentially someone creates a torrent file for a piece of media and uploads it to a website with a tracker. This tracker will connect everyone who is running the torrent file on their Bittorrent client. The first person who uploads the file will become the first seeder, the seeder is uploading the media to everyone else who downloads the torrent and is running it. These are called leechers. The leechers will be downloading parts of the file from the seeder while at the same time uploading the parts they have to all of the other leechers.
It's important to understand that your uploading and downloading doesnt work linearly, you dont start downloading the beginning and go until you finish, you download bits and pieces and by the end you have everything. Anyways, after a while these leechers while complete their download and become seeders, they are now just uploading to the leechers. As you can imagine, the more seeders and the less leachers the faster the download. Traditional servers will also often times be used to help the upload speed of the single leecher in the beginning to get the process up and going. Once it is, you can obtain
very fast download speeds. Ive gotten 20 mps down before from my university, and 5 or 6 was pretty average (granted this wont be the case for most of you). Alright screw all of this boring crap lets get to the piracy.
1. Finding a BitTorrent Client
You need a program to run your torrents, makes sense right? For this guide ill be using my favorite, uTorrent
http://www.utorrent.com/download.php
Its small, clean, and easy to use, but PC only. If you have a mac you will want to use Vuze (aka Azureus)
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Ill be talking you through this with utorrent, but the basics are the same and im sure you can figure it out with vuze.
2. Alright now lets steal some crap
There are two types of bittorrent trackers, public trackers and private trackers. Anyone can download from a public tracker, but private trackers require an invite and often times are focused around a specific type of media. For instance, 1080p movies, MMA, Sports Recordings etc. The easiest to use is a public tracker, so thats what we will use. The most (in)famous public tracker is the pirate bay, run by those crazy swedish who developed this whole P2P concept in the first place. The best way to search public trackers however is
http://www.scrapetorrent.com
Scrapetorrent will run your search through the all of the biggest public trackers and give you links to their site for easy downloading.
Another good way to find the newest and most popular stuff is to go on
http://thepiratebay.org
Click Top 100, then click on movies games etc. So if I click on movies right now at the top I see Iron Man. Now normally when you search for a movie you are going to see twelve billion different versions of the movie with possibly cryptic descriptions and of questionable legitamacy, for now lets assume this is legit. Later on I will explain how to not get virus, what the different tags mean, and so on.
Alright so I click on Iron Man[2008]DvDrip[Eng]-FXG and a page comes up with a description, comments, and a link to download. I click download and my browser asks me what I want to do, pretty easy, open the torrent with uTorrent. Once that happens you torrent will start up or just pop up and ask you where you want to put the file, and it will show you a list of files. One of the best parts about torrenting is that unless the uploader is a douchebag and RARs everything (more on this later) you can just download the parts you want. Well I want everying so I just click ok.
3. The Downloading
Oh shit this part is intensely hard, it starts downloading automatically whenever you run uTorrent and you can start, stop or pause the download whenever you want. All of this stuff you can figure out on your own. Alright download is finished time to play the movie.
4. The Best Way to Play Movies
Now with torrents the clips you download wont always be in the most basic avi or quicktime formats. Nerds like to throw crazy shit at you. For this, you need a codec pack called CCCP and Media Player Classic. Media Player Classic comes with the codec pack and it will play fucking anything with no bullshit, hassle, or crap. It has a real nice interface and I have it set to play every single file type except for ogm (obscure, use VLC, but you probably wont see much of it).
http://www.cccp-project.net/
Again, PC only, so if you have a mac youre on your own.
5. But Double U Tee Eff all of the files are in these weird RAR things
Its basically like a more effective form of compression than zipping. So head on back to scrapetorrent and type in winrar. Alright here we find
WinRAR Extreeme Edition version 3 71
Well its in bold and its extreeme so lets download that one. Easy enough to set up, now you can unpack these pesky rar files and either run the media from inside, or just pull it out of the RAR.
6. Screw this, I have an ultimate gaming PC with quad sli, lets steal some games.
Sorry mac users
http://mvpc.ytmnd.com/
Now getting your stolen games to work is pretty easy, but if you read the comments, youll find that a lot of people dont know where to start. Contrary to the opinion of the angry internet nerd who cant wait to call you a retarded n00b, we all had to start somewhere. Alright lets assume you have the game downloaded, now what. Normally when you buy a game you put the DVDs in and a screen pops up and installs. Well same thing with when you download a game, except its called a virtual image instead of a DVD. For this you need a program that can mount this virtual image, on to a virtual disk drive. Its basically like tricking your computer into thinking that you actually put a dvd in. There are many programs, my favorite being Daemon Tools Pro
http://www.torrentportal.com/torrents-details.php?id=3431224
Alright so now that you have that installed you run it and this screen pops up. What you want to do is click add image and navigate to the iso, bin, or whatever kind of virtual image you have on your hands (Youll know since itll just be one big flipping file somewhere under 4.7gigs, but probably pretty close.)
Now before you can put the virtual drive in your need to create some drives. So right click on the lower section and add a SCSI drive and an IDE drive. Youll find you can bypass certain protections on the IDE drive, but bleh, you dont need to worry about that.
So now youll want to right click on the image you added and mount it to the IDE drive. Now the autorun should kick in and you can install the game/program. At some point the installation will prompt you for a key. The key can either come from a keygen the crackers built, or you can find it in an nfo file (read it with notepad) that came with the torrent. If its not sitting out in the folder you downloaded the game with you will find it inside of the virtual disk. So right click the mounted disk in daemon tools and hit file explorer. Then look for a folder named crack, or just something out of the ordinary. Ok done installing. Now its important not to download any updates that didnt come with the torrent, or else the crack wont work. At this point if you try to run the game it will say please insert the correct disk. Now comes the crack.
You will find the crack in an appropriately named folder with the game or inside the virtual disk (file explorer on daemon tools again). All it is is a hacked version of the exe file. What you want to do is navigate through program files to the correct folder and find the exe with the same name and icon as the crack. You want to copy the original incase you mess things up, and put the crack in the folder. Now make a shortcut so you can run it from your desktop, and bam game should work perfectly, and you shouldnt need to remount the virtual disk every time you want to play.
Each game though, will be a bit different. Its important to read the NFO file that comes with the download beforehand to figure things out. If you are getting some weird error go back to the page you downloaded the torrent from and read the comments to see if anyone is having the same problem. If not you can either leave a comment with a question (not everyone is a dick, many people are happy to help you out) or you might want to search the officialy knowledge base, or even call tech support (Hi I stole this game and it isnt working right, halp?).
7. Finding Legit Torrents
The thing about the internet is, as im sure you have noticed, people love to be assholes. As soon as a legitamite crack team uploads an anticipated file you can expect 15 dickwads to upload fake versions stuffed with as many viruses as you can imagine. Luckily, it is extremely easy to spot these. First thing you want to look at are the number of seeders in that file versus the other files. If one has 15 seeders and one has 10000, 10000 people are probably not downloading a virus and 15 retards are.
This isnt always the case though, because its possible to actually spoof seeders and make it look like a ton of people are downloading it when they arent. The easiest thing to do then is to read the comments and the first thing people will say is whether or not it has a virus. If you want to check for yourself then my use your newly found torrent abilities to download a program called NOD32. It will scan your computer at lightning speeds (seriously ive finished all 1.2 TiBs in like 45 minutes) and you can just right click a file and hit scan, before you try to run it.
8. Tags on Movie Torrents
So when you search for a movie you will probably see twelve thousand version all with dvdrip DVDSCR R5 Telesync CAM etc. WTF DOES ALL OF THAT MEAN.
Well its pretty simple, if you want more in depth descriptions look it up on wikipedia, but heres the spark notes
720/1080p - Rape quality, I have tons of these, play great on my bigscreen.
Dvdrip - Straight from the DVD, good quality plays well on the computer
DVDSCR - Dvd quality, but often has numbers at the bottom and messages telling you are a very bad man if you have a copy of this. This pretty much means someone is working on the inside and physically stole a copy from the production company. Awesome stuff, lots of times you can watch movies weeks before they come out in theaters.
R5 - This is like a dvd quality video where they took the video feed from a russian version and put in a professional audio version to go with it, usually comes out before the DVDrip.
Telesync - Usually a professional filming of a movie playing in a theater, usually means fairly poor quality, but its watchable for many people, and usually has line audio so perfect quality there.
CAM - Some idiot smuggled a crappy handheld into a theater, so many people watch these but really its a piece of shit and the fat bastard usually spills his popcorn and you have to look at the ground while he tries to get some more dirty calories into his obese self.
Again, the easiest way to check the quality of a movie is to read the comments, people will rate it and bicker, insult the uploader, etc.
9. Dont get caught
This one is reaaaaaally easy, the majority of you could do nothing extra without getting so much as a letter of warning.
Though if you are on comcast or are at a university you will want to check out a program called PeerGuardian 2. Its basically an IP blocker that will keep people out of your crap. Run it whenever you are using torrents.
If you are at a university its a good idea to go into preferences on utorrent and cap your upload speed, and keep your uploading to a minimum in general. Only like 2 of the 500 people I knew to be very active in the P2P community at UW had their internet shut off and they uploaded around 500 gigs in a couple days (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation). Also its a good idea to check your university's policy on P2P activity, and the presence of a DC++ Network (Much faster, even safer) on campus.
Well thats about it, if you have any questions about private trackers, uploading your own torrents, have problems or whatever else, feel free to message me. Also feel free to flame me or call my guide pointless and a piece of shit, I love you guys~
