What sites can you recommend for torrents of bootlegged shows?

August 15, 2004 6:34 PM

I have recently found that bit torrents are great once you haven't got a cap on your monthly bandwidth. I have found a couple of great sites for previously bootlegged shows, but what other sites can my fellow Mefites recommend?

(I would be happy to share the sites I do have inside if they are wanted!)
posted by Richat to computers & internet (13 comments total)

suprnova.org, of course.
posted by Krrrlson at 6:39 PM on August 15, 2004

seconded.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 7:27 PM on August 15, 2004

yup--suprnova...and there's animesuki for anime.
posted by amberglow at 7:28 PM on August 15, 2004

what sites do you go to, Richat?
posted by amberglow at 7:29 PM on August 15, 2004

actually, there was something on this topic previously
posted by bob sarabia at 7:34 PM on August 15, 2004

bitoogle is semi-ok for searches, too.
posted by amberglow at 7:39 PM on August 15, 2004

Well, Bob, thanks for that link to the last time it was discussed...I will have a look.

Amberglow, the main two I have found, and loved, are Sharing the Groove(despite it's recent rebuild/hiccups) and I just found EasyTree and have found it pretty great too.

I do tend to really enjoy the music side of the torrents, finding rare stuff etc., but I am thinking to tossing the premium usenet subscription and wondered if the torrents could accomplish the same sort of thing, minus the discussion aspect. 'Course I have Mefi for the discussions now!
posted by Richat at 8:11 PM on August 15, 2004

Well, I'd keep my Usenet subscription if I were you. Two things against torrents are:

(a) They're slow. Much slower than a premium Usenet connection.
(b) You have to upload. And uploading will slow down your download speed in turn. If you max out the upload, to expect to get much more downloaded than the uploaded speed, no matter what your connection's download speed. And people get real pissy when you don't upload, for good reason.

Overall, torrents and Usenet complement each other. Neither replaces each other. Torrents have more breadth, but Usenet is faster, not that expensive, and also have enough breadth to expose you to things you haven't seen before.

torrentreactor is another good source for torrents, by the way.
posted by calwatch at 12:06 AM on August 16, 2004

suprnova is closely monitored by The Bad Guys (you know, the MPAA and that lot), if that's at all intimidating to you.

Private trackers are where it's at, but I can't really tell you about any of the ones I know about, because then they wouldn't be private any more.

In the meantime, here are a few of my fave non-private trackers :

Digital distractions
TVtorrents
MVGroup
Torrentbox
torrents.co.uk

The same caveat I mentioned above for suprnova applies to all public sites, of course, if you're intending to download copyrighted material, which I of course, would never, ever, ever do. Honest.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:54 AM on August 16, 2004

Two things against torrents are:

(a) They're slow. Much slower than a premium Usenet connection.

I dunno about you, but I regularly get 300Kb/s and more on torrents, which means I can download a new episode of, say, the Daily Show in like 15 minutes or so. That's plenty fast, I reckon.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:56 AM on August 16, 2004

torrentreactor is where suprnova gets a large chunk of its torrents. For some reason, suprnova doesn't seem to keep track of quite as many as TR does.

If you're having speed problems, you should be limiting your upload rate to about 80% of your backchannel. Modern bittorrent clients, such as Azureus will let you do this. While speeds like the chicken's will be rare -- I have a 6 megabit downchannel and have seen by bittorrent download speed hit 5.5 megabit once, and tend to hover around 2.1 -- there are a few things you can do to keep your speed from being frustrating:

• Enable TCP SACK on your system.
• Use a better client
• Change your listen port to some value other than 6881 - 6889, if your network or ISP is rate limiting traffic to BT clients, which is getting popular.
• If you're using NAT, make sure you advertise your real IP, not your private (192.168) address.

posted by majick at 7:14 AM on August 16, 2004

Best reason to keep Usenet is that it's nearly entirely anonymous from the downloading side of things. Your ISP knows you're doing it, but there's absolutely no reason for any of the copyright owners to suspect you of it.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:32 AM on August 16, 2004

On my DSL, I max the 1.3 mbps downstream, even with a pretty good upstream of around 160 kbps. This is not slow.
posted by smackfu at 11:38 AM on August 16, 2004