Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with bittorrent

Ugly bittorrent ratio needs a facelift

alitorbati — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:03:31 -0800

Is there any software of Mac OS X that will protect my bittorrent seed/leech ratio? I'm looking for something like GreedyTorrent, but for mac. Obviously, freeware is preferred but I'm willing to hear any suggestions. Please don't use this post to encourage me to seed more. I seed as much as I can on one of my computers but my mac just won't do it.

Also, can anyone suggest any reasons that my mac is extremely finicky about seeding any torrents I get from what.cd? I'm using Transmission, if it matters.

Thanks!

How to record streaming presidential debate?

maus — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:42:09 -0800

How can I record a video stream from CNN this Friday? I follow US politics and elections like other people follow professional sports, and there's a playoff tomorrow that sounds like it's going on whether or not one of the teams shows up. Unfortunately, I have play rehearsal tomorrow night and will be unable to watch it. I don't have cable TV, and was planning on watching it on CNN's or Fox's stream. Is there a simple way to record it for when I get home? Alternatively, is there a reliably-seeded bittorrent tracker for political videos like this?

How to stop torrents at work?

numlok — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:13:20 -0800

I'm sure this question will not make me the most popular student at the dance, but is there a way to identify (via IP) machines running BitTorrent clients within an internal network (ie. work)? My company has around 50 employees, and the old, "Please don't torrent at work" doesn't seem to be doing much good anymore. It brings our email and web browsing to a near standstill, and dropping by the "usual suspects" is not only tiresome, but doesn't seem to find all the sources of traffic any longer. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Detect bandwidth throttling?

ao4047 — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:59:49 -0800

We suspect our ISP is shutting down our internet connection when we use a BitTorrent client and/or throttling bandwidth. Is there any way to detect this? We have Comcast and I know about the legal stuff but wanted to be able to detect it ourselves.

Torrents are slowing down my Firefox!

zardoz — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:54:58 -0800

Whenever I run Transmission on OSX, my Firefox browsing slows to a trickle, or simply stops altogether. I have an iMac running OSX 10.5.3, and I use Transmission to download torrents, and less frequently Limewire. About a month ago I moved to a new house and a new ISP, an DSL line with a 4500 kb/s download, and about 800 up (in Tokyo). My download and surfing speeds aren't as fast as my previous place, but it's still quite fast.

Recently, though, whenever I fire up Transmission and/or Limewire, my browsing just stops. Sometimes not completely, but only if whatever I'm downloading is itself just a trickle. (This isn't OS specific: I use BootCamp and have the same problem when booted into Win XP, using uTorrent and FF). The strange thing is this problem just cropped up about a week ago, and surfing while downloading worked fine when I first got the connection going.

I've read some other posts about this problem, but still can't figure it out. I've installed Carrafix, for example, but at least at the time of this writing (and perhaps never), I don't understand it. I'm only moderately computer literate and the whole "bandwidth throttling", "bottlenecking" stuff is new to me.

I don't really know what to do. Others have suggested cfosSpeed, but it's Windows only and I mostly use OSX--is there a Mac equivalent to this program? Any other tricks or suggestions?

How to fix windows premissions for torrented files

Four Flavors — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:10:39 -0800

Torrented files can't be read by a remote machine until they are cut/pasted. Why, and how to fix it? I have 2 computers, one of which downloads torrents. The completed directories can be seen by the other computer, but clicking on them gets an 'access denied' error. Moving the directory somewhere else, then moving it back where it was causes the error to go away. This happens long after the file is done & the torrent stopped.

What could be causing this? I use uTorrent, in case it matters. The torrents are downloads of movies I already own on VHS from various trackers. Both machines are windows XP boxes, in the same workgroup. Both users have admin rights on their respective machines, and the share allows all users full access. No users are set to 'deny'.

Help with Bittorrent port fowarding

nivekraz — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:40:46 -0800

Just got Verizon FIOS and the wifi access point sucks. So I disabled the wireless portion on the fios router and plugged in a linksys wifi router. Wireless is now kick a** but my bittorrent is slow. I need help with port forwarding. The fios router is 192.168.1.1/24 and the new access point is 192.168.1.2/24 with the wireless network being 192.168.2.0 and the computer I want to torrent on is 192.168.2.101. On the fios router (.1) I have set port forwarding for port 65473 to forward to the linksys(.3). Then on the linksys, port forward for 65473 to computer (.2.101).

>> Fios Router 192.168.1.1 > Linksys to Fios Interface 192.168.1.3 > AP 192.168.2.1 >MacBook 192.168.2.101

This doesn't work. If I plug into fios router and get into the .1.1 network, it works. How can i get wireless bittorrent working?

Fios router is an Actiontech MI424-WR. Wifi is Linksys WRT160N.

My house of (network) cards has tumbled

puddpunk — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:00:34 -0800

I live in a house with 6 other internet hungry people. Help me cater for our needs! I live in a very connected household but I can't find a consumer router to cater for us. We have 4 laptops, 2 desktops, 1 NAS, 2 ps3's and 2 xbox360's in our house and I need help to find a solution that works.

Currently we have a fairly beefy ADSL connection and Belkin N1 wireless modem router sitting on the end of it to share with everyone. The game consoles are frequently used for online gaming (both PSN and Xbox Live) and there is often heavy access going on from the desktops/laptops (Web surfing, downloading, music/video streaming and some bit torrent).

When a lot of connections are created (i.e. p2p, joost) and a fair throughput is heading through the router (like to and from the NAS) it will often buckle and cause a small 5-10s outage, killing any transfers. Otherwise the Belkin N1 is almost perfect.

I have access to a WRAP board running an older version of m0n0wall which I have found to be very stable but gives me lots of problems with the game consoles because it lacks (and developers refuse to implement) UPnP.

I understand that UPnP isn't a great protocol and I always prefer to run a tight ship. BitTorrent isn't a problem because you can specify the ports to advertise on the client and match them on the router. However the game consoles lack this customisation and so far I have found NO solution to be able to use multiple console online services behind one NAT machine (bar buying more IP addresses and 1-to-1 natting them)

Does anybody have a solid solution to replace my Belkin N1 router, I would love to use the WRAP board I have and use the Belkin as an access point only.

So in short, my requirements are:
1) Can support heavy loads and many connections
2) Support UPnP (or another solution to allow Xbox/PS3 to play nice behind the router)
3) Wireless N support and decent legacy wireless support too

A bit on bittorrents

barrakuda — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:04:13 -0800

Can someone explain to me the magic of bittorrents? How do they work? How are they different from programs like Limewire and Kazaa? What's the deal with seeds and peers and how can you optimize your downloading speed (i.e. how to make it quicker)? Finally, which are the best sites where you can find downloadable files? Thank you.

What's the best way of distributing a DVD over the Internet?

amcewen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:37:06 -0800

What's the best way of distributing a DVD over the Internet? I'm thinking probably bittorrent for transmission, but what format? ISO? A set of VOBs, etc.? Basically, I decided to make a DVD of some of the excellent TED Talks to give to a friend - I figured a DVD would be better as it wouldn't require him to sit in front of his computer to watch them.

As the TED Talks are creative commons, I thought other people on t'Internet might like a copy and so I'm looking at how to share it with everyone.

I'm trying to make it easy for people to use (it's going to be tricky enough if they have to install a bittorrent client), so want to distribute it in a format that can be burnt to DVD easily on Windows, Mac and Linux. Preferably where I can provide a short set of instructions and pointers to suitable software for each platform.

The easiest for me would be a mirror of the DVD structure - so AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders containing .VOB files - but I've also come across ISO files or .CUE/.BIN files.

Which should I pick? (and if it's one of the latter, does anyone have any recommendations for software to create them on Windows XP?)

peer to peer folder sync

matholio — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:12:10 -0800

Can anyone recommend software to syncronise files between multiple servers ? I have staff creating multiple large files, >1gb, daily and I need to share them with multiple organisations. (medical research data, medical research institutes, univercities, etc)

I'm considering using bittorrent and handrolling a solution.
Scan a folder for new files, auto seed new files, check other servers for their new autoseeded files.

When staff want to commit a data file for synching, they would just move it to a specific folder and wait for the servers to sync overnight.
An enhancement would be a webpage for staff to tick boxes, to publish data, queue for syncing, etc.

As far as I knopw the data will be static, once it's created it won't change, there will just be more of it.

It would be nice to have some reporting functions too.
Platform would be windows or linux.
Encryption during transit would be nice.
Estimated new data is 15gb day.
Initial seed would be 1,000gb+ (may post harddisks to start off)
Server locations are global.
Bandwidth not a huge problem, academic networks will be used.(keen to be efficient though)

If there is a existing solution, I'd like to hear about it.

I considered PowerFolder, but the techs there say it doesn't doesn't support multiple sources. I'm really looking for something that support multiple sources at a block level.

If there's an obvious way to do this, I'm missing it.
I'll admit I like the idea of using bittorent for legitimate purposes, but that should not be the driver.

Is there more to TV online than iTunes?

dpcoffin — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:28:15 -0800

I wanna download TV to watch on my TV; where do I learn... How?

OK, I’m liking iTunes for commercial-free TV viewing a LOT, and gonna go for an Apple TV (don’t really care about the movie rentals so far; Netflix working fine for that...) but hating how little seems to be available, how I can’t tell when or where any given show is going to be available, willing but not geeky or young enough to understand how to use bitTorrent or Usenet or even Unison, or make sense of any online “explanations” so far found, don’t know if there’s any way to get streaming episodes to be viewable or worth viewing on my HD TV...Sheesh, I guess I’m Lost. And on a Mac, btw.

Where’s my downloading for duffer dummies resource and/or my one-stop overview of legal options and offerings while I wait for this industry to get its act together?

US TV Shows in Japanese? For free?

splice — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:43:21 -0800

How would I go about finding torrents or downloads of popular TV shows dubbed in Japanese? I have been reading alljapaneseallthetime.com and find the method described very interesting. This method involves immersion in Japanese language materials. The author recommends getting materials you are already familiar with so you can generally follow what is going on even if the dialogue is in Japanese.

The problem is that now that I am looking for a few shows in Japanese, the prices are simply bowling me over. $200 for a season of DS9? No, really? And I would be buying a few of these? Uh-huh.

Movies are not so bad and I am not worried about them. They seem to be respectably priced and I can afford them. But the meat of what I want to watch is TV shows I know and love; Star Trek, CSI, Stargate, etc. I already own those shows in english and it grates how I would have to shell out essentially triple the money to get the same shows with Japanese dialog.

Can anyone advise? I already know where to find Japanese TV shows, with or without subs, but I am really looking for US TV shows dubbed in Japanese (sans subs, unless I can disable them). I am handy enough that I can navigate Japanese pages although I will not understand most of the content.

Hope me Obi-wan Kenobi, you're my only help!

Help me design my torrent management system.

christonabike — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:04:28 -0800

I'm looking for tips, tricks, hacks, scripts, and ideas for managing torrents using Linux. Here's what I would like to be able to do:

Automated unpacking. If a torrent contained a zip, rar, etc it should be unpacked automatically.

Automated move on completion. Move music, television, and movies to their appropriate folders. This can probably be done by looking at file type and size.

Continued sharing after a file is moved. Is this even possible? I use some torrent sites that require share ratios, plus I want to be a good file sharer and give back. What if the files are further organized by Amarok?

Remote downloading. I want to be able to go to download a torrent from anywhere. I've already got Apache and PHP setup.

Other cool things. I want to do as little hands on torrent management as possible. Are there scripts that automatically download things with high scores on MetaCritic, Pitchfork, etc? Can I setup a script to automatically download new episodes of a show when they get hosted? I want to know about them!

I think most of this can be done using shell scripts and CRON jobs, but I figured there may already be existing tools.

Alternatives to Hotspot Shield

lemonfridge — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:26:48 -0800

My ISP (Pipex) seems to cripple torrents. When I use Hotspot Shield it seems to get around whatever they are doing and gives me reasonably consistently speedier downloads. But Hotspot Shield has a monthly usage allowance. Are there any alternatives?

Ghost bit-torrent tracker

daksya — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 07:50:39 -0800

How do torrents work? I thought I knew. Something like this, basically:

Person A wants to share files. She creates a .torrent which contains
file-list +
pieces & their checksums +
tracker address +
maybe some other stuff

She uploads it to tracker, which loads the torrent, and if there's an associated directory, also gets it indexed.

Persons B, C, D come across the listing in the index and open the .torrent in their client. Client contacts tracker which, in short, returns list of seeds & peers. Client contacts seeds & peers and individually tries to hook up all connections it can. Enter DHT, which means, I think, is that you get peer lists from peers you already are in touch with.

***

Now it turns out that a pretty famous public tracker went down a couple of months ago, but with some lingering hope of its resurrection still present. I found a torrent on one of the *novas, with the only tracker listed being that of downed-site. On a whim, I open it in utorrent, and although tracker status is "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.", I get some seeds and the torrent is "working".

My question: where did it get the list of seeds from?

If it's from the downed-site, is the moral that it's "down" but not really?

Quality Dedicated Hosting that allows Bittorrent Tracker? Have Budget.

mrflip — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:01:41 -0800

I will soon be distributing a bunch of large scientific and research datasets, all entirely legal for redistribution, many as large as a few gigabytes. Bittorrent is the best solution for this. Many respectable webhosting sites don't allow Bittorrent trackers; too many of those that do seem fly-by-night. I have a budget for this and want something respectable and reliable. Recommendations? My current host (Bluehost) has 6000GB/transfer a month, but I hear that these large caps can often be illusory; I want to be prepared for one to ten TB of traffic per month. I also need to be able to receive similarly large datasets, which I think will be much easier over bittorrent than asking folks to POST >1GB over ADSL and have it crap out after 3 hrs transfer (not to mention hitting CPU limits).

Amazon S3, at $0.18/GB, would be ~ $1000/mo for 6000 GB. I've reviewed most of the previous hosting q'ns, including Dealing with spikes in website popularity, but none of those suggestions make this work financially.

This clearly calls for bittorrent, but I've had real trouble finding dedicated hosting that will allow me to install a tracker. Bitrot has happened to the last question along these lines, and too many of the directories for tracker sites seem populated by rug merchants and fly-by-night operations.

I'm willing to spend money -- preferably in the $100-$200/mo range -- and want something respectable and reliable. If you tell me it will cost more than that then so be it. I'm figuring that the bittorrent solution (combined with throttling, ratios and a cooperative userbase) will keep me in the 1 TB/month range.

Can you recommend dedicated hosting that will allow me to run a tracker?

Another Bittorrent Question

apetpsychic — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 11:32:39 -0800

I've seen this and this,and this. When I'm running Transmission (I used to use Azareus, with the same problems, but I switched because a lot of the trackers I used banned it. I will switch if anyone can suggest a better client) on OSX it kills all of my web browsing. Even when I turn on Speed Limiter there is no web browsing. I'm only downloading one file, with one peer at the moment, for what that's worth. But when I cap upload at 5k, web browsing works again (by the way, I browse with Firefox). That doesn't seem right to me. I have Time Warner Road Runner cable internet and a Netgear WGR614v7 - 54 Mbps Wireless Router. Is there anything I'm overlooking to be able to browse the web while downloading torrents?

Invitation to download

four panels — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:10:44 -0800

Now that Demonoid is dead, is there another great invite-only torrent site?

Q about DMCA takedown notice I received

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:41:16 -0800

Here is my dilemma. Last week I received a DMCA takedown notice from my ISP regarding a TV show that I torrented (is that a word yet?). Do I ignore the message, or give them the information? I know this was wrong, but my thinking was that this was a TV show, and not music, HBO, movies, etc. I guess I was seriously wrong. I deleted the file and uninstalled uTorrent. I guess uTorrent was also uploading, and herein lies the problem.

The note states that I need to send my ISP (quoted from email):
(a) a physical or electronic signature of the subscriber;

(b) identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or disabled;

(c) a statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled;

(d) the subscriber’s name, address, and telephone number and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located.

[end quote]

My question is: what should I do? By filling out this information, aren't I admitting guilt? Wouldn't I be setting myself up to be included in a lawsuit in the future? I actually spoke with a lawyer who said just send them the information because there were no damages, but sending an email "under penalty of perjury" is kind of scary. Ignoring this might be a huge mistake too...

Torrential Reign

Mach3avelli — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 09:38:48 -0800

Niche bit torrent sites. I've always noticed that the best torrent sites for finding obscure stuff are the specialized ones. They also have the best communities. I'm interested in basically everything, from all genres of music (from shoegaze to neo-postpunk) to all types of films (from comedy to Korean horror), etc. Please point me in the direction of all such niche torrent sites.

Looking for an affordable Wifi NAS solution

davidstith — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 07:09:51 -0800

Help me find an affordable NAS that is between 500g-1TB, does Wifi, has iTunes Library support, BitTorrent, and FTP support please.

Scoring Invites to Private BitTorrent Sites

hwickline — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:31:00 -0800

Looking for advice on how to score invites to private BitTorrent sites- specificially Oink.cd. My sister called last night asking me to get myself invited to join Oink.cd so I can invite her. I believe I've seen some sites listing invite exchanges here, but can't seem to find any of those questions. So, any advice on how to go about scoring an invite to Oink or any other interesting private BitTorrent sites? Other similar sites I should be directing her to instead are welcome, too.

Content Management Platform w/integrated BitTorrent Tracker?

limon — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:07:08 -0800

Is there a simple, themed content management platform with an intergrated BitTorrent tracker module? I know about the planned module for Drupal, but it's not yet actual. Are there any alternatives?

Bit-by-bit-by-bit torrent

jbickers — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:01:30 -0800

Big dumb stupid newbie Bittorrent question. My Bittorrent downloads are painfully slow, and I"m wondering whether this is par for the course or if I have something configured wrong.

Let me start by confessing that my understanding of how BT works is cursory at best. I understand the concept, but not the specifics.

For instance, I'm trying to download a torrent that has almost 200 seeds. That's people sharing it, right? So how come my client (Bittorrent) only sees 4 "peers"? And how come my download speed ranges from 0 to 4 kb/s, while my upload speed goes into the high double-digits?

Things I've done, from reading the instructions:

* Turned off Windows Firewall
* Enabled automatic port mapping
* Set up that dedicated port thing in the settings of my Motorola wireless router (this one I really don't understand at all ... I know I set up a dedicated thingie for it, gave it a number that wasn't being used, then specified a slightly lower number in the "Look for available port starting at port ___" preferences box.)
* Enabled "Autodetect available bandwidth"

This last one is interesting, because it tells me my "average maximum download rate" should be 9.5 MB/s. It's automatically got upload throttled at 90 KB/s.

Lots of detail, I know, and probably not all of it helpful. Windows XP, by the way, on a smokin' fast computer with lots of RAM and hard drive space. Is there some magic button somewhere I'm not pushing?