Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with torrent

How to get my large file from here to there?

vegetableagony — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:50:38 -0800

How to privately share a large set of files with a large club? Having trouble getting bittorrent to work. I have a 8gb collection of photos that I helped touch up and organize for a club I was in. Now I am across the country, but most of the other members are all on the same college network.

I tried creating a torrent with transmission using http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce as the tracker and gave the people the torrent directly. One person was able to download the whole thing, but now no one is able to find anyone seeding the file, even though I have transmission open, but it isn't finding any peers. I am using osx10.5 and connecting wirelessly my cable internet.

Any thoughts on what might be making the torrent not work or how to fix it?

Alternatively any suggestions on how to get the files out to the people who want them? I don't want to do anything that will have them open to any random person.

How to make my LaCie 5big NAS better?

Señor Pantalones — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:55:32 -0800

LaCie 5Big NAS hacks/modifications/tricks? Just got a 5Big NAS (5TB) running RAID5. Has a built-in torrent client but it's pretty weak. Any way to hack it to run a linux distro of Transmission or Vuze, something like that? Any other tricks that make this box better (aside from "spend $1500 more and get a readyNAS")

Thanks!

Why can't I download torrents?

ACF — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:52:24 -0800

Although I have downloaded torrents successfully before, I can't get my current system to work. Everything proceeds fine until the actual download - which is stuck at 0.0%. I'm trying to download torrents from demonoid and openoffice.org and using Bit Torrent for Mac (I'm running osx 10.5.7). The problem seems to be that, according to Bit Torrent, there are "0 peers" for my torrents. Though when I check demonoid, there are plenty of seeders. Even stranger, in a previous test, I did get Open Office to start downloading, but canceled it because Bit Torrent reported a 13+ hour download time. I've optimized the download/upload speed settings in Bit Torrent. I've tried switching to Vuze. What could be going on?

Waddaya think I am? Some kind of Jerk or something?

Bageena — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:48:55 -0800

This is easy - I just want the 'TV' version of Steve Martin's 'The Jerk'. So... how do I get it? IMDB admits that it exists, so I know I'm not crazy. An alternative version to both the original and the 26th anniversary release, known amongst some as the 'TV' version. Besides changing the dog's name from 'Shithead' to 'Stupid', there was a scene where Navin is so heartbroken over the lost of Marie that he 'just had to spin'. The bathroom scene was completely re-cut, and there were two additional scenes where Navin is solicited by people seeking charity, one of whom a wealthy Texan millionaire who he weeps with over the cracks in the leather seats of his airplane.

So all I want to know is... how the heck do I get my hands on a copy of this? It doesn't seem to exist in any format I can buy, there's no torrent that I can download, there's not even clips of the alternative footage on Youtube. In digging around, I learned about a cameo with Bill Murray that had been cut from the film. So now we're up to like, fifteen minutes AT LEAST that is missing from my life. Is there anything I can do? Any place I can go? Help me Askmefites! Pretty please?

What's a similarly-functioning alternative to mininova.org for finding torrents?

chudmonkey — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:18:31 -0800

What's a similarly-functioning alternative to mininova.org for finding torrents? I have loved using mininova in the past because it has a nice, simple layout and easy-to-find comments for each torrent which always help determine reliability. However, the people behind that site have adopted some new policies lately and a lot of the torrents I'm interested in don't stay listed on the site for long anymore.

I don't really enjoy using The Pirate Bay, and it seems they are on a similar path now/soon anyhow. Isohunt is familiar to me, but that site is leaps and bounds behind mininova in terms of simple usability, and hardly anyone comments on torrents there.

I use the private site TVTorrents to find TV shows (and yes, I have a few invites available, please feel free to ask me.) and I'd be very interested in finding similar sites that have a specific focus like movies or music.

To boil it down: what's your favourite torrent indexer/tracker and do they make it easy to navigate and evaluate torrents?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and/or advice!

Please help me ID incomplete torrents

tcobretti — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:14:11 -0800

Has anybody come up with a way to identify incomplete torrents? Azureus crashed and dumped all my active torrents, so now I have a ton of incomplete files, but I'm not sure which ones. Any ideas?

What's a good simple and cheap media or file server setup?

wastelands — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:15:38 -0800

Advice for a server newb who needs help getting started with a simple media/backup/torrent server? I've got a 438 GB movie collection an on external 500 GB USB hard drive right now, so I need to upgrade. I was thinking of buying two 1 TB external drives and using rsync for a poor man's RAID 1 setup. But for good drives plus shipping, that's nearly $250, and I thought, why not just setup a real file server? And maybe get a Bit Torrent thingy going too, so I could turn off my main computer at night and keep transfers going? Heck, I'd probably come up with other useful things for the server to do too.

But I don't know where to start. For hardware, looking at, say, a Dell Inspiron 530 ($379), it's too powerful and too expensive for what I'd use it for.

And for the OS... Windows Home Server? Ubuntu? I don't know what'd be easiest.

Ideas? Thanks!

Best Bit Torrent Forum?

davidaugust111 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:32:45 -0800

Best Bit Torrent Forum? I'm having a problem, plus I'd like to learn more about torrents. Does anyone have any recommendation on an active forum board I could join? Thanks, David

Help me with my internet annoyance.

zardoz — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:37:04 -0800

I sometimes have trouble with downloading via torrent: surfing becomes a slow crawl/not an option. I have a broadband DSL connection and I'll often download torrents via Transmission on my iMac.

The problem is with torrents: with either Transmission, or uTorrent I can go for several days, even longer than a week, but then suddenly surfing pages on a browser will slow to a crawl and then stop. Torrent downloading may or may not stop at that point, but eventually it stops too.

When this happens I unplug my DSL modem, plug it back in, wait a minute or two, and then I'm firing on all cylinders, torrent downloading and surfing are good for another week or so.

So how can I avoid this step? Settings in Transmission? Hack the modem?

Seeding torrents on new computer

cgs — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:30:16 -0800

I recently changed computers and want to continue to seed a bunch of torrents, but have lost the original tracker files. What can I do? I transferred over the actual (large) downloads but deleted the original torrent tracker files long ago. Aside from trying to find and download the trackers a second time, is there anything I can do?

Thanks for your help!

Pimping Out a MacMini as Media Center, etc.

Gideon — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:17:34 -0800

I'm consolidating and trying to save some money in the coming years. To that end I've acquired an older Mac Mini and pulled out an old monitor. I've set it as a working media center, but I think I could do more and do it more efficiently. This Mac-Mini pretty much only has one job - dealing with media. I've a normal computer I use for everything else. Right now my setup is like this:
I have boxee for Netflix and Hulu (sometimes). For videos I might download I use a program that grabs the videos for me automatically an begins downloading them in Vuze. Cause I am security sensitive I use the IP Filter with Vuze.

After they are complete they are moved to a "completion folder" where Hazel (the program) moves them to the proper directory. This way I can watch stuff I download on Front Row or Boxee.

I also have Connect360 running so I can watch movies from my 360 in the other room.

I have screen sharing as well so I don't have to worry about needing a mouse and keyboard for the macmini.

-Still, having some troubles. I can't seem to slow down the file moving, so errors crop up in Vuze all the time.

-I'm wondering if there is a more efficient way to do this. Boxee has torrent downloading, but no ip-filtering.

-What else can I use this for? It seems I should be able to do something else with this thing but I'm not quite sure what. I don't need to share files or anything (mobileme allows for that). But what other things might I do?

Web client for BitTorrent?

different — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:05:37 -0800

Are there any half-decent torrent web clients to try, other than Torrent Relay?

How to block P2P on ashared internet connection.

boby — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:25:57 -0800

How can I stop my roommates from using our shared internet connection to download or share copyrighted files? I recently got a warning email from my ISP (Verizon) stating that someone used my account to downloaded a copyright protected television show using Bit Torrent.
I share my internet connection with 3 other persons. Can Verizon or I block all P2P traffic so there won't be any more problems?

Leggo my torrento

Brodiggitty — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:02:52 -0800

Why have my torrent downloads suddenly stopped? Is it my ISP? If yes, are they allowed to do that? So I was about 70 percent into a large torrent download when my download cut out. I recently switched to utorrent 1.8.1. I used to use BitTornado all the time on the same computer/isp so I tried downloading some torrents using bittornado again. No dice. uTorrent shows lots of available peers (200+). It connects to none.

This doesn't seem like a throttling, but a complete pulling of the torrent plug. Yes, I read this question. I don't see how it could be my router because I had no problems until the other day, when it just stopped cold. Internet is working fine otherwise.

I have an "unlimited" plan from a local, smallfry isp in a small, isolated Canadian community. Can they legally block my service in this way if that is what is happening? I can't see it being anything else.

And yes, I see the irony in asking if I have legal recourse when, in all probability, I'm illegally downloading files.

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!

Easiest way to set up a 'fake' torrent tracker?

JMB1138 — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:38:06 -0800

I need to create a website for a fake invite-only torrent community to feature in a short movie centering around said community. What's the easiest way to set up a customizable tracker? It's important to note that there will be no actual torrents shared, this is just for the purposes of the movie. I just need the colors and graphics to be customizable so it looks pretty on screen, and so I can 'update' it with fake accounts posting fake torrents as needed for the story. I already have a domain and a webhost with MySQL access. Do I need to go through all the trouble of setting up a real tracker script? Or you think I can just get away with a customizable BBS system?

Any thoughts appreciated!

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.

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'.

Downloading on an open wireless connection...hypothetically

Anonymous — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:31:23 -0800

Is there a way to anonymously download a torrent? I got a letter from my cable company, saying they had noticed that I might have downloaded some copyrighted material and could I please erase all that stuff? The letter said it could have been someone on my open wireless account, a minor in my household or a virus.
Wow. Relief. Whatever happened, it won't happen again.
However, if one were to want to download something, a weekly show that's unavailable any other way...
what would happen if one were to go to someplace with a wireless network, download the torrents, then leave after erasing the torrent files? Can the ISP trace the files to my notebook or just to the wireless router?
Just curious, hypothetical question.

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.

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?

Sci-fi/fantasy/nerdcore shows that I can download legally and freely via torrent

poppo — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 06:17:01 -0800

With a nice high speed connection now installed at home, I'd like recommendations for finding sci-fi/fantasy TV shows that I can download legally and freely via torrent, that I would not typically have already seen on American cable. I'm specifically interested in sci-fi, fantasy, or other nerd stuff. I especially would like a mini-series or shows with a serial story.

I'm American and have cable, so I already have access to things like the Sci-Fi channel and BBC America, so I'm looking for stuff I can't get on American cable TV that would also be legal to download.

I wouldn't mind whether you suggest current shows or ones that have already come and gone. Chances are if it wasn't on American cable somewhere I've never seen it.

What's a good source for finding TV shows online? Specifically, Ninja Warrior (originally titles Sasuke in Japan)?

ignignokt — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:23:52 -0800

TV-over-the-internet-filter: What's a good source for finding TV shows online? Specifically, Ninja Warrior (originally titled Sasuke in Japan)? I don't have a Tivo and am not usually at home during prime time, so I download my TV shows and watch them when convenient. I haven't had problems finding episodes of The Office and The Ultimate Fighter on Usenet and Demonoid (a torrent sharing site), but Ninja Warrior (from G4TV, which I don't receive, BTW, so I can't do an old-school VCR recording of it) is giving me trouble. I've found three episodes, and I've found a torrent for an episode recorded straight from Japanese TV, but that's about it.

Any tips? Where do you guys usually get your shows?

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?