Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks

BitTorrent is the go-to resource for downloading everything from music and movies to software and operating systems, but as its popularity continues to grow, so do the number of tools available for making the most of it. Some are must-haves, while others are a waste of time. Climb aboard for a look at 10 of the best BitTorrent utilities, tools, and resources for finding and managing your BitTorrent downloads quickly and efficiently.

10. Use BitTorrent to Send Files

Of course BitTorrent is a great place to go looking for files, but you can actually take advantage of BitTorrent’s distributed download protocol to share your own files. This guide details how to create your own torrent to distribute a file on your computer. The guide covers creating the torrent with the popular, Windows-only uTorrent, but the feature is available in almost any BitTorrent client.

9. Start BitTorrent Downloads Over IM

Using IM applications like Pidgin or the Mac-only Adium, you can set up your IM client to automatically accept downloads from specific users (namely, you) and then save the file to a folder that your BitTorrent client watches for new torrent files (in Pidgin you'll need to go to Tools -> Plugins and enable the Autoaccept plugin). Most clients like uTorrent (Windows) and Transmission (*nix) support folder monitoring, so if your BitTorrent client is running it'll detect the file you've sent yourself and automatically start downloading the torrent. This method doesn't allow for very advanced remote management (like #5 below), but if all you want is a quick method for starting a new download, it's quick and easy.

8. Download BitTorrent in Your Browser

I’d always recommend using a dedicated BitTorrent client whenever you can, but sometimes installing or running another app just isn’t an option. In those cases, web application BitLet is a perfect solution. It runs BitTorrent downloads through an applet directly in your web browser; all you have to do is point it to the torrent file. (Read more)

You can even stream music directly from a torrent in your browser with WeStream, BitLet’s other in-browser BitTorrent tool. (Read more)

7. Manage Your Video Downloads with Miro

Cross platform, open source application Miro is designed as a one-stop shop for handling video—whether that's video podcasts or BitTorrent. It doesn't have all the tools available to less specialized clients like uTorrent or Transmission, but it does work well to automatically download a season’s worth of television while it’s happening. (Read more)

6. Speed Up Your Downloads and Outwit Your Traffic-Shaping ISP

Whether you’re new to BitTorrent or you’re just not getting the download speeds you were hoping for, you can take steps to speed up your downloads by capping your upload speeds, adjust your connection allowances, or switch the default port. (Read more)

Sometimes a slow connection is the result of intentional BitTorrent throttling by your internet service provider. In addition to switching the default port your BitTorrent client is using, there are tons of other methods—like turning on encryption or adjusting the way your client behaves—that can help fool your ISP and speed up your downloads. (Read more)

5. Remote Control Your BitTorrent Downloads with uTorrent’s WebUI or Transmission’s Clutch

You're gaga for BitTorrent, and these two tools let you control and manage all of your BitTorrent downloads from the comfort of your web browser—no matter where you are. Both applications can handle almost any feature of the desktop version (and both look very similar, as well). Just find the one that fits the operating system you're using and get started with your remote access. uTorrent even has a special web interface for the iPhone.

4. Set Up a TV Season Pass with Ted or TVShows

Whether you opt for Ted (all platforms) or TVShows (Mac OS X only), these apps ensure you’ll no longer need to dig for the latest and greatest episodes of your favorite TV shows week after week. You just point them to what you like, and they automatically download new episode torrents as they become available.

3. Search the Best of the Best with YouTorrent

Rather than get into an argument over the best torrent tracker/search engine, might I instead submit YouTorrent, a meta search engine that scours some of the best BitTorrent trackers for downloads and sorts the results by number of seeds. I know it's new, and who knows if it'll last (it doesn't even have ads yet), but—god willing—YouTorrent is currently the easiest place to look for a new, healthy torrent (barring some really good private tracker that most of us are not members of). (Read more)

2. Transmission

(Mac/Linux)

The go-to BitTorrent client for Mac users, Transmission has that Mac feel that makes you want to go out and pirate download some Creative Commons-licensed content. It’s popped up already a lot in this list, from its torrent folder monitoring to it’s snazzy remote control features, so if you’re looking for a great client for your Mac, Transmission is the best on the market.

1. uTorrent

(Windows)

It’s unfortunately Windows-only for now (that may change sometime this year), but uTorrent is bar-none the best BitTorrent client you’ll find. It’s fast, lightweight, and full-featured (as you’ve seen above). If there’s one Windows application I miss when I’m working away from Windows, uTorrent is that client.

Intermediate guide to BitTorrent

Last week's beginner's guide to BitTorrent got you all up to speed on what BitTorrent is and how you can use it to download and share large files. It was a pretty good start, but there are a couple settings that any avid BitTorrent-er should tweak to keep their files sharing smoothly over BitTorrent. Today I'll show your how to set advanced bandwidth allocation, ensure a good share ratio, and guard your computer against anti-BitTorrent nasties that want to spy on your downloads.

Off the bat I should mention that I'm using the Windows-only IP blocker PeerGuardian2 and the (currently) Windows-only BitTorrent client uTorrent in this guide (uTorrent is working on a Mac-version), so this intermediate guide is a Windows-only affair. Some of the features I describe below are available on other clients (like Transmission [Mac] or Azureus), but for the sake of simplicity, I'm covering uTorrent only.

Throttle your BitTorrent downloads on a schedule

BitTorrent downloads and uploads can hog a lot of your internet connection's bandwidth, especially if you're sharing popular content. You could just exit uTorrent whenever you want to ensure you've reserved a sufficient portion of your bandwidth for your web surfing and email, but if you're like me, you'll forget to start it back up—meaning you'll end up delaying your downloads (most likely until you want whatever was supposed to be downloading, at which point you will slap your forehead).

To remedy this situation, uTorrent comes with an excellent and simple Scheduler feature that you can access through the Preferences (go to Options -> Preferences, then find Scheduler in the sidebar). Tick the box next to "Enable Scheduler" and you'll see a grid of green boxes light up. The grid runs Monday through Sunday, midnight to midnight (or 0:00 to 23:59), one box per hour. Here's how it works:

• Dark green boxes indicate that uTorrent will download and upload at full speed (or whatever you've set as its full speed).
• Light green boxes indicate limited download and upload rates.
• White boxes indicate that uTorrent will not download or upload any content.

I've always got a little bandwidth to spare on my connection, but I certainly don't want uTorrent hogging my bandwidth while I'm working, so I set the Scheduler to limit speeds from 8am to midnight every day. During the wee hours of the morning, when I'm very unlikely to be at my computer, I open the flood gates and give uTorrent unlimited upload/download speeds. Also, since I try to stay away from my computer for most purposes on Saturday, I keep uTorrent at full throttle. See the screenshot above to see what this sort of schedule would look like.

Like I said, my connection can handle a little bit of bandwidth bleeding all of the time, so when I'm running at limited rates, I set my upload speed to 5 kB/s and my download speed to 15. Handy, huh?

Set global bandwidth limits

If you never want uTorrent to grab an unlimited share of your bandwidth, you can set global up/down limits by going to the Connection section of the Preferences. The settings are fairly self-explanatory—just set your max upload and download rates (in kB/s), or choose 0 to keep the rates unlimited.

Ensure a good share ratio without wasting extra bandwidth

As I mentioned in the beginner's guide, an important part of BitTorrent is sharing, and a good member of the BitTorrent community gives as much as he/she takes. In fact, many sites, especially private trackers, keep a close eye on your share ratio and may even ban you if you don't keep your ratio above a certain point (i.e., if you are a "leecher"). I'm in total agreement of the whole share-and-share-alike attitude, but once I've shared an equal part of what I've downloaded, I don't want to waste too much extra bandwidth on that torrent.

Rather than constantly checking your torrent ratios so you can remove them as soon as they cross the 1.0 barrier, go to the Queuing section of uTorrent and find the "Seed While" section. There you can set a goal ratio for a file you're sharing, then set how much bandwidth uTorrent will allocate to the torrent once that goal is reached (in the screenshot, for example, uTorrent will stop sharing the file after its share ratio reaches 110%).

Protect your file sharing privacy with PeerGuardian2

PeerGuardian2 is an IP-blocking application that keeps a defined list of computers with blacklisted IP addresses from connecting to your computer. For our uses, the intent of PG2 is to keep anti-P2P organizations from tracking your downloads. Before anyone gets a false sense of security, running PeerGuardian2 will not protect you from being spied on outright, and like one reader pointed out last week, an IP blocker is only as good as its blacklist. However, a lot of people still like using PG2 and consider it a good layer of protection—however thin—against being spied on by anti-P2P organizations. In general, there's nothing bad about PG2, so running it probably won't hurt anything (though one reader said it blocked a torrent tracker he was connected to). But if it turns out that someone was keeping track of your BitTorrent downloads, don't blame ol' PeerGuardian2.

How do you BitTorrent

The settings and tweaks I highlighted above are mostly preferences, and they reflect the more intermediate uTorrent settings that I make use of and think are important. However, that doesn't mean we've exhausted the spectrum of uTorrent (or BitTorrent) tweaks. If you've got any settings or tweaks you like to make to your BitTorrent client, let's hear about it in the comments.

A beginner's guide to BitTorrent

Despite the fact that BitTorrent has been around for a good 6 years now, the lightning fast file sharing protocol hasn't completely taken off in the mainstream. Since we post a decent amount about BitTorrent around here, we figured it was just time we put out a beginner's guide to BitTorrent. This is the guide you can send to your friend next time he gets that glassy look in his eyes when you mention BitTorrent and how quick and easy it makes downloading albums educational, public domain videos and other large files.

Without going into too much detail, here's a crash course in the file sharing protocol that is BitTorrent (feel free to skip to the How to find and download a file with BitTorrent section if you're not all that interested in the details).

What is it

BitTorrent is not a program. It's a method of downloading files using a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing system. The programs that you use to download files via the BitTorrent protocol are called BitTorrent clients.

BitTorrent is not like Limewire/Kazaa/Napster/other P2P programs you've used in the past. This is often the biggest source of confusion for people new to BitTorrent. It's not difficult to use, it's just different. As soon as you forget about your old file-sharing program (and you will once you start using BT), the easier it will be to start using BitTorrent.

How does it work

What makes the BitTorrent protocol unique is that it distributes the sharing of files across all users who have downloaded or are in the process of downloading a file. Because BitTorrent breaks up and distributes files in hundreds of small chunks, you don't even need to have downloaded the whole file before you start sharing. As soon as you have even a piece of the file, you can start sharing that piece with other users. That's what makes BitTorrent so fast; your BitTorrent client starts sharing as soon as it downloads one chunk of the file (instead of waiting until the entire download has been completed).

In order to download a file like the educational public domain video we mentioned above, you have to find and download a torrent file (which uses the .torrent file extension) and then open it with your BitTorrent client. The torrent file does not contain your files. Instead, it contains information which tells your BitTorrent client where it can find peers who are also sharing and downloading the file.

How to find and download a file with BitTorrent

Now that you've got a better idea of the terminology and process behind BitTorrent, let's jump right into using BitTorrent.

First you need to download a BitTorrent client (the program that manages your BitTorrent downloads). I'd recommend:

• uTorrent for Windows
• Transmission for Mac
• Azureus or KTorrent for Linux (Actually, Azureus is cross platform, meaning it will work on Windows and Mac, but on those platforms it's not nearly as lightweight as the alternatives listed above.)

Search for a good torrent. There are a handful of really good web sites for downloading torrents (that's right, you search for torrents on the internet). The sites I'd recommend (in no particular order) are:

• Mininova
• The Pirate Bay
• isoHunt
• TorrentSpy
• btjunkie
• Demonoid (Demonoid is sort of a members only site, but if you can get yourself a membership, it's one of my favorites [and a great place to find more esoteric downloads].)

Try out whichever one you like. One might fit your tastes better than another, but I've had good experiences with all of these. From this point, search the site using their search box like you're using Google—just type in the name of what you're looking for. You'll likely get several results, but you want to choose the torrent with the highest number of seeders (indicated in most BitTorrent search results under a field labeled 'S'). Seeders are people who have already downloaded and are sharing the entire file. The more seeders, the faster your download will be. Some sites also provide you with a health meter, which is generally a measure of seeders vs. active downloaders.

Download the torrent. Once you've found a good and healthy torrent, find the download link and download the torrent. Your browser will ask you what you want to do with the file, so be sure to tell it to open the torrent in the BitTorrent client you downloaded above.

Your BitTorrent client will open and (possibly) ask you where you want to save the file(s). Pick your save location, hit OK, and that's it; your file will begin downloading. If you're not impressed with the speed at first, be patient. It can sometimes take a minute or two before the download ramps up to full speed. If you're still not happy, try searching for another torrent with more seeders.

That's it?

Yep, that's it. That, in a nutshell, is how to download files using BitTorrent. There can be more to it, of course, if you want to dive in a bit deeper. For example, you can run through the Speed Guide in uTorrent to improve your download speeds (the guide is fairly self explanatory—just go to Options -> Speed Guide to get started), download select files from the torrent rather than every file, throttle your bandwidth, and so on, but this basic guide should get you started.

Also, to ensure you stay in good standing in the BitTorrent community (and aren't labeled a leecher), you should always try to upload as much as you download. Most BitTorrent clients keep track of your upload/download ratio, and you should generally continue sharing a file until your ratio reaches 1, after which you can feel free to remove it from your client (the file will remain on your computer—you just stop sharing it).

Stop Your ISP from Throttling BitTorrent Speeds

If you've followed our beginner and intermediate guides but your BitTorrent download speeds are still less than stellar, there's a chance your ISP may be throttling your BitTorrent traffic. The Wired How To Wiki details several ways to get around ISP traffic shaping, from encrypting your traffic and changing your default port number to reducing or hiding your transfers. Following these methods won't guarantee faster traffic (in fact, encryption could end up slowing you down), but if you think your ISP is behind your disappointing speeds, it won't hurt to try.

HOW TO: Configure Azureus

I’ve had a lot of friends want to install Azureus, a fantastic open source bittorrent client, but were unable to get it running properly. To get Azureus running properly and efficiently, a few settings deep within the configuration panel need to be set. I’m writing this article so I can send it to those who need a quick way to install Azureus and getting it running quickly.

First, you need to open up the configuration panel so we can get to tweaking some settings. Click “Transfer” on the left pane. Here we are going to enter the values for download and upload speeds. Since my connection gets fidgety and pretty much dies if I have my upload speed higher than 15KB/s, that’s what I set my upload speed to in Azureus. This is dependent on your connection, but unless you have an synchronous connection your upload speed won’t be so great and you don’t want to go higher than 30kb/s assuming the average upload speed on a Cable/ADSL line is 30-50KB/s. It depends if you are going to use the Internet for anything else than bittorrent when you have Azureus open. If you are going to be browsing too, which is what I’m acquainted to, you might consider having a lower upload speed. The next box to fill in is for download speed. As a general rule, I keep this set to 0, which is unlimited.

Then you’ll want to click the “Files” selection on the left. Make sure what your settings look like mine with the exception of the download directories. Find a directory location where you want to save all of your downloaded files and make a folder within that called done, completed or something to that extent. Azureus has a great feature where it will keep incomplete files in one directory and then move the completed files to a new directory.

The last option that I like to change is on the last settings page, “Queue.” Simply uncheck “Show confirmation popup when stopping seeding with a share ratio lower than 1.” I find that more of an annoyance than anything, considering my Azureus client is always open anyways so I do my fair share of seeding. Now click “Save” and you’re set!

Hopefully these few settings make your Azureus client run better.

Tips for speeding up your torrents

The TorrentFreak blog brings us a 5 useful tips for speeding up BitTorrent downloads.

Help! Bittorrent is slow This is probably one of the most frequently asked questions I get about Bittorrent. Unfortunately there s not some kind of magic trick that makes your torrents go through the roof. But you could take some simple steps to optimize your speeds.

The tips are pretty solid, and provided you've got everything else set up correctly, they should help to speed up your BitTorrent downloads if you've been disappointed by slow speeds.

If you'd like to get started with BitTorrent but have no idea where to begin, consider getting started...

Get your TV season pass with Democracy

Ever since we first posted about the Democracy Player, I've been excited to get a better handle on it what it has to offer. For example, you probably already know that Democracy offers desktop integration of free internet television, making it the best tool out there for subscribing to "vidcasts," but what a lot of people don't know about Democracy is that it has built-in support for BitTorrent downloads.

That means with the right RSS feeds, you can subscribe to and download television shows over BitTorrent just as easily as you would manually subscribe to a podcast in iTunes. This week I'm going to show you how simple it is to download all of the latest episodes of your favorite television shows shortly after they air via BitTorrent and RSS using the cross platform, open source Democracy player.

I've covered this territory in the past using another open source program called TED, which is good solution in itself. However, subscribing to TV shows with Democracy is dead simple, so I wanted to offer another option for readers who still aren't thrilled with any of the available BitTorrent clients. I also wanted to highlight the kind of integrated downloading and playback we can hopefully expect more of in the future.

Note: It's illegal to download copyrighted material. TV shows are copyrighted. Download at your own risk, etc. etc. You must have your opinions about this by now. Do what works for you.

Download and install Democracy

If you read Lifehacker, you know how to install software. So go ahead and download Democracy, install it, and run it. [1]

Find feeds for your favorite shows

Keep in mind that Democracy works like any podcast aggregator, meaning that you have to have the right kind of RSS feed for it this to work (specifically a feed that includes the enclosure tag). Luckily, there is such a feed from a wonderful BitTorrent site called tvRSS.

If you browse to the Shows section of tvRSS, you should see hundreds of television shows conveniently organized alphabetically. Find the show you want to download (say, for example, 24). You'll see a page full of episodes of that program, but you'll also see duplicates.

That's because tvRSS tracks more than one distribution group. To weed out the dupes, select a distribution group from the drop-down menu (I use EZTV, for example) and hit search. Now your results should be pruned of all the duplicates and you should see all of the latest episodes sorted from newest to oldest.

Now just copy the link labeled "Search-based RSS feed" to your clipboard and head over to your Democracy player.

Add your BitTorrent feed to Democracy

Now in Democracy, hit Control-N (Command-N for Mac) or go to Channels -> Add Channel and the address you've copied from tvRSS should already be in the text field (if not, manually paste it in). Hit OK and you should see a new entry in the channel pane. Click on your new entry (which will read "tvRSS - search-based..." - unfortunately Democracy won't let you rename feeds).

Democracy will automatically begin downloading the latest show from the feed you just added. You can cancel it by right-clicking the entry and selecting "Cancel Download," or you can let it do its thing if you want that episode.

Watching your content

Check on the progress of your downloads in the Active Downloads section. I've found that BitTorrent downloads with Democracy get pretty good speeds, especially if it's a popular torrent (as is the case for any BitTorrent client). If you've got the app running in the background, you can be sure that it'll start downloading the show you want as soon as it's available, meaning that you'll get better speeds because that's when the most people will be downloading.

Democracy does not have the same options for tweaking your BitTorrent downloads that you would find in more robust, full-featured BT apps like Azureus or uTorrent, (in fact, it has none), but if you're not one to futz around with those settings to begin with, Democracy is just the ticket.

When your downloads complete, they're moved to the New Videos section and you can watch them whenever you want. New videos will expire in 6 days by default, but you can tweak this preference in the settings if you'd like to keep videos longer. Alternately, you can save a video indefinitely by clicking the Save button.

If you've put much time into Democracy, I'd love to hear more about what you think about it and whether you've found any killer functionality that's gone unnoticed. Personally, aside from the BitTorrent business, I've realy been enjoying some of the built-in channels, specifically the music videos offered by the Telemusicvision channel.

If you're loving or hating Democracy, let us know about it in the comments.