Public trackers are available to anyone. These are the sites you will find when doing a web search for torrent trackers. Because of their public nature, many torrents are tracked by copyright holders, and downloading them can result in action from your internet service provider. Private trackers require invites. These sites are not accessible until you have been invited by another member. They often have requirements, such as sharing an equal amount of what you download. Private trackers are much less likely to result in cease and desist letters from copyright holders. Always get your torrent from a trusted source, ie. a website or a person that you know you can trust.
Use popular shorthand for finding the file you want.
For example: if you need the second episode from the third season of a show, search for
Most torrent sites allow you to sort search results by the number of seeders. Look for files with a large number of seeders. Not only will you download it faster, but it is less likely that the file is fake or infected with a virus. The number of leechers will affect your download speed as well. A leecher is a user that is downloading, but is not currently seeding. A leecher becomes a seeder when the full file has been downloaded. If there are significantly more leechers than seeders, the amount of bandwidth you receive will be lower, resulting in slower downloads.
On the flipside, downloading a larger file can take significantly longer depending on your connection. Read as many comments as possible to determine if other users feel that the quality of the file is good and worth your time. Some trackers have a rating system which allows users to vote on if the file is good or not.
VLC Player is a free, open-source media player that can play virtually any media file that you download. ISO files are disc images, and either need to be burned or mounted in a virtual drive in order to run them.
Scan every file that you download for viruses. Try to download files that have been released by trusted sources in the community. Always check comments and ratings to see if anyone else experienced virus attacks with the torrent.
µTorrent Vuze
Your torrent client should be configured to automatically open torrent files. If yours is not, you can drag the torrent file into the client window to add it to the download queue.
Downloading multiple files at once will slow the overall speed of each file. If you don’t want to use all of your bandwidth on a download, right-click on it in the client and select Bandwidth Allocation (the wording will vary depending on your client). From here you can limit the download speed and upload speed. This is useful if you want to stream a movie while the file is downloading.
Find a list of active trackers online. There are several websites that list active trackers. Copy the list of trackers to your clipboard. Right-click on the torrent in the client. Select Properties from the menu. Select the General tab. You should see a list of trackers in a box (there may be just one). Paste the list that you copied into the box. You need a blank line in between each tracker that you enter. Press OK and the torrent will automatically try connecting to the new trackers.
You cannot start using the file before it is finished downloading. For example, you can’t start watching a video file before it is complete. This is because the file is downloaded in separate parts and the parts aren’t downloaded in order.
Seeding is what keeps a torrent community alive. Without seeders, no one can download the files. While it’s not required, it is considered a courtesy to seed for some time after the download finishes.
Running a torrent client in the background should not have a large effect on web browsing or word processing. More intensive applications such as streaming video and playing games may benefit from exiting the torrent application first.
