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HOW TO: Download a Torrent File ?

Transmission_torrentWriting this article upon a request received to [email protected] . After reading this tutorial about downloading a torrent file, you will be able to download movies, music, games or large sized files using torrents. Basically torrent is a small file that has .torrent as an extension. Bittorent is the protocol we use in the torrent method of file downloading. Its a Peer to Peer file transfer protocol which allows any internet users to share large size files. Creation of torrent files will be seen in my next article. The torrent file can be downloaded from Torrent search engines.

Here is the list of some famous torrent search engines. Torrentz, The Pirate Bay, Mininova, Demonoid and Bitjunkie. There are many paid and invite based torrent search engines available. In this list, demonoid also such invitation based TSE (Torrent Search Engine). Due to huge number of users subscription and usage the TSE’s normally enables this sort of invitation method.

This article meant for absolute beginners, who dont know about torrents and downloading large files through torrent search engines.

Here i took The Pirate Bay, torrent search engine to proceed with downloading a file. It’s one of my favorite too ;). Not only for me, due to the good seeding capability and maintenance, Pirate bay becomes favorite for maximum torrent users.

So what will be the content of .torrent file which we downloaded from any of the TSE website ?

The torrent file consist the size of the actual file (to be downloaded), number of parts the file splitted and hosted (for large files, splitting and storing is advisable for easy sharing), location of the Tracker, and the checksum of the files made available in the network to download.

What is Seeding ?

You will be seeing these two terms whenever you search for a torrent file in the TSE followed by the torrent file name.

Seeder (or) Seed:

The person or the computer in a network, which has the fully downloaded (finished) copy and serves to the newly joining torrent downloaders.

Leecher:

The node or a computer connected in the network, that has very less speed in terms of uploading the data to others. In between the downloading process, the user shares the downloaded packets with other peers connected in the network. In this case, some users accept packets from other users faster, but restricts their upload speed due to some reasons. The Torrent tracker mark these people as Leechers and display it in the torrent file statistics.

Tracker:

Its actually the node that keeps the track of the clients connected using a particular tracker and tells the newly joining and existing node’s about the availability of packets. The tracker no where stores the actual file in the server or anywhere.

So, we are the people (users of torrent) who store the actual file and share it with the world.

Step 1: Search and Download the Torrent file from any above mentioned TSE

tpb3

Here i am using The Pirate Bay to search a torrent file named “The Holiday” in movie category. Its actually a movie that i like to download. You may use mininova or torrentz and its upto your choice.

tpb4click on the “Pirate Search”, once you typed the file name, that you looking for. You will get similar results shown below.

tpb5In the above image you see 6 columns separation for each file. Selecting DVD Rip is recommended to get a good quality movie and you must check the quality of the video by viewing some screen caps inside each of the link. The row also gives info about the date, when the file actually uploaded, the Tracker status, Size of the original file, Number of seeders and number of leechers for that particular torrent file.

tpb6Look for some good amount of Seeders always before jumping into downloading.

Step 2: Check for Comments and Reviews before Downloading any Torrent file

To save your time and bandwidth, it is very must for any torrent users to check the comments or reviews written by the user who tried downloading the same file. In some cases,

The uploader may inject some virus or trojan inside their file.

The file may be Password protected (password may not given) or not viewable by default media players.

Corrupted files may be uploaded.

So it is advisable to check the comments always before downloading the original file.

Step 3: Download and Install any Torrent clients

We know the torrent file’s have the extension called “filename.torrent”, hence it is important to run these files with their native applications.

Select "Save file" when it prompts for downloading the utorrent client
Select “Save file” when it prompts for downloading the utorrent client

This is the place where we need to go for “Torrent Client’s”, and these are freely available in internet to download.

This is an image of utorrent client can be downloaded from utorrent.com
This is an image of utorrent client can be downloaded from utorrent.com

Available torrent clients are, uTorrent, vuze, Bitcomet, and Transmission . I normally use Vuze or utorrent for downloading torrent files and both are really rocks. These clients are available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms too.

Step 4: Once Installation completed, launch the Torrent client software

Once you have completed the torrent client software installation, launch it to locate the torrent file.

utorrentIn the image, you can see the utorrent client software. The first icon is to add new torrent files. click on it and select where “The Holidaymovie torrent file located. Accept default settings and click ok to begin the downloading. You can pause in between the download process and can start whenever you need it again.

Download uTorrent

The size of the utorrent client software is just 281 KB. One of the smartest and smallest torrent client i have ever tried. You may have a look at the Trackers, Peers, Pieces (packets) status and speed in graph representation while downloading a torrent file. When we download a file using utorrent client, then its stored in the path (My documents / Downloads). If the client is Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) then the files stored in (My Documents / Azureus Downloads).

Finally i like to give one more TSE, in which you can search with almost 50+ TSE trackers at a time. It is called Torrent-Finder, and i havent used it much, so try it in your own and remember to read the comments by users before downloading through your searches.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article about downloading a torrent file. If you have any doubts regarding this, you may ask through the comment box. I always welcome your feedbacks and suggestions too.

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About the Author: Robin C

Security Consultant, Engineer, Technology Enthusiast and Blogger.

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6 Comments

  1. There are some paid clients available but the above given 5 torrent clients are commonly used by torrent users.

    Try to look for alternative in these five after testing them.

  2. This is really helpful. I am just getting started with using torrents to download music and I wanted to know just what made it work! Thanks for sharing so many other sources with me.

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