Some time ago, I wrote an article (WARNING: link is PDF) about where to download music now that Free Napster is no more. At the time, I felt that Usenet was the best place to get music, movies, software and more for free. Usenet is sort of like email, except that instead of user A sending a message directly to user B, the message is placed on a common server that everyone can access. If this reminds you of just about any Internet message board, you'd be right. Usenet is the granddaddy of all Internet message boards. In fact, the main difference between Usenet and posting on any old Internet message board is that you have to "send" your post to Usenet using a program like Outlook Express that supports NNTP protocol instead of just typing in your messages via web browser using the HTTP protocol, as you would with a "regular" Internet message board. In short, posting on Usenet is much more like sending an email than surfing a web-based message board. And of course, unlike most Internet message boards, Usenet allows you to post binary attachments - music files, movie files, ZIP\RAR and other file types with your messages - which is the whole point of all this in the first place.

However, Usenet is not without it's problems. Although just about every ISP in the United States provides free access to their own Usenet servers, they don't put a lot of effort into it. Many newsgroups - like alt.binaries.sounds.mp3s - can have gigabytes of data in them, and buying and maintaining servers that can handle that load - not to mention the bandwidth of synchronizing all those gigabytes of data with other news servers - costs ISPs a lot of money, and that's not even getting into the possible legal hassles. And because most people have no idea of what Usenet is, most ISPs don't bother with the expense. Therefore, your own ISP might offer Usenet access but the retention rate - that is, the amount of time a post stays on the server - cranked down to just a day or two. Or perhaps they have fixed disk quotas for the binary newsgroups - which leads to a lot of incomplete posts. In short, the Usenet service provided by your ISP might be lacking.

Of course, you can always pay for a third-party service like Giganews. Because these services are dedicated to Usenet, they have much longer retention rates and rarely have incompletes. But these aren't perfect either, because they're metered. For example, Giganews charges $7.99/month for 2GB worth of transfers from their servers. This might sound like a lot of bandwidth, but trust me, it adds up quickly! Better deals are available - 10GB/month costs $11.99 and 20GB/month costs $22.99 - but it quickly gets pretty expensive to get your "free stuff"!

The latest geek craze is a little program called Bittorrent. It's not like any other file sharing program out there. It was originally created to efficiently transfer very large files over the Internet and perhaps because of this it's become the P2P app of choice for sharing large files like DVDs, DivX movies and TV shows. Of course, you can still download music but it's rare to see individual tracks on Bittorrent - full albums are definitely the medium of choice here.

The only problem with Bittorrent is that... well, it's a bit complicated to get started. It requires understanding how the program works, getting familiar with some new lingo and even tweaking your router! But it's all worth it! Since I've jumped on the Bittorrent bandwagon I've downloaded DVDs, DivX\XviD movies, 3 movies that were just released in theatres, complete seasons of Andy Richter Controls The Universe, Good Eats, Wonderfalls and Spooks, 9 of the Euro 2004 matches, the FA Cup Final and much, much more. So put your thinking cap on and let's get started!

Let's say that you alone are the possessor of some rare Akon remix that everyone in the free world wants to get their hands on. If you put the file in your Kazaa shared folder, other users will queue up and download it from you. If you have your uploads restricted to 1 user at a time, User 1 will download it while Users 2, 3 and 4 wait in your queue. You could expand your download queue to allow for multiple users, but since most cable and DSL accounts are capped at a low upload rate, the only thing that would happen is that your 40kbps upstream bandwidth would get divided to 4 different users, so each one gets 10kbps instead of one user getting the faster 40kbps. Of course, your rare remix will eventually appear on other user's computers in the Kazaa search engine, but until then, everyone will have to wait. See this simple illustration for a visual on this.

A typical P2P file-sharing application (click to enlarge)

Now, imagine the same scenario only this time as soon as User 1 starts downloading the song to his PC, User 2 can download the file from both you and User 1. Likewise, when User 3 comes along, he can download the song from you, User 1 and User 2. The Bittorrent protocol can download any part of a file from any user in any order, so it doesn't matter if User 3 only has 6% of the file copied - you can still download what he has while you're getting other parts of the file from User 1 and\or User 2 and so on. If you scale this up to include hundreds of users, you can see why this works much better than something like Kazaa. In fact, when a file is very popular on Bittorrent you can get download speeds that would make Kazaa cry. I've downloaded full albums in under 3 minutes and have downloaded 1.3GB movie files in about 2 hours and 29 minutes with Bittorrent - a nearly impossible feat with Kazaa!

Bittorrent P2P file-sharing (click to enlarge)

To get started, you need a Bittorrent client. The official one is here, but I use an "experimental client" called BitTornado that has worked well for me so far. There are several other clients out there - Azureus, TorrentStorm, ABC, and TurboBT just to name a few - but all of the examples on this page will be done using BitTornado. So download that first and get used to BT - you can always try another client later.

If you access the Internet through a router or firewall, please read this important information before proceeding!!

The first thing you notice when you install Bittorrent is that... there's no "program". Unlike Napster or Kazaa or SoulSeek, you don't use Bittorrent by opening a program and entering a search term in a window. You find things to download by visiting websites that have torrents to download. A torrent is a small file that tells the Bittorrent client everything it needs to know to get a file - the tracker server where the downloading is coordinated, the name of the file(s), etc. You can either click on a torrent hyperlink directly or right-click the torrent hyperlink and do a "Save As...". I recommend saving the torrent to your desktop just in case you have to temporarily stop the download. This way, you only need to click a file on your desktop instead of hunting down that webpage again. Just as an exercise, go to this site which offers military videos for download by Bittorrent exclusively. Find a video that has lots of seeds and right-click on the title of the video to save the .TORRENT file to your desktop. Once that's done - it should only take a second or two - minimize your IE window and click on the file you just downloaded to your desktop. In another second or two, you should see a screen that looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

This is the main Bittorrent window. Just about everything you need to know about your download will be on this screen. One of the most obvious things you see is the "download rate" and "upload rate". This of course represents how fast you're getting and sharing the file. Because of how Bittorrent works, you're going to want to have the highest upload rate you can, as this will make your download faster. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I said, there's a lot of Bittorrent lingo you need to know and there's no better time than now to get into it.  So while your file is downloading, have a quick read of this glossary:

Seed - a computer that has a complete copy of the file you're downloading.

Peer - a computer (like you) that has a partial copy of the file you're downloading. As soon as a computer downloads the entire file, they become a seed.

Leecher - a computer that's downloading a file, but has yet to finish; basically the same as a peer.

Swarm - the total number of people involved in seeding and leeching a file. If there are 4 seeds and 16 peers, then the swarm consists of 20 computers.

Tracker - A server that regulates the upload and download of files. When you click on a .TORRENT file, your computer contacts the tracker to get a list of computers which are seeding the file in question; while you're downloading, your computer will check-in with the tracker every so often and update the list.

Share Rating - Simply the ratio of the total amount you have uploaded divided by the total amount you have downloaded. When using Bittorrent, it's vital that your ratio be equal to (or greater than) 1.00 before you close the download window. Bittorrent only works when people share their bandwidth, so please keep your Bittorrent window open after your download is complete. Even if you're not feeling very humanitarian, you should note that many trackers will reject your IP address for future downloads if you stop sharing before you have shared a complete copy of the file in question. Also, as Bittorrent develops and grows, many small "clubs" are developing - members-only websites that run the trackers and keep track of your uploads and downloads. Like any club, they have the right to kick you out if you don't follow the rules and most of them are currently asking for ratios of at least 1.0 to maintain good graces.

Distributed Copies - In the BitTornado client window pictured above, you see the words "Connected to 7 seeds; also seeing 1.899 distributed copies". A distributed copy is simply a copy of the file as held by the swarm. In other words, if everyone in the swarm has a piece of the file - even without a seed - you will still be able to download the file, because every peer has a little bit - as long as there are 1 (or more) distributed copies. To use the "official" Bittorrent analogy, it's as if 100 people at a table each have 1 page of a 100 page book - no one person has an entire copy (a seed) - but as a whole, all of the peers have a copy of the book.

Three Other Helpful Things:

1) Bittorrent puts locks on the files you are downloading and\or uploading, so you won't be able to watch your video files until you close the Bittorrent client. If you've just gotta do something with the file before your upload ratio hits 1.0, just hit pause, copy the file to a new location (or burn it, of whatever you need to do) then click "Resume". You can the watch or listen to the file in the new location.

2) If you need to stop downloading the file for any reason, just click on the "X" button in the upper-right corner of the download window. To resume the download, just click on the .TORRENT file on your desktop again and be sure to select the same download location you selected before. The Bittorrent client will verify the files you have already downloaded and resume the download once the verify is done.

3) Bittorrent allows for downloading files in many forms. For example, you can download a album of MP3s either as a folder full of MP3s or as a ZIP or RAR file. When you download a DVD, the file could come as a TS_VIDEO folder full of *.vob files, or as a bunch or RAR files (.rar, .r01, .r02, etc) or as an image file (like an .ISO file). So you might need to download some other programs to unpack your Bittorrent wares. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about a downloaded file.

The Advanced Class

Well, by now you've downloaded your first file via Bittorrent. So how do you get the GOOD stuff? Well, if you're interested in one particular show or movie, go to Google and search for MOVIE NAME + Bitorrent - you'd be amazed at how often that works! But of course, you probably want to really go for the gusto, so head on over to Suprnova. Suprnova lists dozens of torrents and includes games (for PC, PS2, Xbox and other platforms), DVDs, DVD rips, applications, anime, music and more. It also has a search feature. After you get the hang of Suprnova, you can find many other sites to assist you with getting great stuff for free. There are also search engines - try TorrentSearch or BTSearch. Start digging - there's plenty of stuff on the 'Net to help you out! In fact, I've been in "this business" for years and BT still blows me away for the sheer volume of stuff out there. You can download every game from the Euro 2004 tournament (games usually show up on Suprnova around 2 hours after they've completed!) or full seasons worth of your favorite TV shows... All with a couple of clicks! Just gigs and gigs worth of stuff to watch from all over the world... from the UK's Spooks to Australia's My Restaurant Rules to America's Smallville to crazy Japanese game shows, it's all there.

Well, it looks like the MPAA has gone sue-happy and has forced several tracker sites to shut down. The most missed of these is Suprnova, but other faves like demonoid.com are gone as well. There are still plenty of sites out there - especially ones that traffic in TV shows, as suing someone for a copyright violation over distributing a TV show is (surprisingly) not nearly as cut and dried as it is with music or movies. The bad news is that I'm not gonna be linking to any of those sites, as I don't want to give anyone (especially the jackboots at the MPAA) any more ammunition than they have already.

Wow - a lot has changed since I first wrote this article! So much so that I thought I'd give you an update on the whole downloading situation.

First of all, the music and movie industries are carrying on their war against P2P. More sites have been shut down, more downloaders have been sued and lots of large-scale pirating operations have been shut down and their owners arrested. As I see it, there are three ways to combat this. The most obvious thing to do is to stop downloading altogether. While this virtually guarantees that you won't get into any trouble with the authorities... it's just no fun! So someone that wants to continue downloading has two other options: IP blocking and Usenet.

IP blocking is a technique by which certain Internet addresses are blocked from your system. So while the RIAA or the MPAA might be able to see you on a BT tracker, you won't actually send them any data packets... thus, they have no proof that you were uploading anything. A program like PeerGuardian installs a sort of "firewall" on your system. You can choose which types of IP addresses you want to block - governments, anti-P2P organizations, ad servers and\or known spyware IPs - and then PeerGuardian will download an list of banned IPs from blocklist.org. PeerGuardian will then check for updated lists every couple of days, so it's really easy to stay up-to-date with the latest block IP lists. Programs like PeerGuardian aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination... but they're far better than nothing. Condoms aren't perfect, either, but only a fool would refuse to wear a condom whilst having sex with a streetwalker because the condom might leak or rip. Besides... PeerGuardian is free - so what have you got to lose?

The other option out there for heavy downloaders is Usenet. Usenet is (in theory) perfect, because it's as close to anonymous as you can get. Most third-party Usenet providers strip the originating IPs from Usenet posts, so no one knows who posted them. Your ISP doesn't know what you're downloading, only that you're connected to a news server. So what's not to like about Usenet? Well, selection can be a bit dodgy. There's a metric ass-ton of content on Usenet, but if you have specific tastes, you might be slightly disappointed. Readers that only like to download 1960s Japanese horror films might want to stick with sixtiesjapanesehorrormovietorrents.com... the rest of us can find pretty much what we want from Usenet. And oh - my other main complaint about Usenet - that it's a metered service - is slowly starting to go away. Several Usenet providers like Giganews, Newshosting and Forte now offer unlimited Usenet accounts; the accounts typically run between $14 and $24 a month, so they're really only cost-effective for the heavy downloaders. But still, the chances of you getting busted via Usenet are almost nil.

*     *     *

Something else that's changed is the most Bittorrent software now supports Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). What's cool about UPnP is that you no longer need to manually open ports on your router. If your router and Bittorrent client both support UPnP, the necessary ports will be opened and forwarded automatically when you open your Bittorrent software. Likewise, the Bittorrent client will close the ports when you close the software. This means that you can change the TCP ports that your Bittorrent client uses without having to manually change your router's settings via a web browser. It's hardly a ground-breaking feature, but it's an appreciated one nevertheless.

*     *     *

Lastly, I thought I'd mention that I switched to Azureus full-time ages ago and haven't looked back. Unlike BitTornado (which opens a new window for every download you have going), Azureus has a single window from which you can control your all of your uploads and downloads. There is native queuing support in Azureus, which means that you can make certain files high priority (or not). But the best thing about Azureus in my opinion is its plug-in support. There are several useful Azureus plug-ins, including a "flag" plug-in (so you can see at a glance where individuals in the swarm are located) and Speed Scheduler (which will automatically stop or throttle your down or upload speeds at a schedule you specify). But my favorite plug-in the the Azureus web interface, which allows you to manipulate Azureus on any computer, anywhere in the world (as long as it has Sun Java installed). The web interface plug-in even supports UPnP, so it will automatically open and close the necessary ports on your router as you open and close Azureus. Check it out!

If you have a router or firewall - be it hardware or software - you will need to open some ports on your device before Bittorrent will work properly. You don't need to do this, but doing so will greatly increase your upload speed, which will in turn increase your download speed. Typically, you need to open ports 6881-6999. Many routers will not allow you to open more than 100 ports per rule, so you might need to create two rules to open all the ports you need. If I've totally lost you already, perhaps this picture will help:

(click to enlarge)

In a nutshell, you need to logon to your router and use the web-based interface to open the ports. You do this by opening a web browser and pointing it to the IP address of your router - in my case it's 192.168.1.1; yours may differ. The "port forwarding" option might require you to click an "advanced" tab, but once you get there, create a new rule that opens ports 6881-6999 on your firewall and routes the same ports to the IP address of your PC. There are far too many brands of routers for me to provide instructions for them all - check your router's documentation for complete details. As I said, this is not required for Bittorrent to work, but you will have frighteningly slow download speeds until you do.

ROUTER UPDATE

Because many ISPs have blocked or "throttled" (that is, cut back on) the bandwidth for BitTorrent's "native ports" of 6881-6999, many BT clients out there now have an feature where the ports they use are randomized. This means that you will no longer need to make the above change to your router configuration *if* your client supports randomized ports *and* have are running UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) on your router. Confused? Check out the FAQ on your client's website to see what configuration is recommended for your client.

Click here to return to the main article.