Hi all,
This is for all noobs & not so experienced people with bittorrent. To put it simply bittorent is a p2p file-sharing technology. The technology is is constant development in order to fine-tune & as broadband evolves, bittorrent should potentially evolve alongwith it. It does have the potential for communities & companies to make releases of there software easily & fast without sacrificing almost nil bandwidth. The only investment the company or the software group has to do is to upload the file to some tracker, download the .torrent file with the tracker info, wait so that 3-4 people have leeched the file (peers) from you & in turn they've become seeders themselves. After this the viral network takes over & depending on the popularity of the file in question the file remains alive (atleast 1 seeder is there) .
Some terms so tht it's easier to follow things forward.
Seeder :- One who has complete copy of the file & is sharing/uploading the file to others .
Leecher/peer :- The terms are almost synonomous with each other. It's somebody who doesn't have the complete file. The only difference is tht the leecher would not keep the file open for seeding
Ratio :- It's the ratio between downloading & uploading. In public trackers this isn't as important as in private trackers where one can experience severe downloading issues if one doesn't have good ratios maintained.
Trackers :- Trackers are nothing but sites which only have the .torrent file. Some popular public ones are mininova.org, torrentspy (it's also serves as a torrent search engine) while private ones include demonoid.com, idesir.com to name a few.
.torrent file :- A .torrent is a small file which has metadata about the file. It's also an extension. For e.g. Elephants_Dreams_HD.avi,torrent can be divided in 2 parts , the first part gives tht the torrent is a movie (avi), the name of the movie & tht it's in .torrent format. A .torrent file can only be read by a torrent client. The .torrent file has things like :-
1. Name of the tracker/s from where the file can be downloaded
2. The no. of pieces the file is broken into as in blocks
3. The hash for the file . Hash is a security mechanism. It something like a checksum (md5sum), simply put a kind of fingerprinting which is not easy to replicate.
4.size of the torrent :- How big the file is For e.g. the file mentioned above is 812 MB when downloaded fully.
5.Creation date :- When was the torrent created & any comments by the person who submitted.
6. Swarm :- Swarm is comprised of peers & seeds, one can have atleast 2 people in a swarm & have 13-14 people at the most.
Torrent client :- This are softwares which are needed to use the .torrent file. Some of the more popular torrent clients are utorrent, Azureus, bitlord, bitcomet etc. The star or upcoming one of these is utorrent which for the size of it (170k) does quite well. The other one which figures prominently is azureus, which has all kind of customizations. The advantage or disadvantage is it uses Java or JRE which needs much more memory rather than utorrent.
The torrent client has much more functionality which would be talked about in the next few pages
[break=D/L a .torrent file]
The first thing is to find a .torrent file which one needs. For this e.g. I would be using the free Orange movie made by the blender foundation alongwith lot of volunteers. The film is under creative commons so one can download it without any issues.
Anyway on with the downloading. As one can see below here we're at the Elephants Dream » Download & Watch ready to download the .torrent file. The 1024 as well as 1920HD version, so depending on my tastes, bandwidth as well as the hardware I choose one of the torrent files.
As one can see above, the 1st window shows the two files, I make a choice & download one of them, While downloading FF(Firefox) asks me if I want to open this file with utorrent or should I just save it on disk. Now the 1st option appears as I had already made an association tht .torrent files with open only with utorrent. The last window just shows that the file has been downloaded. If one looks at the .torrent file one will find tht it's between 25kb to 150 Kb file, depends on no. of trackers & pieces of file which are there.
[break=utorrent]
Now as I had chose utorrent immediately the utorrent app. got fired & it shows me this window. Please note tht I've used different icons & theme hence the look is slightly different from the stock utorrent.
Now some things in that first window. First it tells (in the Save as) where the file is going to be downloaded. If you want a particular file to be downloaded somewhere else that address needs to be put there. Then it asks iif one wants to put some label. Labels are a way to recognize what the file is about. I have organized my labels according to the private trackers from where I download as can be seen just below the inactive column. It also tells how big the file is, when the torrent was created, a checkbox for starting that torrent immediately, if I want to give it the highest priorty, disk space which is free on the hdd. There is also an advanced button on the bottom left clicking on which produces this :-
Now the advanced window again is split up in general & advanced tabs. The general tab shows us the name of the tracker, it usually is preceded with an announce message, there are boxes to enter any custom download & upload speeds for that particular torrent, It also seeks if that particular torrent should over-ride the settings of the client.
[break=utorrent2]
Clicking on the advanced tab shows us this pic.
As told before, the labels helps to categorize while if some program needs to be run like an anti-virus or an anti-spyware application or an media file can be told here.
Now the actual operation starts . While one is downloading or it looks something like this :-
Now let's see what things are seen here. One can see the green arrow pointing up just before the white space, this tells that at this point in time I'm uploading something. The columns after that state that the file I'm uploading is of 4.45 GB, the next column is of status where one is either downloading or seeding, as I'm seeding one can see the S (I've deliberately made the column smaller so other stuff can be seen), the no. of seeds, as I'm seeding one cannot see how many other seeds are there but overall there are 3 seeds, the next column shows no. of people who're downloading/leeching from me, at this point there is only 1. The next column is ratio, as explained before it tells how much of that particular file I've shared.
Tip :-When calculating ratio, the tracker sites calculate overall ratio & not individual ratios but it makes sense to have 1:1 ratios to have healthy ratios as well as letting the file have a long life.
As I'm seeding, the next column Downloading speed here is irrelevant hence it is 0, while the uploading speed is capped at 4.9 Kbps
Tip :- Always cap your upload speed to 80% of what one can upload. Refer to other posts for details about finding your upload & download speeds.
Availability:- How much/many copies of the file are available in full. 1 is yourself, the other part .728 is how much is available at the moment. Bittorrent follows the principle of downloading the rare parts first hence one downloads the rarest parts 1st & then the common ones later.
ETA :- This one here is about how much time it would take my client to have a 1:1 ratio.
[break=utorrent3]
Just below utorrent is divided into 6 tabs namely General, Peers, Pieces, Files, speed & logger.
1. General :- As can be seen in the pic. before, the General tab has many things. First if tells how much of the torrent has already been downloaded.
The availability of the file. The darker the blue bar is, the more common that piece of the file is.
Now again the the tab is divided into 3 parts namely :-
Transfer, Tracker & General
Transfer :- Most of the things should be self-explanatory at this point except for wasted . Wasted can be of many reasons right from the torrent being poisoned to getting duplicate data. There are solutions to minimize this but can't be thrown away altogether.
Tracker :- For public trackers one can show/share everything, but private trackers give a passkey. This passkey is similar to the username & password given by an webmail or email provider. As one doesn't share tht even this isn't to be shared otherwise the other person might leech & you'll suffer.
General :- Again self-explanatory most probably except for the hash part. The hash is what makes it slightly unique than other p2p technologies. The hash is a sort of checksum for the file. The most simplest or easiest to understand is the md5 checksum but tht's another subject altogether.
Right at the bottom, at the status bar one can see some stuff. Some of it is explanatory while some will be tackled later on.
[break=utorrent4]
Now we're at the next tab, this time we're downloading the file hence it shows how much we've downloaded of the file in the window above. There is 1 seed present while there are 3 seeds overall & 1 peer who's not there at the moment. My swarm in this case would be 3+1+1=5 people. It also tells of the download speed at the moment & how much time estimated time it'll take at the present rate of download.
Now we come to the Peers tab.
All the seeds & peers are shown in this tab (except oneself). In this case I'm downloading from somebody from India (due to the 59. ) IP & he uses 64531 port . For queries on port forwarding look up this article . It also gives things such as the client he uses, flags , now this is interesting one, to put it simply it's like traffic junction signals or railway signals. D here is for Downloading while E is for encryption. again some things would be tackled later on. Percentage, percentage is how much the peer has or seed has, there are occassions when you might be downloading from a peer who doesn't have the whole file but has some bit of it, one starts downloading in the hope that a seed would come sooner rather than later.
Relevance, this one is again interesting. One comes across situations when one has downloaded similar percentage wise but there might be some pieces that I've tht the other peer might not have or vice-versa. In such a case this column provides useful info.
Down speeds , the speed at which one is downloading, up speed happens when one is uploading, peer downloading is when one is uploading & the peer is downloading from more than 1 seed. If one sees constantly a peer downloading more than what one is seeding it means tht there are more seeds/peers from where it's able to download.
[break=utorrent 5]
This is the Pieces tab. The Pieces tab. It shows Size of the Piece which here is 512 KB. That Piece itself is divided into blocks with each block of being 16 KB each. So we have 32 blocks & as the blocks become completed a piece gets completed.
Files tab. This is pretty self explanatory. As one can see that its a media file which I'm downloading which has some subtitles with it, while the subtitles & other things have been downloaded, the main file is still being downloaded.
This is the speed tab. It's pretty self-explanatory. It basically gives a snapshot of what the system is at. The interesting one is show Disk statistics which gives an idea as how the cache & the hdd are responding.
This is the logger which tells if there were maybe not so good people whom the ipfilter was able to block. Also gives out an entry when a file is downloaded.
This brings to an end Part 1 of Utorrent tutorial
This is for all noobs & not so experienced people with bittorrent. To put it simply bittorent is a p2p file-sharing technology. The technology is is constant development in order to fine-tune & as broadband evolves, bittorrent should potentially evolve alongwith it. It does have the potential for communities & companies to make releases of there software easily & fast without sacrificing almost nil bandwidth. The only investment the company or the software group has to do is to upload the file to some tracker, download the .torrent file with the tracker info, wait so that 3-4 people have leeched the file (peers) from you & in turn they've become seeders themselves. After this the viral network takes over & depending on the popularity of the file in question the file remains alive (atleast 1 seeder is there) .
Some terms so tht it's easier to follow things forward.
Seeder :- One who has complete copy of the file & is sharing/uploading the file to others .
Leecher/peer :- The terms are almost synonomous with each other. It's somebody who doesn't have the complete file. The only difference is tht the leecher would not keep the file open for seeding
Ratio :- It's the ratio between downloading & uploading. In public trackers this isn't as important as in private trackers where one can experience severe downloading issues if one doesn't have good ratios maintained.
Trackers :- Trackers are nothing but sites which only have the .torrent file. Some popular public ones are mininova.org, torrentspy (it's also serves as a torrent search engine) while private ones include demonoid.com, idesir.com to name a few.
.torrent file :- A .torrent is a small file which has metadata about the file. It's also an extension. For e.g. Elephants_Dreams_HD.avi,torrent can be divided in 2 parts , the first part gives tht the torrent is a movie (avi), the name of the movie & tht it's in .torrent format. A .torrent file can only be read by a torrent client. The .torrent file has things like :-
1. Name of the tracker/s from where the file can be downloaded
2. The no. of pieces the file is broken into as in blocks
3. The hash for the file . Hash is a security mechanism. It something like a checksum (md5sum), simply put a kind of fingerprinting which is not easy to replicate.
4.size of the torrent :- How big the file is For e.g. the file mentioned above is 812 MB when downloaded fully.
5.Creation date :- When was the torrent created & any comments by the person who submitted.
6. Swarm :- Swarm is comprised of peers & seeds, one can have atleast 2 people in a swarm & have 13-14 people at the most.
Torrent client :- This are softwares which are needed to use the .torrent file. Some of the more popular torrent clients are utorrent, Azureus, bitlord, bitcomet etc. The star or upcoming one of these is utorrent which for the size of it (170k) does quite well. The other one which figures prominently is azureus, which has all kind of customizations. The advantage or disadvantage is it uses Java or JRE which needs much more memory rather than utorrent.
The torrent client has much more functionality which would be talked about in the next few pages
[break=D/L a .torrent file]
The first thing is to find a .torrent file which one needs. For this e.g. I would be using the free Orange movie made by the blender foundation alongwith lot of volunteers. The film is under creative commons so one can download it without any issues.
Anyway on with the downloading. As one can see below here we're at the Elephants Dream » Download & Watch ready to download the .torrent file. The 1024 as well as 1920HD version, so depending on my tastes, bandwidth as well as the hardware I choose one of the torrent files.
As one can see above, the 1st window shows the two files, I make a choice & download one of them, While downloading FF(Firefox) asks me if I want to open this file with utorrent or should I just save it on disk. Now the 1st option appears as I had already made an association tht .torrent files with open only with utorrent. The last window just shows that the file has been downloaded. If one looks at the .torrent file one will find tht it's between 25kb to 150 Kb file, depends on no. of trackers & pieces of file which are there.
[break=utorrent]
Now as I had chose utorrent immediately the utorrent app. got fired & it shows me this window. Please note tht I've used different icons & theme hence the look is slightly different from the stock utorrent.
Now some things in that first window. First it tells (in the Save as) where the file is going to be downloaded. If you want a particular file to be downloaded somewhere else that address needs to be put there. Then it asks iif one wants to put some label. Labels are a way to recognize what the file is about. I have organized my labels according to the private trackers from where I download as can be seen just below the inactive column. It also tells how big the file is, when the torrent was created, a checkbox for starting that torrent immediately, if I want to give it the highest priorty, disk space which is free on the hdd. There is also an advanced button on the bottom left clicking on which produces this :-
Now the advanced window again is split up in general & advanced tabs. The general tab shows us the name of the tracker, it usually is preceded with an announce message, there are boxes to enter any custom download & upload speeds for that particular torrent, It also seeks if that particular torrent should over-ride the settings of the client.
[break=utorrent2]
Clicking on the advanced tab shows us this pic.
As told before, the labels helps to categorize while if some program needs to be run like an anti-virus or an anti-spyware application or an media file can be told here.
Now the actual operation starts . While one is downloading or it looks something like this :-
Now let's see what things are seen here. One can see the green arrow pointing up just before the white space, this tells that at this point in time I'm uploading something. The columns after that state that the file I'm uploading is of 4.45 GB, the next column is of status where one is either downloading or seeding, as I'm seeding one can see the S (I've deliberately made the column smaller so other stuff can be seen), the no. of seeds, as I'm seeding one cannot see how many other seeds are there but overall there are 3 seeds, the next column shows no. of people who're downloading/leeching from me, at this point there is only 1. The next column is ratio, as explained before it tells how much of that particular file I've shared.
Tip :-When calculating ratio, the tracker sites calculate overall ratio & not individual ratios but it makes sense to have 1:1 ratios to have healthy ratios as well as letting the file have a long life.
As I'm seeding, the next column Downloading speed here is irrelevant hence it is 0, while the uploading speed is capped at 4.9 Kbps
Tip :- Always cap your upload speed to 80% of what one can upload. Refer to other posts for details about finding your upload & download speeds.
Availability:- How much/many copies of the file are available in full. 1 is yourself, the other part .728 is how much is available at the moment. Bittorrent follows the principle of downloading the rare parts first hence one downloads the rarest parts 1st & then the common ones later.
ETA :- This one here is about how much time it would take my client to have a 1:1 ratio.
[break=utorrent3]
Just below utorrent is divided into 6 tabs namely General, Peers, Pieces, Files, speed & logger.
1. General :- As can be seen in the pic. before, the General tab has many things. First if tells how much of the torrent has already been downloaded.
The availability of the file. The darker the blue bar is, the more common that piece of the file is.
Now again the the tab is divided into 3 parts namely :-
Transfer, Tracker & General
Transfer :- Most of the things should be self-explanatory at this point except for wasted . Wasted can be of many reasons right from the torrent being poisoned to getting duplicate data. There are solutions to minimize this but can't be thrown away altogether.
Tracker :- For public trackers one can show/share everything, but private trackers give a passkey. This passkey is similar to the username & password given by an webmail or email provider. As one doesn't share tht even this isn't to be shared otherwise the other person might leech & you'll suffer.
General :- Again self-explanatory most probably except for the hash part. The hash is what makes it slightly unique than other p2p technologies. The hash is a sort of checksum for the file. The most simplest or easiest to understand is the md5 checksum but tht's another subject altogether.
Right at the bottom, at the status bar one can see some stuff. Some of it is explanatory while some will be tackled later on.
[break=utorrent4]
Now we're at the next tab, this time we're downloading the file hence it shows how much we've downloaded of the file in the window above. There is 1 seed present while there are 3 seeds overall & 1 peer who's not there at the moment. My swarm in this case would be 3+1+1=5 people. It also tells of the download speed at the moment & how much time estimated time it'll take at the present rate of download.
Now we come to the Peers tab.
All the seeds & peers are shown in this tab (except oneself). In this case I'm downloading from somebody from India (due to the 59. ) IP & he uses 64531 port . For queries on port forwarding look up this article . It also gives things such as the client he uses, flags , now this is interesting one, to put it simply it's like traffic junction signals or railway signals. D here is for Downloading while E is for encryption. again some things would be tackled later on. Percentage, percentage is how much the peer has or seed has, there are occassions when you might be downloading from a peer who doesn't have the whole file but has some bit of it, one starts downloading in the hope that a seed would come sooner rather than later.
Relevance, this one is again interesting. One comes across situations when one has downloaded similar percentage wise but there might be some pieces that I've tht the other peer might not have or vice-versa. In such a case this column provides useful info.
Down speeds , the speed at which one is downloading, up speed happens when one is uploading, peer downloading is when one is uploading & the peer is downloading from more than 1 seed. If one sees constantly a peer downloading more than what one is seeding it means tht there are more seeds/peers from where it's able to download.
[break=utorrent 5]
This is the Pieces tab. The Pieces tab. It shows Size of the Piece which here is 512 KB. That Piece itself is divided into blocks with each block of being 16 KB each. So we have 32 blocks & as the blocks become completed a piece gets completed.
Files tab. This is pretty self explanatory. As one can see that its a media file which I'm downloading which has some subtitles with it, while the subtitles & other things have been downloaded, the main file is still being downloaded.
This is the speed tab. It's pretty self-explanatory. It basically gives a snapshot of what the system is at. The interesting one is show Disk statistics which gives an idea as how the cache & the hdd are responding.
This is the logger which tells if there were maybe not so good people whom the ipfilter was able to block. Also gives out an entry when a file is downloaded.
This brings to an end Part 1 of Utorrent tutorial
