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Distributed downloading system
FINDING music or video files online is one of the biggest problems that users face while surfing the internet. Most websites don’t have the bandwidth or the disk space to accommodate such files and those that do are few and are hardly likely to contain interesting material. This is where peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies come in.
A P2P network relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of individual participants (people like you or me connected to the internet) rather than the traditional model of commonly used central servers these days. Thus, BitTorrent (BT) is its relatively newer form which is what we will be exploring today.
Understanding the technology
BitTorrent is a distributed file distribution technology. Simply put, it is just a very efficient way of downloading files. What makes BT different from normal downloads is that instead of downloading in a predetermined order, the file you download is broken up into chunks. Thus, for the file that you might be downloading to your machine, its chunks would be coming in random order (for example, the end of a movie file first and then the beginning) and these can come from different machines of users who are downloading or have already downloaded that file. This makes it possible to send large files — in fact, you can even send a file of over 1GB through this.
To work with BT, you will need a software called BT Client to download files. A BitTorrent client connects to other BitTorrent clients and downloads several chunks at the same time in random order. As you start collecting those chunks of the file, your BitTorrent client will also start making them available for download to other BT clients, and you will become a part of the P2P file distribution network. Thus, you will upload and download at the same time. In the long run, this makes the protocol fairly efficient and very scalable — the more the BitTorrent clients serving up a given file, the faster the download. This also prevents those freeloaders on other P2P networks who download files from you, but will not share any files themselves.
The .torrent files are the gateway to the world of BT and are needed to connect to and download other files. These files contain information that the BitTorrent client then uses to locate other users who are serving up the file you are interested in. These files are downloaded normally, like any other file and are then read by your BT client.
Your first client
There are literally hundreds of BT clients available online. However the best among them is uTorrent which you can download from www.utorrent.com in the download section. You can also review the installation instructions for the software at http://torrentpack.com/installingutorrent.html.
One reason why I recommend uTorrent over other BT clients is because it shows the health of your connections using coloured status icons. This feature proves to be quite useful because, if, for some reason, the status of your file changes, you will see the torrent go “red”, whereas with other clients, you may think it is just slowing down and will speed up later, when the problem may actually be with your port or torrent or tracker. After a download is initiated, it will usually go from red to blue if everything is okay.
For those who don’t know, a tracker is a server which directs the uploading and downloading of packets of data on torrents. It contains information on the number of users who are currently downloading and seeding the torrent.
Downloading options
There are literally hundreds of websites from where you can download .torrent files but the best way to find torrents are through Torrent Engines.
TorrentSpy is one such search engine. Other good engines include BitTorrent (http://www.bittorrent.com/index.html), ISOHunt (http://www.isohunt.com/), BTJunkie (http://btjunkie.org/), Fulldls (http://www.fulldls.com/), Torrent Finder (http://www.torrent-finder.com/), Torrent Pond (http://www.torrentpond.com/) and the Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org).
Next week we will explore the world of Torrents in greater detail along with the ways through which you can share those GB files with your friends as well.
The writer is a freelance contributor
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