When you are downloading torrent content you are a “leecher”. When you are sharing content, you are a “seeder”. This terminology will be used more later. Read up on copyright law. A lot of what is shared using Torrents is done so illegally. Do not be one of these people. Only share and download material that you have the legal right to share.
Public trackers are open to anyone, and can be easily found with a quick Google search. They do not require registration, and have no sharing requirements. Public trackers are often littered with advertisements. 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 are usually invite-only, and cannot typically be found through Google searches. You will be required to sign up for an account, and your file sharing ratio is often monitored to make sure you are seeding at least as much as you are leeching.
Use popular shorthand for finding the file you want.
For example: if you need the fifth episode from the fourth season of a show, search for “
Quality - If you are downloading a video, the encoding process will result in differing quality between files. In general, larger files will be higher quality than smaller ones. Check the Comments on the torrent to ensure that the quality of the file is good. Many torrents allow users to rate them, which can help with your decision. Number of seeders - The more seeders a file has, the quicker you will be able to download it. This is because there will be more people to connect to when you are downloading the chunks of the file. If there are significantly more leechers than seeders, you may be waiting a while for the file to finish. Most trackers list the number of seeders and the number of leechers next to each search result. Most trackers will allow you to sort by the number of seeders.
Oftentimes torrent files come in ISO format. These are rips of discs, and need to be burned or mounted in a virtual drive in order to run them.
If you didn’t configure a download location when you installed your client, you will be asked where you want to save the file when the torrent is loaded. If you don’t have enough free space for the file you want to download, you will not be able to start the download process.
You can download multiple torrents at the same time, though your overall maximum download speed will be split between all active transfers.
Most internet service plans have slower upload speeds than download speeds. This means that in order to maintain a 1:1 ratio of leech to seed, you may need to keep your Torrent tracker open longer than just the time needed to download. A good way to do this is to leave your Torrent client running in the background. Note: If you move or delete the files, you will lose the ability to seed.
Set a minimum ratio. This will be the minimum that your torrents will seed to after the download has been finished. Try to set it to at least 100%. This means that if you downloaded a 300MB file, you would seed until you reached 300MB sent. If you want seeding to stop after the ratio has been met, set the speed limit to 0.
