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Get PUMPed With VIPeers’ New P2P Search & Sync Tool
December 29, 2008 by sharky
VIPeers is busy again developing fresh peer-to-peer and BitTorrent ideas — this time with a brand-new P2P application called PUMP. Pump is a complete all-in-one P2P solution offering a robust array of features, including: PC/mobile media syncing; music, video and torrent searching; embedded media player; blog & podcasting content integration; and sharing capabilities implemented through VIPeers’ online filesharing and podmailing applications.
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Private Trackers Announce ‘Global Ban’ Of Romania
December 28, 2008 by sharky
Romania - a real hotbed for tracker activity - has yet again found itself on uncertain ground in amongst the private tracker community. This was recently rekindled a few days ago when Waffles.fm officially announced that Romania is "largely a cesspool of spam" and is thus now globally banned from the tracker. This includes all existing members, as well as potential future invitees. Today, ScT also announced plans to rid Romanian users from its tracker.
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Fixing Spotify Login Issues, Once And For All
December 26, 2008 by sharky
In an article published 4 weeks ago, we introduced how to Join Spotify from banned locations. If you kept up with logging in to your account at least every two weeks through UK web proxies (assuming you selected UK as your country of choice), you may still have received a notice upon logging in that says, "Your current location does not match that set in your profile. You may travel with Spotify, but only for 14 days". Worse yet, if you failed to login for more than 14 days the message becomes more dire, whereby you won’t even be able to gain access to the Spotify application, due to mismatched countries in your profile and home IP address. Here’s a few tips to get Spotify back in action.
Looking for an invite to Spotify? Here’s a site that has been known to post valid Spotify invite codes:
http://lakka.se/index.php?p=spot
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Find 100% Working Verified Torrents at Vertor.com
December 22, 2008 by sharky
Public tracker users often need to have their guard up when browsing through the vast selection of similar torrents at Mininova, TPB and others. Some torrents are password-protected; others contain malicious viruses, and there’s even fake torrents to lure in unsuspecting torrenters. Even a new torrent that contains an impressive seed-peer list may look ripe for the taking, but even these offer no security. Finally, for the first time ever, there’s a public tracker that actually checks & verifies their torrents before offering them for download. Introducing Vertor.com, a revolutionary next-gen BitTorrent site where every available torrent is checked for downloadability, viruses, DRM and passwords.
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New Online Utility To Find Trackers with Open Signups
December 20, 2008 by sharky
For those who are searching for an online service that checks private trackers for open registrations, we don’t have to look very far. You’re probably already aware of BTracs.com and TrackerChecker.org. While both of these sites adequately provide updated listings, they’re about as visually stimulating as a ham sandwich. Introducing OpenTrackers.net — a brand-new exciting online utility that puts sexy back in finding private trackers that are open for signups.
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Private Tracker Invites For Sale at TorrentInvites.org
December 17, 2008 by sharky
If it were April 1st, we’d put a lot more scrutiny into what we’re about to report. It would appear that TorrentInvites.org is selling private tracker invites. Just in time for Christmas, you can now purchase your very own favorite private tracker, for you or a loved one. And some of them are even on sale; such as What.cd which is going for $9.95 USD. Ironically, that’s much less painful than waiting to take their IRC invite quiz.
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Invites: The Top 50 Most Requested Private Trackers
December 17, 2008 by sharky
Experienced BitTorrent users know a thing or two about private trackers - some sites are just better than others. This could translate to fastest pre-times of new releases; trackers with the most diversity and number of torrents; community-focused trackers; and even the rarity of an account weighs heavily on what is deemed "in demand". We scoured high and low on torrent forums everywhere to find out what trackers are in hot demand, and tallied up the results - #1 shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
To compile this data we visited torrent forums and counted (really!) each and every tracker request that was posted, including ones that were ‘filled’. Our stats went back as far as July, 2008. Sites that were used included:
| ThePirateSociety | P2PTalk.org | TrackeReactor | TorrentInvite |
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Fight Throttling: Auto-Restart uTorrent With Random Ports
December 13, 2008 by sharky
A few readers have contacted us in regards to being throttled (or more specifically; sandvined) by their ISPs. As described in these instances, seeding is fine initially but then trickles down to under 10 KB/s. One solution that works well is a simple restart of µTorrent (with a random port number), which seems to temporarily unblock the connections. That is, until the sandvine hardware figures out the established new port number, and seeding winds down to a crawl once again. However, we can’t always be sitting in front of the computer, constantly monitoring the status of µTorrent’s upload speeds - this just isn’t practical. A better solution involves automated stopping & restarting of uTorrent.exe on a pre-determined schedule, each time with a randomized port.
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FileShareFreak Tracker Watch - Dec. 12
December 12, 2008 by sharky
There’s just two more weeks until Christmas, and trackers are full of holiday spirit. Many of the major players have already kicked off the festivities with Christmas competitions, contests, treasure hunts and holiday-related fun. In this installment of "Tracker Watch" we also present a slew of brand-new sites (17 in all), plus some tracker tidbits and info.
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Firefox Scripts That Integrate Torrent Searching on IMDb
December 11, 2008 by sharky
There are two tools that the average movie pirate regularly uses in his/her arsenal - IMDb.com, and torrent sites. You know what we’re talking about: cross-referencing actors, directors and films with ease at the user-friendly Internet Movie Database, and then head on over to Mininova, IsoHunt or ThePirateBay to seek out the flicks. Well, here are a few Greasemonkey userscripts for Firefox that facilitate the process so much easier, by integrating torrent searching onto a displayed movie title page on IMDb. No longer do users need to switch between tabs, type in or copy/paste titles into the search bar at various public torrent indexers - simply click and go!
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Pre-Times: Release Blogs vs Private Trackers
December 10, 2008 by sharky
Release blogs are fiercely competitive; some excel in quantity, or perhaps a certain specialty - others pride themselves as being a cutting edge provider for the quickest releases. But when it comes to pre-times, how fast are they, anyways? Are some better than others? In a word - Yes. We took a look at popular release blogs and compare them with pre-times from some of the best private trackers. And the results are surprisingly good. For example, RlsLog.net averaged a pre-time of 34 minutes over the last 10 (major) movie releases, when compared to the announce times of three private trackers (SCC, TL and RevoTT). The drawback? Unlike a tracker, you’ll usually need to wait a little longer for an affiliate to post RapidShare or other 1-click hoster links in the comments, in order to actually download it.
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Release Blogs - Finding The Latest P2P & Scene Releases
December 08, 2008 by sharky
Scene Blogs. P2P Blogs. Call ‘em what you will. Frequenters of release blogs know a thing or two about finding the freshest releases. Sites such as ZeroSec, RlsLog & ScnSrc are dedicated to bringing you the latest info on new scene releases; all without the worries of having to seed or keep a good tracker ratio. And without question; these sites beat out public torrent indexers (pre-times) by hours, and even hold their own with some of the best private trackers. Below, we take a look at an assortment of release blogs, and delve into what makes them so popular.
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6 Things You Can Do To Test Your ISP for BitTorrent Throttling
December 04, 2008 by sharky
The cat-and-mouse game between ISPs and bandwidth-hogging P2P applications is almost as age-old at the Internet itself. If you’ve noticed deathly-slow torrent downloads as of late, it’s probable that your ISP is manipulating (throttling, rate limiting, blocking or sandvining) your P2P / BitTorrent traffic. ISPs from all corners of the globe are desperately trying to decongest their networks, cut costs & maximize profits — all at the expense of torrenters. Here’s 6 things you can do to verify that your Internet provider is a Bad ISP.
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TorrentZEN - A New Real-Time Torrent Search Engine
December 03, 2008 by sharky
Recently-launched TorrentZEN.com is a brand-new torrent meta search engine that provides live search results from 18 different public torrent indexers. Not only are the results fast, accurate and fresh from the source sites, (not from cached sources found in some other meta searchers) T-ZEN doesn’t search other meta search sites; just the top public indexers.
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Is Your BitTorrent Throttled? Try uTorrent 1.9
December 02, 2008 by sharky
As first reported by DSLReports, subscribers of Comcast, Cox, Bell Sympatico or other unpopular BitTorrent throttlers & sandviners may now have an alternative solution with µTorrent’s new alpha version 1.9. Peer-to-peer communications have traditionally used TCP, including BitTorrent trackers, whereby ISPs can quite easily "see" what type of traffic is being forwarded. While still in its infancy stages of development, µTorrent v1.9 (current build 13582) includes uTP, which is a variant of UDP (billed as UDP torrenting or micro transport protocol). uTP is an entirely different protocol (transport layer) than TCP that doesn’t require handshaking, and is thus much harder - if not impossible - to throttle.
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The 10 Best Free Web Proxies For Anonymous Surfing
November 29, 2008 by sharky
Let’s face it: There are hundreds of free web proxies out there that provide anonymous surfing. Of these, most will even unblock MySpace, Gmail, FaceBook or any other no-no when surfing from school or work. Some have taken this a step further and allow for signing into your MSN, AIM or Yahoo! messaging accounts - conveniently through an anonymized (and secure) SSL version of eBuddy.com. Others allow for sending anonymous emails and newsgroup postings, even YouTube viewing. But is there really a "best" web proxy? We’re not sure about that; there’s pro’s and con’s to each one. Either way, here’s our picks for the Top Ten best free web proxies on the Internet, and why.
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Join and Access Spotify.com in Unavailable Locations
November 28, 2008 by sharky
If you don’t already know about Spotify - it’s a sleek new music & radio streaming service on the ‘Net. With an iTunes-like interface and music that pumps out at a cool 160 bitrate, you’ll never again go back to Limewire to find untrustworthy music tracks. Spotify allows everyone to create their own playlists; search, browse & listen effortlessly - all without blowing your ratio at What.cd. It’s streaming; and it’s free!
Unfortunately, if you live in the U.S., Canada or Mexico, you’re on the blacklist for Spotify; as it’s not currently available in all locations - even if you opt for a premium account. But don’t let that stop you. First, you need to find an invite. Second, you need to sign up through a web proxy from a supported country.
EDIT: Dec 08/08 - It appears that UK proxies are now being blocked. I just tried a Polish Proxy, and it worked: http://secretproxy.pl, or try one from THIS LIST. Additionally, we’ve updated the accessibility in a future article here.
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Tracker Donations - What You Get For Your Money
November 26, 2008 by sharky
It takes a lot of dough to maintain a private tracker. Just one good dedicated server can easily run $200 - $300 a month, let alone sites that run multiple servers to keep up with the heavy traffic & tracker load. Perhaps toss in some other miscellaneous expenses, such as sophisticated IRC services, P2L (Pay2Leech) scene accounts (to ensure good pre-times), site seedboxes, hardware upgrades… and the total begins to add up. TL, for example claims a whopping €6,000 (Euro) monthly bill to maintain those 14 hard-working servers to keep the bits-a-torrenting. So, what can you expect back in return? Well, it all depends on the tracker.
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FSF Tracker Watch - Nov. 24
November 25, 2008 by sharky
More tracker news. New torrent sites. ‘Nuff said. We’ve snooped around and found a whack of new trackers for all your torrenting needs. Top stories: Waffles.fm & What.cd collaborate to bust a member selling invites on eBay; STN - a new Torrent Forum; ScL & iPlay.ro give invites to every member; and 20 new trackers, including 3 new music sites.
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A Comparison of Popular TV Trackers
November 23, 2008 by sharky
We probably don’t have to tell you which is the best private TV tracker. However, there are some very decent alternative private sites that deal exclusively in television torrents; even some that are open for registration. For those of you who would rather shell out mad dollars for a good Internet package instead of subscribing to hefty $50 cable bills, then it’s imperative to get yourself into a couple of TV trackers to fill in the void. So, what’s the best part about having access to almost every show imaginable… Is it that they’re absolutely free to watch? Nope. Is it that there’s so much more variety, including different languages & international programs that aren’t available from your lame Cable Co.? Nah. The best part is, there are no commercials!
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Pre-Times For TV Trackers - The Cycle of a TV Episode
November 21, 2008 by sharky
Ever wondered how long it takes for a private "TV" tracker to add an available torrent for a show that just aired? Or, what is the difference between pre-times for a specialty TV tracker such as BitMeTV, and a 0day tracker, and a public tracker such as Mininova or ThePirateBay? These questions and more explained, as we take a look into the inner workings of television torrent pre-times, TV scene releases, and their impact at various trackers.
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Blu-Ray BRRip & BDRip - Two New XviD Formats
November 19, 2008 by sharky
Over the past month, you may have noticed two new HD (XviD) formats while browsing your favorite torrent tracker. While Blu-Ray BRRips and BDRips have been around for quite some time (in x264 / *.mkv container), only recently have scene groups been releasing them as XviD *.avi files.
But what makes this remarkable is that they’re compatible with standalone home DVD players (with DivX/XviD support), XBOX 360, PS3, and other external peripherals. These BRRip XviD and BDRip XviD files allow anyone to burn HD-quality Blu-Ray ripped movies on regular DVD media, and playback on most conventional DVD players - without the headaches of re-encoding or DVD authoring. There’s just one catch - you’ll likely need an HDTV to take full advantage of the superior video quality.
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A Review Of New Torrent Clients - What’s Hot, What’s Not
November 18, 2008 by sharky
The explosion of the BitTorrent revolution has sparked the development of an infinitesimal number of new torrent clients; some are built from the ground up, while others use opensource code, and try to build on an existing idea. Many of these new clients are dismal abominations, while others seem to excel in different (unique) areas. However, will any of these newbies be able to de-throne µTorrent’s indisputable title as king of the clients? We’re not sure about that, but there is one that seems to be faster, at least on public trackers.
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PureTNA Adult Tracker Surpasses 1 Million Members
November 17, 2008 by sharky
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, adult private trackers are home to some of the most popular torrents sites in existence. Proving this success is PureTNA.com, which has recently eclipsed the 1 million member milestone; positioning it in the #4 spot for Alexa traffic rank among all private trackers. Only Torrents.ru, Demonoid and Zamunda claim higher rankings, while the #5 spot belongs to Empornium - another adult tracker. We interviewed "Breeze" from PureTNA, who openly discusses some interesting stats & history of this popular site.
| Tracker: | Alexa Rank: | # of Members: | # of Active Torrents: |
| Torrents.ru | 459 | 2,671,361 | ? |
| Demonoid.com | 534 | ?? * | 203,209 |
| Zamunda.net | 1,920 | 600,001 | 54,742 |
| PureTNA.com | 2,170 | 1,008,468 | 42,852 |
| Empornium.us | 2,258 | 880,708 | 62,542 |
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FSF Tracker Watch - Nov. 14
November 14, 2008 by sharky
We didn’t want to have to rush and come out with another one of these so quickly, but there’s a ton of hot-off-the-press tracker news that just can’t wait. In this third installment, we’ve got some sneak peeks into the newest Gazelle trackers, the triumphant return of eBookVortex, plus a Google Search that covers 50 different torrent sites.
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Tracker Forums That Offer Invites To Other Trackers
November 13, 2008 by sharky
With private trackers, Power User status really has its privileges. Many of the major trackers have assigned ‘Community Reps’ who recruit new members for other trackers, and some trackers allow members to post invite giveaways & trades in their forums. So if you can prove yourself a valuable member at one tracker, you’ll quite easily be able to find an invitation to a variety of other ones - you just need to know where to look. For example, when you become a Power User at Libble.com (5 GB uploaded, ratio of 1.05, 4 weeks), you can get yourself into What.cd (without having to go through their IRC quiz), which then opens the door for many other invites. With a little bit of hard work and some time, you’ll soon have an account at practically any tracker you ever wanted. Here’s a list of private trackers’ forums that recruit (or allow invites/giveaways to) other private BitTorrent sites:
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TorrentDam - The Mac OS X Torrent Search Utility
November 11, 2008 by sharky
Finally, Mac OS X users have a torrent search utility to call their own. Introducing TorrentDam, a brand-new public tracker metasearch tool. It’s free, it’s tiny (at just 592 KB), and it’s open source! TorrentDam allows users to search up to 7 different popular public trackers, including Mininova, ThePirateBay, IsoHunt & Demonoid.
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25 More Tasteless Avatars & Sigs From Private Trackers
November 11, 2008 by sharky
Here’s 25 more utterly useless avatars picked from upstanding denizens of private trackers. If there was an award for the most depraved and ghoulish torrenters, Cinemageddon would win in a landslide. By far, they are the most sick & twisted group of users of any tracker, and there were many avatars we just steered clear of. An estimated one-third of the entire 50 came from CG’s members.
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25 Tasteless Avatars & Sigs From Private Tracker Users
November 10, 2008 by sharky
We’ve scoured high and low on private trackers’ forums for the best avatars and user sigs we could find. Be forewarned that these are not for the faint of heart; most contain vulgarity, political incorrectness and other tastelessness that we deemed as appropriate criteria for avatar greatness. You won’t find these on What.cd or Waffles, and trying to use them there will likely get you an unwelcomed warning, or worse. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
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FSF Tracker Watch #2 - Nov. 9
November 09, 2008 by sharky
With the completely unsuccessful launch of the first FSF Tracker Watch - which nobody saw - we’re more than proud to relive the same pain over again. Here’s even more useless information, torrent news and brand-new trackers to the BT scene.
TV.Torrents.ro is Back!!
After being down for an unknown reason for well over 3 weeks, Tv.torrents.ro is back in action! An explanation has not been given, but who cares - those red arrows in µTorrent have switched back to green again!
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Obscure Movie Trackers - A Look Inside The Hidden Gems
November 08, 2008 by sharky
‘General’ and 0Day trackers are fantastic for finding the latest movies, but if you’re a diehard fan of rare flicks, b-movies, indies, film noirs, cult films and other obscure content, you’ll mostly be out of luck with these trackers. Most torrenting film buffs will agree that while public sites can provide some of the odd stuff; it’s trackers that are completely dedicated to these film genres is where the action is. Members need not bother to search for the latest Hulk or Batman movie - you won’t find those titles within the torrents on these hidden gems. But aside from serving up the rarities and classics, the communities are second to none. Below is a sneak peek into the accounts at 5 popular outlandish movie trackers, and what each has to offer.
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Invite Trading vs. Giveaways - What’s The Difference?
November 05, 2008 by sharky
This is not a pro-trading manifesto. It is a look at the correlation between ‘traders’ and ‘inviters’, and the overall impact on private trackers, their members and torrent forums.
Through the eyes of a private tracker, there’s really no discerning difference between trading an invitation, or by simply giving it away (publicly) to someone who asks - the fact is, either way it’s against tracker rules. While most reputable "Tracker Invite" sites & forums have now opted to go ‘anti-trading’ in recent times, ‘invite giveaways’ are as popular as ever. But is there really that much of a difference between the two?
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New Online BitTorrent/Multi-P2P Service at VIPeers.com
November 03, 2008 by sharky
zSlide, the creators of the online/email BitTorrent Podmailing service have outdone themselves once again, this time with a revolutionary all-in-one P2P solution called VIPeers: a new hosting service for Web & BitTorrent distribution. What sets this apart from 1-click hosters and other online BitTorrent services is that there so many more available options for users to share their files. Uploaded files can be shared in emails, as *.torrents, podmailing links (*.zed), DDL (direct download links), forum links, even as clickable links on your favorite social networking sites. Sharing files and torrents has never been so easy!
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uTorrent: Move All Your Downloaded Files & Keep Seeding
November 02, 2008 by sharky
The Scenario: You finally picked up that dreamy 1 TB hard drive, and the plan is to move all of your seeding µTorrent folders (and torrents) over to their new home. If you want to continue seeding, then technically you don’t need a tutorial such as this; simply stop each of your torrents, right-click, select ‘Advanced’ and choose ‘Set Download Location…’ and then browse to the new location of the directory. This option will work just fine, but if you’re a heavy µTorrent user with a lot of active (seeding) torrents, then this can be excruciatingly tedious. A more practical solution would be to edit just one file to instantly change all of the paths.
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Top-BT - A BitTorrent Client To Double Download Speeds
October 31, 2008 by sharky
Researchers at the Ohio State University have implemented and released a new BitTorrent client software written in Python, called Top-BT. Different from previously released BT clients, Top-BT actively discovers Internet topology, and uses this intelligence to always choose close peers to download file pieces. Their study shows that, compared to other native BT clients, Top-BT can accelerate downloading up to twice, but save up to 40% induced Internet traffic. So, naturally, what did we do? We put Top-BT head-to-head in a speedtest with µTorrent using public trackers.
NOTE: TopBT has withdrawn from LH-ABC, and is now built onto Vuze. Read our updated article here:
TopBT on Vuze - A Topology-Aware BitTorrent Client
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FSF Tracker Watch - Oct. 28
October 28, 2008 by sharky
We’re going to try a slightly new format around here, and put out a weekly? article dedicated to tracker news & stories that otherwise would be too small for a regular post. Included will be new trackers to the scene, down trackers, and other tidbits pertaining to individual sites. Without further ado, let’s get ‘er started!
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Don’t Get Disabled: Seed Times, Ratio Rules & Inactivity
October 26, 2008 by sharky
This is all but an exhaustive list of trackers and their requirements for minimum seed times (on individual torrents), minimum overall (global) account ratios, and inactivity time (in which you’ll get disabled for not logging in to the site and/or not using the tracker). These are to be used as a guideline only, and are subject to change. Each tracker has an FAQ or Rules section that stipulates most of these, especially useful in the event of new or unique rules.
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Seed The Same Files To Multiple Trackers in uTorrent
October 24, 2008 by sharky
We’ve already covered a similar topic on ‘Preseeding‘, whereby you can seed previously downloaded files to another tracker, without taking a hit on your download ratio. But if you want to seed the exact same files to multiple trackers simultaneously in µTorrent, it gets a little more tricky. No, you can’t just add multiple private trackers (URLs) to the announce list of a torrent - this would surely qualify you for a big fat ban on most trackers. Nor do you need to copy the seeded folder and/or files to another location, and then seed it to a different tracker from a secondary location - it can all be done from one folder.
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What.cd Bans Invite Giveaways on Tracker Forums
October 22, 2008 by sharky
Looking for a quick invite to What.cd? Well, you probably won’t find it on many ‘Tracker Invite’ forums anymore. What once was a gimme for an easy giveaway has now been banned. We can’t hold fault to What.cd for the decision. There’s just too many people joining up on a tracker forum, and easily acquiring an invitation after a short probation period. So why is it that these Torrent Invite sites are complying with What.cd’s request to be removed from any invitation giveaways or account trading? Simple, really - they’re protecting their own members from being disabled on What.cd. To quote a TrackeReactor staffer, “What.cd staff has denied what.cd giveaways here. Many users from here were disabled”.
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FileShareFreak Hacked? Our Birthday, Other Site News
October 20, 2008 by sharky
It only seems fitting that we should report our own hacking, if it were true. No, we weren’t "hacked" although we did have some insidious code circulating in one of our files. We can only speculate on where it came from - since we’re on shared hosting, and it was our hosting company that noticed it even before we did. A Whois lookup gave the location of 58.65.232.17 as Hong Kong Hostfresh as the culprits responsible. The problem seems to be rectified now, and a backup was used to overwrite the malicious file. Further proof of how important it is to use a good antivirus program at all times.
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Total Anonymity - A List of VPN Service Providers
October 18, 2008 by sharky
What To Look For When Purchasing a VPN Service
It all depends what you’re looking to do with it. For simple anonymous browsing, some providers offer this for as little as $5/month, or even for free. But if you want a total Internet traffic anonymizing experience, a premium VPN account is a better way to go - there’s no IP numbers to configure into the webapps, and no software to install - just set up the VPN and it’s done! Other VPN selling points include:
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Anonymous BitTorrent Through a VPN - The Speed Tests
October 16, 2008 by sharky
To successfully bypass a BitTorrent-blocking university or the evil throttling of a bad ISP, the use of a seedbox is more than adequate. Another solution is to incorporate a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service, and tunnel all of your Internet traffic through a new IP address. Not only will your ISP be unable to "see" what you’re sending & receiving, but your home IP is kept out of the torrent; or anything else for that matter. Essentially, a VPN anonymizes all of your traffic.
We’ve touched on the subject of VPNs here at FSF before, but never actually ran any conclusive testing to prove that not only does it work; but more importantly, to verify BitTorrent transfer speeds. For this, we purchased a month of VPN service, anonymized the PC and ran some speed tests on both public and private trackers. As expected, the results were unsurprisingly very good.
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uTorrent Users: Update to Latest Stable v1.8.1 - For Now
October 15, 2008 by sharky
One good thing about µTorrent is its upgradability to a newer (hopefully improved) version, and that this is set to "ON" by default (with user confirmation) in the client. The bad thing about uTorrent …well, ironically it’s the same thing. After a much-anticipated release of version 1.8.0 stable, everything started to go wrong: from ongoing ZoneAlarm firewall and NOD32 antivirus conflicts, Vista problems, connectability issues and a bounty of other mishaps in the last month or so. µTorrent developers have repeatedly scrambled to put out quick betas/builds until finally settling on the latest stable v1.8.1 - a version even the dev team couldn’t have contemplated having to come up with in such short notice. All this for a tiny 263 KB application.
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New Shareaza v2.4.0 - 9 Months After With 900 Changes
October 13, 2008 by sharky
The audacious Shareaza fiasco that saw their domain rudely hijacked and the popular file sharing client replaced with a fake ‘pay’ (aka. "legal") Shareaza v4 is likely still fresh in many of our minds. Fortunately, the original developers did not cease work on the GNU-licensed real Shareaza, as they introduce a much-improved new version v2.4.0.0 this month. After more than 9 months of dedication, the team is proud to announce the first major upgrade to Shareaza since the debacle. This latest Shareaza comes loaded with 900 very impressive cumulative updates & changes, including Vista support, integrated IRC chat, TorrentWizard, new skins, and even a TCP/UDP connection test.
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Canadians, Vote NDP on October 14th for Net-Neutrality
October 11, 2008 by sharky
Fellow Canadians, if you put any stock in ‘net-neutrality, freedom of speech, and P2P filesharing, you’ll want to vote NDP in the upcoming election on Tuesday, October 14th. I simply and strongly cannot sit idly by and write about P2P topics when everything I believe in stands in such jeopardization. It is not only my duty as an avid proponent for BitTorrent, P2P and Internet neutrality, but also as a patriotic Canadian. Nobody’s asking for absurd copyright laws that diminish the rights of copyright holders and protect the infringers, but some middle ground must be found. It won’t happen if C-61 is reintroduced. Bored? Read no further.
UPDATE (Oct. 15): While NPD didn’t win, the election still proved to be a success. Again, a minority Canadian Government has been established, keeping the status quo.
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uTorrent Freeleech Tips Using ‘Labels’ and ‘Scheduler’
October 11, 2008 by sharky
You’ve probably seen this before - your private tracker has announced a "freeleech" coming up in the near future, giving you a great head’s up notice of when it’s going down. If you want to use the opportunity to buffer the account ratio or finally be able to download what you’ve always wanted, µTorrent comes loaded with a couple of handy features that are tailor-made for home seeding. With ‘Labels’ you’ll be able to categorize a select group of torrents, download them beforehand, and start them all at once - at the click of a button. In the event that you’re not at your home PC when the freeleech begins, or have no access to a computer (no WebUI), the ’scheduler’ feature will launch the torrents at a predetermined time.
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Share Private Torrents With uTorrent’s Embedded Tracker
October 08, 2008 by sharky
Making your own torrents from files and folders in µTorrent is easy - use the ‘Create New Torrent’ feature, browse to a folder or file, throw in a public tracker URL in the Tracker list and upload it to your favourite public torrent site for all to use. But what if you only want to share your torrents with a friend or small group of users, and not the rest of the world? µTorrent incorporates a cool feature called Embedded Tracker that allows you to create and seed your torrents privately.
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The Winners And Losers of P2P - What’s Hot / What’s Not
October 07, 2008 by sharky
BitTorrent has pretty much solidified itself as the undisputed king of P2P — like it or not, the reality is there’s not much to debate about. But what about those other P2P filesharing protocols? Have they become forgotten pioneers of a bygone era, cast aside by a next-gen world of crazed torrenters? Or are they equally thriving in their own right, albeit somewhat displaced? We’ll try to answer that by digging around in some of the alternative P2P methods to see what’s hot, and what’s not.
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PassThePopcorn.org - The Innovative Movie Tracker
October 06, 2008 by sharky
The Gazelle codebase works exquisitely for music trackers (What.cd & Libble) because of the advantageous categorical grouping and tagging characteristics. PassThePopcorn.org has proven that Gazelle functions equally as well when the same principles are applied to a movie tracker. Films, too, are easily grouped and require multiple tagging criteria (genre, year, language, codec) in which Gazelle once again earns merit as the superior tracker codebase.
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25 Tips & Tricks To Maximize a WHAT.CD Freeleech
October 05, 2008 by sharky
For What.cd members who are aspiring for Power User status, freeleech promotions offer the best way to get there. Freeleech offers members a golden opportunity to upload tens, even hundreds of GBs in just a short few days - let alone the ability to finally download everything you ever wanted. Whether you’re using a seedbox, home BitTorrent client, or both - here’s a collection of solutions and tips to get you on track to a great What.cd ratio.
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High-Speed BitTorrent - A Look Inside the 1Gbps Seedbox
October 03, 2008 by sharky
Around here, we’re no strangers to seedboxes. If you’ve ever been privy to one, you’ll probably find it hard going back to regular home torrenting once you get accustomed to the download speed and seeding power. Well, that’s exactly what we’ll be facing next week when our TorrentSwift 1Gbps seedbox account expires. Alas, we’ll be downgrading back to our slow-as-molasses 100Mbps (mbit) seedbox where bandwidth is capped at a meager 12,500 KB/s (in a best-case scenario). But it sure was a fun ride while it lasted.
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Pirate City - Kicks Things Off With 800+ Streaming Movies
October 01, 2008 by sharky
Those of you who’ve been anxiously awaiting the public opening of The Pirate City, today is that day. There’s been a huge buzz over this, and as beta testing winds down paving the way to open access, expect TPC to become a monster hit among online video streaming enthusiasts.
The Pirate City comes not without controversy. If rumours are true that The Pirate Bay is indeed behind this new video streaming site, it gives all the more reason for the MPAA to abhor them even further - something of which TPB is already accustomed to.
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Libble.com Switches Over To Gazelle Codebase
September 28, 2008 by sharky
Libble.com took a big step forward and upgraded their noticeably dated tracker to Gazelle. This is something that they’ve been contemplating for a couple of months now, and most users have been supportive of the change. The main advantage of Gazelle is the improved sorting & tagging (with torrent groups and artist pages), as well as a massive performance increase. Perhaps this is something that will finally allow Libble to expand a little bit.
| What.cd | Libble.com |
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IPFilter.dat Not Blocking Bad Connections in uTorrent 1.8?
September 28, 2008 by sharky
For those of you who incorporate IP Blocking into µTorrent, you may have noticed that when you upgraded to v1.8, the ipfilter.dat addon doesn’t seem to be blocking anything. Rest assured, it is working. If you use µTorrent v1.7.7 with ipfilter.dat and click on the Logger tab at the bottom, blocked IPs are automatically shown (and logged). This is not the case for v1.8, and you’ll need to manually enable the log to get it to display the blocked peers.
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Demonoid Users Beware - Be Careful What You Download
September 27, 2008 by sharky
As a rule, private trackers are more secure than public ones. However, what many members of Demonoid don’t realize is that most of the popular torrents are using public trackers - which is just about everything that has a huge swarm of seeders & leechers. Thus, you may as well just be downloading from ThePirateBay or Mininova; essentially it’s the same thing. So why is it that Demonoid users are shocked when they receive nasty eletters from their ISPs admonishing them for downloading copyrighted content? That’s exactly what’s happening, and the complaints are rolling in on many of the torrents.
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DidItLeak - Serving Up Freshly Leaked Music Releases
September 27, 2008 by sharky
Unless today is your first day on the ‘Net, we probably don’t have to tell you that new music is often handily available for download weeks, even months before an official ’street’ CD retail release date. If you’re looking for the newest leaked music releases - check out Did It Leak - not only do they report the latest music leaks but also offer the coinciding official street date alongside the leaks. How cool is that?!
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5 Reasons Why You Need To Be a What.cd ‘Power User’
September 24, 2008 by sharky
Almost every tracker has a user class designated for "Power Users" who go above and beyond by crawling out from the mediocrity of regular "User" class. Becoming "PU" on most sites is straightforward enough - just download a lot and seed (even more), and you’ll likely get there eventually. Most trackers offer PU’s the ability to view NFO files & Top Ten lists, make requests, with perhaps an invitation thrown in once in a while. With What.cd, it’ll take a tad more effort than just simply downloading & seeding to become a Power User - but of all the private trackers, being PU at What.cd really is in a class of its own. No other tracker comes remotely close to offering similar site ‘perks’ and exclusive features that What offers their PU’s. Here’s 5 reasons why it should be every members’ #1 goal to reach Power User status at What.cd:
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Elude BitTorrent Throttling ISPs With Free OpenDNS
September 23, 2008 by sharky
For Comcast and other major ISP subscribers, BitTorrent is not exactly a user-friendly protocol. Sandvining and other throttling techniques employed to block, limit or shape BT traffic are more commonplace than ever before. Comcast in particular is increasingly becoming more efficient at sandvining, and almost all BitTorrent clients are now non- or low-resistant to this scheme. Fortunately there’s an arsenal of services that can efficiently used to promote torrenting, such as paid VPN services and remote seedboxes.
For those who are tight for cash, here’s one free solution that has had moderate success with Comcast subscribers in particular. It’s called OpenDNS - and it works through computers (on a variety of OSes), routers, and even through existing DNS services.
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Gazelle Codebase Hits RapidShare, MegaUpload
September 22, 2008 by sharky
What.cd and Project Gazelle are already offering SVN (subversion) access to their popular Gazelle codebase, so it comes as no surprise that it landed at popular 1-click hosters such as RapidShare and MegaUpload. So what does all this mean? Not much, really - the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) of Gazelle is currently available publicly through SVN anyways. The drawback is that Gazelle is not directly upgradeable via these download links. Links can be found here:
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TorrentKing - New & Improved With 850 Torrent Trackers
September 19, 2008 by sharky
Looking for a huge repository of BitTorrent trackers? Sure, you could just browse around here at FSF - but if you want additional extended info such as tracker genre, country & supported language - all displayed on the same page - TorrentKing.org is the place. There’s also direct links to RSS feeds & tracker IRC channels - for both public and private trackers alike. TK is dedicated to providing the most comprehensive listing of BT trackers anywhere, with detailed and categorized information about each one.
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Get Ready For the Relaunch of VReel.net For HD Video
September 18, 2008 by sharky
Since the demise of the very popular video portal Stage6.com, not many sites have made a serious run at becoming a legitimate successor. Sites such as Veoh, Wuapi, Joost (and the like) offer a fairly decent video streaming service, but clearly not on par with the quality that Stage6 produced, and that’s High-Quality DivX. After taking a loss of "millions" per month, DivX® was forced to pull the plug on the project - obvious proof that properly monetizing an HD streaming service is difficult to accomplish to say the least.
VReel.net is set to take over where Stage6 left off, and is currently in the final stages of launching Beta v2 - likely finalized before the end of this month. Although comparing VReel to a “Stage 6 clone” wouldn’t be entirely fair - or even correct - as they’ll be incorporating their own leecher-proof media player, complete with superior H.264 encoding.
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Sucubus - A New Music & Video Online Search Engine
September 18, 2008 by sharky
Recently-launched Sucubus is a new search utility for finding music and video files on the ‘Net. The application itself is installed on the host’s computer, but the interface (GUI) and searching is conducted through a browser. But what makes Sucubus unique is in the ability to save video files in a variety of formats, including AVI (XviD), iPod (MP4), PSP, iPhone, and DVD formats - not only does this make Sucubus great for searching, but also a versatile on-the-fly converter.
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Latest OiNKPlus v10 Enhances Music Trackers
September 17, 2008 by sharky
If you happen to be a diehard OiNKPlus fan, you’re probably already aware that one of their flagship features - the Last.fm media player - hasn’t worked for quite some time. The OiNKPlus coding team has worked tirelessly to correct the issue that pertains to the upgraded Last.fm structure, and it is now once again available in the newly-released OiNKPlus version 10. Other key upgrades include the addition of SSL to What.cd, and improved embedding into other supported BitTorrent sites.
For those of you who don’t know what it’s all about, OiNKPlus is a media enhancer and artist discovery add-on for Firefox, that works in collaboration with many music trackers (and other select BT sites). The added OiNKPlus info cleverly coalesces within the supported website for seamless integration on the .torrent download page - and it even works with The Pirate Bay and mininova. Below is a look at the before and after examples on What.cd and mininova.org:
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10 Really Great FREE Sites for Essays, Exams & Papers
September 15, 2008 by sharky
Ah, September! The days are getting shorter, the leaves are changing colour, and scholars & academics are all back in school. If you’ve ever tried Googling for essays and term papers, sifting through the vast array of results can be daunting, as most websites only offer premium (paid) services without offering any free downloads.
As with everything else on the ‘Net, scams are around every corner when it concerns essay sites. We’ve put together a collection of ten great websites that cater specifically to exams, essays & term papers that are, indeed, completely free of charge.
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Everything You Need to Start Up a Great Private Tracker
September 14, 2008 by sharky
These days, setting up a private BitTorrent website is almost as easy as setting up a blog. Simply grab a domain name, purchase some hosting (that supports torrenting), and install yourself a script such as TBDev, TBSource, or even Gazelle. Tweak it up a little, add some custom images, and voilà - an instant torrent site. It’s done all the time. But to launch a successful private tracker, there’s more to it than that. No, we’re not talking about badgering members into donating to keep it running - you need an angle that the real pros are using. This includes the entire A-to-Z gamut of IRC services such as PreBots, PreNET and IRCd - not to mention total anonymity with offshore bank accounts & offshore hosting.
It’s not often that true sceners will divulge the secrets for developing a private tracker and turn it into something really special - and even profitable. This is "in-the-know" knowledge that takes years of internal scene experience to hone - rarely is it information easily parted with. For the first time ever (that we’ve ever seen), we’ve found a select group of sceners who are more than willing to help the aspiring private tracker owner achieve the ultimate BitTorrent site.
Want to know more? Inquire here at this IRC channel - irc.p2p-net.eu/#programming. The OPs will be more than happy to answer any questions. Here’s a condensed look (and explanation of) just some of the outlined services that are being offered:
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FilesWire.com - Online Browser-Based P2P Filesharing
September 11, 2008 by sharky
Billed as the world’s first web-based P2P client, FilesWire is a fully decentralized, P2P filesharing application that works directly from a web browser. There is no client to download, install or configure - so users are able to start searching, downloading and sharing content immediately. FilesWire incorporates the G3 platform (protocol), combined with LimeWire’s popular Gnutella network which ensures that millions of files are always available.
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Our Picks - Alternatives To The High-Level Trackers
September 10, 2008 by sharky
Looking for the latest music, movies and TV torrents? Don’t beat yourself up trying to find an impossible invite to TranceTraffic, BitMe, ScL or ScT when there are hundreds of private trackers that offer similar content. Unless you’re into niche trackers that offer irreplaceable and hard-to-find torrents, most of the scene stuff trickles down to most of the other trackers anyways. Here’s our picks for excellent alternative BT sites that you’ll actually be able to get in to.
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New Online Service To Add Trackers To Your Torrents
September 08, 2008 by sharky
Finally there’s a web service that allows for the addition of alternative working trackers to existing torrents. Introducing btReAnnounceR - the new online utility that finds more trackers for any public torrent, and adds them to the ‘announce’ list. So why would anyone need more trackers in a torrent? For a variety of reasons, such as:
- • Your torrent stops at 99% completion (or less). Adding alternate trackers to the list can assist in finding more peers to connect to.
- • Increase the download speed of existing torrents. Downloading a torrent and it seems too slow? Adding alternate trackers can increase connectivity, and download speeds.
- • Some ISPs (even countries) are blocking certain trackers. This can be circumvented with alternate trackers that are not on their blocklist.
- • The primary tracker is down or offline. Many public torrents have only one tracker (in the announce list) yet the actual files may be spread across additional trackers.
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The 10 Best Torrent Meta-search Websites & Aggregators
September 04, 2008 by sharky
Public torrent sites can be broken down into two categories: torrent index sites (or torrent directories such as mininova, isohunt and thepiratebay); and torrent search-engine aggregators, more commonly known as torrent meta-search sites. A torrent meta-search will pull its results by crawling other torrent websites and indexing links that point to meta data .torrent files.
To break it down even further, some meta-search sites offer real-time results from the top torrent sites, usually shown in one page for easy browsing and statistical comparison. Others will display a less aesthetically pleasing (but often more thorough) search that’s built to mimic the Google search engine. Whichever way you prefer to conduct your torrent searching - here’s the best of the best, and why.
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The ‘RLSLOG Seven’ Find a New Home
September 01, 2008 by sharky
The recent fiasco that involved Martin, ReeGed and the gang has been (somewhat) resolved. The recent exodus of the seven RLSLOG editors didn’t take long to settle in on a new home. Not only have they set up a great new scene-release blog, coolly named Zerosec, but they’ve managed to sneak out with the original RLSLOG Forums database, as well. Great news for RLSLOG forum fans - users are able to login with their old account info.
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Use Podmailing to Send Large Files Via Email, BitTorrent
September 01, 2008 by sharky
Podmailing is a peer-to-peer mail service that incorporates BitTorrent as the protocol for sending/receiving large files and folders. Podmailing is a simple and efficient way to send and receive large files and folders by e-mail. It even works with ultra large files of several Gigabytes (there’s no size limit). You just need to install their Podmailing software for Windows or MacOS X in order to start sending files for free. It is very simple because it works just like composing an e-mail.
OK, enough with the shameless plug - on with the tests!
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Public Torrent Users Beware: The Next-gen Torrent Scam
August 30, 2008 by sharky
Unless you happened to be fortunate enough to start out on BitTorrent through the great world of private trackers, you’ve probably fallen for some pretty intricate public torrent scams in your time. And let’s face it - we’ve all been duped into downloading password-protected torrents, only to have to click on external links to find that elusive password on sites that we just shouldn’t need to be visiting. Some of us may have been forced to acquire a special media player (such as DOM) to play that movie you just spent three days downloading. But all of this is child’s play compared to the new generation of torrent scams.
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Get Updated DVD R1, R5 Movie Release Dates
August 30, 2008 by sharky
Looking for updated information for when the next big movie is going to hit BitTorrent? A brand-new blog has been launched that tracks the upcoming release dates for DVD R1’s (Region Code 1 - North America - DVDRiP/DVDR) and R5’s (Region Code 5 - Russia - with English ‘line’ audio). Not only that, but TV shows and games (PC & Console) are also listed.
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