November 05, 2007 by sharky
A BitTorrent website is simply a torrent search engine (where .torrent files are hosted) in which you can browse through and download the ones you want to add to your BitTorrent client program.
Torrent websites are broken down into two categories - public and private. Public torrent websites allow anyone (in most cases) to browse and download torrents. Private sites require registration and signing in before any access is granted.
There’s a huge number of torrent hosting websites, each with different qualities. Check out the alexa.com ‘Top 100 BitTorrent Websites‘ to see which ones are the most popular by ranking. But first we’ll explain how to open .torrent files:
Downloading/Opening .torrent files
Now that you’ve chosen a BitTorrent program (and hopefully already installed it first), take a look at a sample torrent website and how to download. For this example we’re going to use “BitComet” and “The Pirate Bay”:
Launch your Internet browser and visit thepiratebay.org. (For this example, go to “Top 100″ - look at the middle of the website to the right; and then click on “Total Top 100″ - the reason being is we want to generate a list of popular good torrents).
This will now bring you to this page here:
To download a .torrent file, click one of the green arrows as shown above. This will ask you if you want to OPEN or SAVE the file. You can SAVE the torrent file to your hard drive and open it later through your Bit client. Or, if you choose OPEN, it should launch your BitTorrent client. If you are asked to “OPEN WITH” - it is because the *.torrent files are not associated with any program yet, so choose ‘select the program from a list‘ and select BitComet (or another) as the program to open them. This should now launch your BitTorrent program (in this example, BitComet) and this BitComet window should now pop up as shown below:
Click OK to start the download. (NOTE: You can change the download path of specific folders before the download begins if you like. This is handy if you have more than one hard drive; you can send some tasks to drive C: and some to Drive D:).
This should now bring up the next window - the BitComet main window - like this:
Now the task has been started and the download is has begun. Note that it usually takes several minutes for the tracker to connect with other seeds and peers, so the downloading process usually takes some time to commence. If the seed/peer numbers remain at “0/0[0/0]” for a long period of time (10 minutes), the task should be deleted (and all files). Either it is a bad torrent, or a torrent with no users, or it is from a private tracker and thus inaccessible. If ALL your torrents display this, then it could be a connection/settings (or firewall) issue.
NOTE: You can change the default path where all downloads go in BitComet through OPTIONS > PREFERENCES > TASK.
NOTE: Be advised that some BitTorrent clients will allocate the disk space needed for each download beforehand. For instance, if you choose to download a file that is 10GB, make sure to have at least that much free space on your hard drive before it even begins. This setting can be changed in some programs to only use hard drive space as it downloads (on-the-fly), but either way that space will still be required at some point.
You can also get additional information about a particular torrent - instead of clicking on the green arrow quicklaunch, click on the title of the torrent. This will launch a new page dedicated to details about that particular torrent, and can include:
- A list of all files included in the torrent
- User comments for that torrent
- A view of an included *.NFO file (with even more info)
- Seed/Leech ratios, file size(s), date of torrent added, etc.
- Another torrent ‘download’ link
Archived by FSFmirror
