FileShareFreak [mirror]: How To: Download Torrents Through a Proxy/Firewall

April 16, 2008 by sharky

You may find yourself in a situation where you’re unable to download *.torrent files onto the PC that you’re using. Perhaps you’re sitting in an Internet Café, public Library or other place that blocks the actual downloading (or opening) of torrent files to the computer. I know that some Universities do this, as do many non-commercial ISPs & corporate firewalls (proxies) at the workplace.

Many firewalls and security measures will block P2P traffic, filesharing programs (and any new installations of such), or disallow new ports from being added to the “allow” list. These are somewhat difficult to override, depending on the situation (not to mention risky to attempt at work). But if you are able to install, use and launch a BitTorrent client, but not download *.torrent files for it, then this tip may work well. (You may still be able to run µTorrent through a USB stick in situations where new software installations/P2P programs are not allowed).

This works for both public and private BitTorrent sites, although the procedures vary slightly. “Public” is explained first, with some additional ‘private’ torrent tips to follow.

Public Torrents

1. Find a torrent: Open your browser and visit a public tracker, such as thepiratebay.org. You may also be blocked from that site, as well — if so, visit http://anonymouse.org and enter the URL (http://thepiratebay.org) to get around it. Now, select a torrent that you wish to download, (do not use the green arrow quicklaunch); instead, click on the torrent title. Next, right-click where it says “Download This Torrent” and select “Copy Link Location“:

With many sites, you’ll be able to right-click the green arrow and select “Copy Link Location” — this is the same thing. Whichever way you decide to do it, the importance is being sure that you’re ‘copying’ a proper URL with .torrent at the end of it. This path will be shown in the bottom of the browser when hovering over a link:

2. Open µTorrent: Launch µTorrent, and select File > Add Torrent From URL…

The data should automatically ‘paste’ into this window - simply click ‘OK’.

Occasionally you may get an error message (mininova is famous for this), just click OK and try the URL again.

The .torrent should now start in the BitTorrent client. NOTE: Sometimes it takes a few moments to update the tracker URL when importing torrents in this manner - not to worry, seeds/leechers are soon to be updated.

Alternative Method:

It’s entirely possible that none of this worked for you. Here’s a second option:

Follow the same steps as above by copying the URL of the .torrent. But this time, visit http://txtor.dwerg.net/ and “Paste” the URL into the field there. Click “Download”.

Save the “…torrent.txt” file to your hard drive. Here’s the Firefox screenshot:

Once downloaded, simply rename the extension of the *.txt file to .torrent by removing “.txt” from the title of the file name. You’ll now be able to open the torrent in your BitTorrent client!

Private Trackers:

The above methods will usually not work when importing a URL from a private site that does not include a passkey in the URL of the torrent. As an example, FunFile.org’s torrents do not, and therefore will not work in either manner. An example of a private .torrent that will work looks like this (note the passkey at the end of the URL):

http://www.torrentleech.org/download.php/48929/CoreAVC.Professional.Edition .v1.6.5.0-EDGE.torrent?passkey=6ha3dfe9dks3953927877cfa49du80

Here’s an example of a private tracker’s *.torrent URL that does not contain the passkey (and thus will not work):

http://www.funfile.org/download.php/28909/VSO.Software.ConvertXtoDVD. -v3.0.0.9.Multilingual.WinALL.Keygen.Only-BRD.torrent

One solution is to try and manually save the *.torrent file as *.torrent.txt through a web proxy (anonymouse.org), although many private sites don’t allow access through anonymous proxies.

Last chance: See if the private site has SSL. Try adding an “s” to URL of the private site in your browser (i.e. https://www.funfile.org). This may allow you to download torrents straight into your BitTorrent client.