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So here on the left are the .torrent files of the movies I have
collected using isohunt [A Richmond,
BC, based
bittorrent search engine!]. I have tried
to pick
what looked to me like the best/seeding version - there may be others.
I haven't watched them all through but I tested snippets and they were
all watchable.
movie player?
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If you need a movie viewing program I suggest you use either of the
Free, Open Source programs MPlayer or VLC. VLC is great for Windoze
computers as you probably won't have to install any codecs seperately.
subtitles?
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Subtitles can be confusing. Some are in seperate .sub, .idx or .srt
files. I suggest you rename the subtitle file to be exactly the same
name as the movie file. This way, the subtitles should work by default.
For instance, to view the Hiroshima mon
amour.avi file with english subtitles, extract the Hiroshima.mon.amour_Resnais_french_divx.srt
file from the english
subtitles.rar then rename it Hiroshima mon
amour.srt. Unfortunately, the Bicycle Thief
torrents doesn't include english subtitles. I have found some on this
site [bicycle
thief] though I haven't tested them to see if
they work - sometimes they will be out of sync which is a headache
to
fix.
bittorrent [BT] and clients:
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OK, basics: new to bittorrent and downloading computer movies? It's
only slightly more complicated than Youtube so fearnot [fixing subtitle
or sound sync notwithstanding]. I wrote a quasi-guide to
how to do it
for an assignment last year. Or just Google one of the many better
written guides.
- my silly anti-copyright project from last year
- my personal website under development
- my old old eciad homepage
- vancouver critical mass blog
- I use ubuntu
- all the links on my anti-copyright thingy
You don't need anything special for the .torrent file - just click and save it somewhere that you will remember. The .torrent is a tiny file - like a map, or set of instructions that tells your computer how to get the movie. To use the .torrent file you need to install a free bittorrent client program. I suggest utorrent [tiny quick program, Windoze only] or Azureus [requires lots of memory and java, any OS] or use the wikipedia comparison chart to pick another [pick one that does DHT]. Once you have a client program installed you can use that to open the .torrent file. It will download the movie/bundle of files to your computer as fast as possible. It uploads and downloads at the same time - it really is file sharing. All you have to do is wait now. You can download/upload around 2 or 3 torrents simultaneously - but too many at once makes it slow. Just queue any others in the client program to be downloaded afterwards. Depending on the speed of the connection, you will need between 45min and several hours to download each film.
bittorrent quirks:
The jargon for how healthy [fast downloading] a torrent will be is all about seeds and leachers [both are peers]. Seeds are people who have a full complete copy [100%] of a torrent. Leachers are those downloading/uploading who do not yet have a complete copy. It is expected that you will continue sharing the file as a seed [known as seeding - you just leave the client program running] after you have got the complete file. This is so that you upload the same amount of data as you download - so that the whole sharing scheme can continue to work! The client program keeps track of how much you have uploaded/downloaded by displaying a ratio. A 1:1 ratio [1.0] means you have shared exactly the same as what you got. It is good form to wait until the ratio is at least 1.0 before quitting. [I try for 1.5].Much depends on how many seeds and peers there are. More seeds is better. Because we are mostly downloading obscure movies that will mean unhealthy torrents with few peers [less than 5 is very small]. So please seed these really slow files as long as you can so that everyone can get them. I've written the current number of seeds/peers under the .torrent movie title. These numbers will change and be wrong by the time you read this - but, it gives some idea of what is coming and what needs help.