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whatthehey

(3,660 posts)
8. Yep and pretty easy - here's a primer
Fri Dec 4, 2015, 01:28 PM
Dec 2015

1) Download mtorrent (greek letter mu) from their website. Safe free and used by millions. Just decline any sponsored add-on apps. Should need no set up or adjustments whatsoever once installed.
2) Visit www.thepiratebay.vg or www.kat.cr. These are the best current general purpose torrent aggregators. Both have easy prominent search windows. Look for a file in the resulting list with a lot of "seeds" - people who have and are sharing the file. The search results should default to this order. For TV episodes a quick tip. If the uploader, the original adder of the file, is ettv or ethd you can be confident in its quality and safety; they are a very prominent uploader ring.

One caveat. There are really only 3 things to avoid and only one of those once you learn your way around. "Impossible" episodes first and always. I downloaded S02E07 of Fargo recently. E08 was already there, but hasn't even been broadcast. Exceptions would be imported shows like Downton Abbey where the Brits have already finished season 6. I'd also avoid any .zip or .rar files until you get a spidey-sense. They can hide nasties although the torrent community is very good at id-ing and denouncing them.

3) When you select your file, you will see two download options. One will likely have a magnet icon and be called a magnet link. Without getting geeky on why it's just easier for beginners to use that one.

An hour in standard definition is about 300MB or in HD about 1GB depending on encoding.
Depending on your bandwidth and seeds you can get download speeds well in excess of 1 meg per second. I have a 50 meg connection and on 5g wifi I can get up to 4.8. When I paid for only a 10 meg connection I could still get 1.3 without a VPN in between. Even the latter will download an HD show with a lot of seeders (most recent popular shows) in 15 minutes. At the best I can get an SD show in less than 2 minutes.

4) Decision time. Once your file downloads you have two choices. You can remove it from the mtorrent list (not from your computer but just the files actively connected to the network of p2p sharers) or you can leave it there and be a "seed" yourself. Your ISP is unlikely to care about downloading but some send nasty grams if you do a lot of uploading/seeding. As they are often tv providers too it's obvious why. File sharers will disparage "leechers" who don't share their files once they have them but it's your call. For a non-savvy user who doesn't want to mess with VPNs and seed-boxes I wouldn't blame anyone for not taking that risk. Your call.

Final comment on files. There are more video file formats out there than you might think. If your default video player, likely Windows media player, has trouble playing your torrents, either restrict yourself to downloading mp4 files or download another free, widely used and safe software called VLC, which seamlessly plays just about anything. If you want to grab audio files too, the equivalent do it all software is foobar2000.

Feel fre to post or pm with any questions. I am not particularly tech-obssessed and I remember being new to it all too so happy to help in basic English as much as possible.

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