uTorrent tutorial- Part I

Hi all,
This is for all noobs & not so experienced people with bittorrent. To put it simply bittorent is a p2p file-sharing technology. The technology is is constant development in order to fine-tune & as broadband evolves, bittorrent should potentially evolve alongwith it. It does have the potential for communities & companies to make releases of there software easily & fast without sacrificing almost nil bandwidth. The only investment the company or the software group has to do is to upload the file to some tracker, download the .torrent file with the tracker info, wait so that 3-4 people have leeched the file (peers) from you & in turn they've become seeders themselves. After this the viral network takes over & depending on the popularity of the file in question the file remains alive (atleast 1 seeder is there) .

Some terms so tht it's easier to follow things forward.

Seeder :- One who has complete copy of the file & is sharing/uploading the file to others .

Leecher/peer :- The terms are almost synonomous with each other. It's somebody who doesn't have the complete file. The only difference is tht the leecher would not keep the file open for seeding

Ratio :- It's the ratio between downloading & uploading. In public trackers this isn't as important as in private trackers where one can experience severe downloading issues if one doesn't have good ratios maintained.

Trackers :- Trackers are nothing but sites which only have the .torrent file. Some popular public ones are mininova.org, torrentspy (it's also serves as a torrent search engine) while private ones include demonoid.com, idesir.com to name a few.

.torrent file :- A .torrent is a small file which has metadata about the file. It's also an extension. For e.g. Elephants_Dreams_HD.avi,torrent can be divided in 2 parts , the first part gives tht the torrent is a movie (avi), the name of the movie & tht it's in .torrent format. A .torrent file can only be read by a torrent client. The .torrent file has things like :-
1. Name of the tracker/s from where the file can be downloaded
2. The no. of pieces the file is broken into as in blocks
3. The hash for the file . Hash is a security mechanism. It something like a checksum (md5sum), simply put a kind of fingerprinting which is not easy to replicate.
4.size of the torrent :- How big the file is For e.g. the file mentioned above is 812 MB when downloaded fully.
5.Creation date :- When was the torrent created & any comments by the person who submitted.
6. Swarm :- Swarm is comprised of peers & seeds, one can have atleast 2 people in a swarm & have 13-14 people at the most.

Torrent client :- This are softwares which are needed to use the .torrent file. Some of the more popular torrent clients are utorrent, Azureus, bitlord, bitcomet etc. The star or upcoming one of these is utorrent which for the size of it (170k) does quite well. The other one which figures prominently is azureus, which has all kind of customizations. The advantage or disadvantage is it uses Java or JRE which needs much more memory rather than utorrent.

The torrent client has much more functionality which would be talked about in the next few pages