[dzp111]

I'm a little confused about bit torrent. Could someone explain it to me (like I was a 10 year old?). I tried downloading bit torrent files but I'm getting nothing.

Do I need an app for this? Which is best on Mac?

Thanks.

[mduell]

BitTorrent is a protocol that improves download speeds by sharing the parts of the file you already have with other people downloading the same file instead of having everyone pull it from one web server.
None of the popular web browsers support it natively, so you'll need a seperate client.
You're "getting nothing" from the .torrent files you've downloaded because they're just pointers to where a bit torrent client can download the actual file from.

Azureus and Transmission are both popular clients for OS X.

[hldan]

Originally Posted by mduell 

BitTorrent is a protocol that improves download speeds by sharing the parts of the file you already have with other people downloading the same file instead of having everyone pull it from one web server.
None of the popular web browsers support it natively, so you'll need a seperate client.
You're "getting nothing" from the .torrent files you've downloaded because they're just pointers to where a bit torrent client can download the actual file from.

Azureus and Transmission are both popular clients for OS X.

Actually the Opera browser supports bit torrent. http://www.opera.com/. He can also try Xtorrent which does it all in terms of searching and retrieving the torrent and downloading but for a price of $20.00 U.S. :-( http://www.xtorrentp2p.com/

[dzp111]

Originally Posted by mduell 

BitTorrent is a protocol that improves download speeds by sharing the parts of the file you already have with other people downloading the same file instead of having everyone pull it from one web server.

See now that's what I don't get. Say I want to download a video clip, what's the difference between my downloading it from utube and doing it from torrent? Well, maybe utube's not p2p (or is it? -technically?)

Btw, thanks mduell, Transmission's doing the trick.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by dzp111 

See now that's what I don't get. Say I want to download a video clip, what's the difference between my downloading it from utube and doing it from torrent? Well, maybe utube's not p2p (or is it? -technically?)

When you download it from youtube, you're downloading every byte of the file from a server paid for by youtube. When you download a torrent of, say, a Linux distribution, only a small portion of the file will come from the server; the remainder comes from other users who are downloading the same file (and already have different parts of it). Torrents work well for organizations who can't host files themselves (usually for the purpose of copyright infringement) or can't afford the bandwidth to provide decent speed to their users (Linux and other free software distributions). Some commercial operators (like Blizzard with WoW) are also using it to reduce their bandwidth costs and distribute updates more quickly to their millions of clients.

[Gee4orce]

I highly recommend you check out XTorrent - it's a Mac only bittorrent shareware app that really makes downloading torrents as easy as typing in what you want to search for, and clicking download on the one you want.

You really don't need to know anything more than that !

The technical details though, are something like this: The .torrent file is actually just a description that tells your bittorrent application how to find and download the actual torrent contents. The torrent itself is split into hundreds of small chunks, and your torrent application will download random chunks from whatever hosts it can find on the internet, until it has compiled the entire file. The upside of this is that you get the maximum possible download speeds because there is no one single point of failure - this means you can pretty easily max out your broadband connection. For this reason, most torrent apps have a way of limiting your download speed, so that you're still able to do other things online at the same time.

Also, as the same time as downloading you're actually uploading any chunks you've got, to whoever wants them. This is known as 'seeding'. For this reason, you should really try to keep your torrent open for a while, even after you've completed it, just to seed back to the other people who want it.