Downloading torrents, please help

[crazyfrog86]

I have a question, I wanted to try downloading torrents so I searched on the internet for a little help on how to do it.

I downloaded Vuze to download the torrents, so I think I know how to do that now.

This might sound a stupid question but I was wondering how much do torrents cost to download or are they free?

Also, roughly how long do they take to download? (attempting to download a series of brittas empire) and if it's not done by the time I want to turn my computer off then what will happen, I mean can it still continue downloading? Or will it continue when I next turn it on again tomorrow? Or will it stop completely so I have to start from scratch again?

Because it's only 14% complete now and when I go to bed I turn my computer off, I don't even leave it on standby. It's also currently telling me theres over one day still left to go, a second ago it was 5 days.

Oh and also, can you select parts of a torrent to download and not download other parts, (like, for example only 1 or 2 episodes) and if so then how?

Has anyone done this before and can anyone help me? would be much appreciated. Cheers.

[gary66706]

I'm running a Mac, and I have a torrent program called Tomato Torrent. I was able to download the entire BE series (can't get it here in the USA, otherwise I would have bought it). Torrents are kinda tricky for someone who hasn't used them before. Th hardest part is setting them up, forwarding ports, etc. Once you get going though, it should take around a week to get what you're looking for. That's about how long it took for series 1-6 for me. 7 is still downloading.

Keep posting your progress and LMK if you need help.

[gary66706]

...also, to answer some of your other questions, you should leave your computer running for the entire duration of the download. Even though you may have 17% or so of the files, you probably won't be able to open anything until the download is 100% complete (the files do not download in order, a bit of one episode here and there until it's finished).

[casper]

Although this is an old thread, I have som recommendations:

Vuze is very bloated. For Windows, I would personally recommend µTorrent. For Linux, I would use Deluge or Transmission. I don't know about Mac.

About torrent downloading, there are two kinds of trackers: the private tracker and the public tracker.

Public trackers are trackers like The Pirate Bay where people can just download torrents without registration and so on. For popular torrents, you might get decent speeds, but for rarities and and more obscure things like The Brittas Empire, the situation is another. In that case, private trackers might be the solution. Private trackers require registration (which is sometimes limited to a specified amount of users - for instance 100.000, and when that limit is reached, registration is closed until perhaps the user count has dwindled to 90.000 when registration is opened again), and they are ratio managed which means that you have to give back as well as download. If you fail to do so, you will be banned. The advantages are endless as people feel more responsible for keeping a good site and therefore people will continue to seed long after they have finished downloading which results in good speeds. Another advantage could be that the tracker is specialising in certain torrents, for instance UK TV shows.

Take a look at filesharefreak.com/2008/04/11/specialized-private-bittorrent-websites-tv-trackers/