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Wednesday, November 10th "BitTorrent: a Saviour for U.S. television addicts" While I will have to wait for college basketball season to truly sing the praises of this great method of file sharing, discovering bitTorrents, or torrents, has been a godsend for following some of my favorite shows such as the Simpsons and the Amazing Race. Download a small application and then head out to look for files on a lot of pages and directories. Simply type in “bittorrents” in Google and you will find plenty of pages. Some of the good ones have them classified as movies, series (i.e. TV Series), music, and games. You are a at the mercy of what people want to offer up, but most of the popular series and shows are listed. The great thing about bittorrents are the way it works – it takes advantage of the unused upload bandwidth of each individual user so that other users can download the file. That is, at the same time that I am downloading the file or show I want to watch I am also uploading the same file to users. In general, when more people are downloading a file my download speed actually increases rather than decreases. I won’t get into all the specifics because other, more technical folks can explain it much better. But don’t be afraid to try if you have little experience. Simply download a program – there are several to choose from. Then find some listings on a page and click on the link. Most downloads come in a format like MPEG or AVI which you can watch with windows media player. I warn you that it may take several hours or even a day to download some large files, but you can start downloading before you go to bed and then wake up the next morning to an episode of your favorite show. Below are some helpful links to get you started – there are plenty of programs and sites about this, and I am surely a late entry into all of this. As with a lot of file sharing of this nature be prepared for a few banners on the sites (with links to files you want) advertising some adult content. It’s just the way it goes. Some helpful links: Download one of the popular client (program): A good FAQ so you can understand more about BitTorrents: Some sites with some good files: |