Eventually every bittorrent user (especially when dealing with older files) encounters the problem of incomplete downloads (stuck at 98%) or the problem of there just not being any or enough seeds to support their download. Understanding the problem is the first step to fixing it.

Being Stuck, Download Stops and Hangs at x%

Let’s assume you’re stuck at 98%…

The main reason for the download to stop at a certain percentage is because all the Seeders with complete copies of the file you are downloading have stopped sharing it or for some reason are unavailable. Your client still downloads all it can from the other peers in the swarm, but… that still only adds up to our hypothetical 98%!

Other reasons could include the primary tracker being down, or is overloaded and refusing connections. If this the case however, the file could reach completion once the tracker comes back online and reunites you with the seeders.

Lets assume that the tracker isn’t down or overloaded… now what?

You can try the following methods:

• Find More Seeders by ReAnnouncing the Torrent using btReannounceR
• Find More Seeders by Adding Trackers to your Torrents to

Using btReAnnounceR

btReannounceR is a online tool which can help you quickly find trackers that your torrent is currently tracked by. You can upload your torrent to their service here and view the results.

By clicking the reAnnounce button, this will reAnnounce your torrent to these trackers, and allow you to download a new torrent with new trackers inserted into it. Download that and retry your download now.

This is a much cleaner, easier method than the next,

However, if it fails you should at least take one last try…

Finding more Seeders by Adding More Trackers

This is actually an article on its own, but here’s the rundown:

• Grab a list of trackers from our tracker list.
• Add these trackers to your torrent by following the instructions in this article: Adding Additional Trackers to Your Torrents.
• Watch and wait, if anyone on any of these trackers has your file, they will be listed, so keep a close eye on the Seed and Peer columns
• Continue downloading and SEED!

And that’s basically it for now. If anyone knows other ways to revive dead torrents or find additional seeders please feel free to share!

Happy St. Patricks Day!

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Free Security Software

The need for security software is essential when downloading files from random users via bittorrent. Regardless of how many good users and quality uploaders there are in the scene, there are still malicious users who try to spread viruses, and adware via bittorrent and you should do what you can to prevent yourself from being infected!

P2P Protection

Firewall Software

Anti-Spyware Applications

Add More?

Know of some free security software that isn’t on this list? Leave a comment or post in our forum. Remember, prevention is always the best solution.

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No Seeders? Not Always the Case! How to Revive a “Dead” Torrent

Just because that hard to find torrent can’t seem to find any seeds to download from, does not necessarily mean that there are 0 seeders available in the entire world!

Seeders are very important users to you, as they are the users with a complete version of the file you are seeking. So it makes sense in desperate times to search additional trackers when you are having a hard time tracking down some seeders!

Here’s where adding trackers from our Tracker List come in handy. What this allows you to do is check other trackers (that were not included in your .torrent file) to see if anyone else has the same file to download.

This is a huge benefit as it can help you:

• Track down and increase seeder counts for a file that had none, so that you can begin downloading it
• Add to your current amount of seeders to increase overall download speeds

You must keep in mind, that this situation will arise pretty rarely and may not always work, but if you do find yourself having a tough time finding seeders it’s definitely worth a shot.

Here’s How!

Bittorrent / uTorrent

For Bittorrent 6.4 and uTorrent 2.0 alike you can click on the torrent you are downloading and then select the Trackers tab at the bottom, right-click and select Add Tracker.

As you can see by the image above, we are having a bit of a hard time finding seeds for our torrent…
In the next window, just add the trackers you want to add into the the trackers box and be sure to keep them separated by a line.

Hit OK, and you should see them added into your Trackers tab now, and your client should begin searching them.

And would you look at that! We’ve found some Seeders!

Deluge

In Delgue, once the torrent is loaded right-click on it and goto Edit Trackers. Once inside you are given the option to Add trackers. After you have added all the trackers you desire, right-click again on the torrent and select Update Tracker.

You can find a long list of trackers on our Tracker List page.
Happy Hunting! ?

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Back in 2007 we published a series of articles on various dodgy practices targeted at BitTorrent users. Many people were downloading torrents only to be told that they needed to install software like DomPlayer and 3WPlayer to get them to work. Of course, the torrents were fake.

We also reported on BitTorrent clients such as Torrent101, BitRoll and GetTorrent, which also caused caused a whole load of trouble for those who installed them – even uTorrent and WinZip users were in the sights of malware offloaders.

In an email yesterday to TorrentFreak, a reader pointed us to a problem torrent located here (removed). The file is clearly labeled as ‘The Wolfman DVDrip 2010 aXXo’ but it is a fake, a fact which can be quickly learned by reading the comments underneath the torrent. Nevertheless, we thought it might be interesting to demonstrate how it’s possible to look a little deeper.

The file is tracked by a whole range of trackers but one sticks out immediately.

http://tracker.torrentq.com/announce.php currently lists 48,416 seeds and 37,496 seeders for the supposed ‘The Wolfman’ movie, a highly attractive proposition for those inexperienced in dealing with fake torrents.

Of course the stats are faked, and are run from a tracker set up especially to deliver fake torrents. Indeed, it’s run on a subdomain of TorrentQ, a bad client we featured in an earlier article. Here’s a quick step-by-step of the method we used to investigate the tracker. There are other ways, but this is pretty simple so anyone can try this out.

It’s possible to find information about the files indexed on many trackers by using ’scrape’. In the case of the TorrentQ tracker, the scrape URL is located at http://tracker.torrentq.com/scrape.php. So first off, go to this URL and you’ll get the option to download a file, in this case ’scrape.php’ – download it.

In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.

Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ’scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;

Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.

http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06

The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.

Every single one is flagged as a fake by commenters on Torrentz.com.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

ShowRSS is a great resource which provides bittorrent RSS feeds for popular TV shows. The site is free to use and lets to subscribe to as many show as you like. There is a big collection latest shows to choose from. You can search for shows and check out popular or recent additions.

Here’s how it works.

1. Sign up with an username and password. As you can see, it doesn’t require your email address.

2. Choose from a list of TV shows and add them to your list.

3. Grab the feed address and subscribe to it from your torrent client or feed reader. (If you subscribe with your torrent client, the new episodes will download automatically. See other RSS articles on tipst3r.com)

The application is similar to ezRSS, and has one additional feature. It allows you to customize BitTorrent RSS feeds based on torrent quality and inclusion of repacks.

Features:

• Get torrent links RSS feeds for TV shows.
• Easy sign up. No email required.
• Customize  feeds in terms of torrent quality and propers/repacks.
• Most of popular TV shows are available.
• Search for shows and check “top” or “recent” additions.
• Subscribe to the feed from a torrent client, browser or a feed reader.

Check out ShowRSS @ http://www.showrss.karmorra.info

Article Sources:

MakeUseOf (Original Source)

ShowRSS

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How to Optimize / Increase Speeds in uTorrent

There are several options to configure in uTorrent that allow you to optimize its performance.  We’ll do our best to explain why each option should be used in order to help you get the most out of uTorrent.  What you should end up with in the end is being able to download using uTorrent to pretty much its full capability while still being able to surf the internet at a decent speed!

This is broken down into 3 sub-menus within uTorrent:

Options > Preferences > Connections

Options > Preferences > BitTorrent

Options > Preferences > Bandwith

Options > Preferences > Connections

Port used for incoming connections: you can enter any port number, however is usually best to use a number above 10000 (to avoid any conflict with other programs), we are using 63851 in our example.

Randomize port each time uTorrent starts: We recommend leaving this option unchecked if you are behind a router because if uTorrent uses a new port every time it starts you will have to forward a new port on your router every single time for uTorrent to function correctly.  ** However, if you are not using a router you should use this option for a bit of added security.

Enable UPnP port mapping: I typically leave this checked, it is not needed if you manually forward your ports through a router.

Add uTorrent to Windows Firewall exceptions: I usually leave this checked, just to be sure that there are no issues with Windows Firewall.

Options > Preferences > BitTorrent

Enable DHT Network: Definitely have this option checked, it adds you to the DHT network and allows you to access a larger network of peers to download from.

Enable DHT for new torrents: Definitely have checked, for the same reason above.

Enable local peer discovery: Definitely have checked.

Ask tracker for scrape information: This basically “scrapes” the information about the peers on a particular torrent from one or more trackers, this is handy for analysis when you’re wondering why a torrent might be performing poorly (or exceptionally well!)

Enable peer exchange: Similar to enabling DHT, definitely have checked.

Limit local peer bandwidth: Typically I leave this unchecked as I don’t see a reason to limit local peers as they would be getting/giving the speeds.

Protocol Encryption: This is a bit of a tricky area, we currently leave this option enabled which does slightly slow down your speeds, but it also helps with ISP’s that attempt to throttle your Bittorrent downloads.  We recommend leaving it on for security, but if you want to try and see if you can get better speeds without it, you should try playing with this option to see what works best with your specific ISP.

Allow incoming legacy connections: We typically have this option checked.

Options > Preferences > Bandwith

This can vary from ISP to ISP, so you need to really find out the maximum upload and download speeds for your ISP before you can really tweak this section.

We are going to use the following examples for our demonstration.

Max Upload Speed: 100 kB/s

Max Download Speed: 700 kB/s

Typically you never want to use the Maximum upload speed as there will not be enough space left for the files you are downloading.   If you don’t cap your download speed, you will have a very difficult time using the internet for any other purpose other than downloading.  You should cap your upload and download speeds, we recommend using the following formulas:

Maximum Upload Rate = 80% of your Max Upload Speed

Maximum Download Rate = 90% of your Max Download Speed

Which works out to

Upload Rate: 100 * 0.8 = 80

Download Rate: 700 * 0.9 = 630

Now that we have all of our calculations for our example we can enter them in:

Maximum upload rate: 80kB/s, leave the automatic box unchecked if you are entering a number manually.

Maximum download rate: 630kB/s

Maximum number of connections: We recommend you use usually use around 100-200 maximum connections, for this example we are using 120.

Max connected peers per torrent: we left this at the default values, 50.

Number of upload slots per torrent: we left this at the default value, 4. This is the number of peers you are simultaneously uploading to.

This is just basic optimization for uTorrent, but it should definitely get you pointed in the right direction!

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Magnet links are the direction Bittorrent seems to be heading.  Using Magnet links and utilizing DHT is definitely the way of the future.  But what are Magnet Links? And how do they work?  To understand this, we must first understand what DHT and PEX are, and how they work.

What is DHT / PEX?

DHT is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that most clients (uTorrent, Vuze, etc.) will join by default, even if they are currently not downloading any torrents.  Being on the DHT network will help you find peers and metadata when you are ready to begin downloading a torrent.

Seeing as this is a default network and it is mainly decentralized the need for trackers drastically decreases as they are vulnerable to being shut down for a number of reasons, or could suffer from denial of service.  As you can see from the image above:

[DHT], [Local Peer Discovery], and [Peer Exchange] all are able to track down Seeds / Peers on their own.

PEX (Peer Exchange) is another method of finding IP addresses.  It utilizes the knowledge of peers you are connected to, but obtaining a list of peers they are connected to.

Whereas the trackers below are able to do so as well, sometimes trackers go offline, so this method isn’t always reliable and we predict will become  less reliable in the future.  We predict more and more trackers are switching to this method of distribution, instead of hosting actual .torrent files, however this isn’t going to happen overnight.

Normally Torrent files are downloaded from downloaded from torrent sites, then a client like uTorrent or Vuze then calculates a hashurl (a kind of unique identifier) based on the files it is seeking to download.  It then retrieves the IP addresses of peers from a tracker (can be more than one) or uses DHT/PEX that have the same hashes and connects to those specific peers to download the desired content.

Sites such as The Pirate Bay can save on bandwith by calculating the hashes themselves allowing these Magnet Links to be downloaded instead of the actual .torrent files.  Using the torrent hash (included in the Magnet Link URL) clients immediately seek the addresses of peers on the DHT/PEX network and connect to them to download the .torrent file from them and then the desired content

Since the second method allows the .torrent file to be hosted by anyone, anywhere and can be accessed simply by feeding a link into a client, it is much more reliable.

Since the encrypted information in the .torrent file are still needed to initiate the downloading process, these files cannot be eliminated all-together, and must still be available by someone in the swarm.

Known Compatible Clients

uTorrent 1.8.5 (and higher)

Vuze 4.3.0.2 (and higher)

BitTorrent 6.3 (and higher)

BitComet 1.16 (and higher) [no magnet link support yet, only DHT/PEX]

Transmission 1.76 (and higher) [no magnet link support yet, only DHT/PEX]

Article Sources

thepiratebay.org (blog)

lifehacker.com

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With the release of µTorrent 2.0 Beta, there has been a lot of great coverage and discussion of µTP and what it means to be “network friendly”.  This is an important change to the BitTorrent landscape and will surely be the subject of more discussion and debate, but there are some other features in 2.0 that are worth highlighting.  One of these is the improvements to the setup guide and our first collaboration with Measurement Lab.

While BitTorrent is a relatively mature technology with a sizable global user-base, we have to admit, the learning curve can be steep for some users.  One of the reasons for this is the fact that µTorrent is one of the most powerful network applications a user is ever likely to install, and even the simplest home network is often difficult to set-up and manage.  Configuring your µTorrent client to match your network is an important step that will make for a better user experience.

In µTorrent 2.0 Beta we have sought to streamline this operation by automating the configuration process in the setup guide.  With just a click or two, users can now test their internet connection speed, see how their router handles connections, and then optimize their client to their own network.  We think these features will simplify the experience for new users and make it easier for everyone to get the best results from µTorrent.

To accurately configure µTorrent for optimal performance, it’s helpful to know the bandwidth available to the client.  Traditionally, we have expected users to go to another site to perform a test, understand the results and translate them to the client’s configuration settings.  With µTorrent 2.0 we have integrated the speed testing into the setup guide.  To do this we have partnered with Measurement Lab, which provides the testing tools and infrastructure.

Measurement Lab Collaboration

Founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google, Inc. and academic network researchers, Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy active network measurement tools to measure real-world broadband connectivity.  M-Lab’s goal to “advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections,” is one we at BitTorrent would like to support.

Our speed test relies on the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) servers hosted at M-Lab sites around the world.  The non-personally identifiable data generated by these tests (data collection info here) will be made available to researchers through M-Lab under a Creative Commons Zero license.  Given µTorrent’s substantial user-base, we are hopeful that this data will stimulate new research into the state of the Internet and support the public debate with unbiased measurement data.

M-Lab is supporting important research into how our Internet is actually performing and informing the debate on how this shared resource should be managed.  We plan introduce more M-Labs tools to users in the near future with the hope that empowering users with data about their broadband services will lead to more informed policy debate and better consumer experiences.  In the meantime, we invite you to learn a little more about your broadband connection by exploring some of the other tools at www.measurementlab.net.

The work we are currently doing to bring streaming to our popular µTorrent freeware has the potential to bring transformational improvements to the user experience for BitTorrent users. But its not without at least a little controversy, which I’d like to discuss in this post.

Roughly speaking, the controversy falls into two different areas:

(1)    “Streaming is easy”

From our point of view, streaming is not the most ambitious initiative we’ve been involved with (both µTP and Bram’s Live Streaming project are far bigger challenges).

But it is not trivial either, which is the main reason it has not happened sooner.

Our objective is to enable streaming of files distributed using popular file formats on regular BitTorrent swarms without relying on any server infrastructure and without violating any of the core rules that make the BitTorrent protocol so effective. The file will still be downloaded to your hard drive, but you will be able to play the file while it is downloading rather than waiting for the download to complete. What we’d love to eventually achieve is an experience that might be integrated seamlessly with the webtop, so that the µTorrent client can simply provide background support to a web experience which is ultimately very similar that of YouTube or Hulu, but with radically different economics.  We might call it the “µTube” vision…

What’s exciting about this is not just the fact that we have technology to achieve this, but we also have a critical mass of users who will be able to accelerate this towards broad adoption.

In short – it ain’t rocket science, but its not trivial; and its novelty is mostly in its breadth of scope rather than the fact that you will be “able to stream with BitTorrent”.

(2)    “Streaming will kill BitTorrent”

We play an important role trying to safeguard the development of standards around the BitTorrent protocol – a responsibility we take very seriously. There seem to be a surprisingly large number of pundits out there who seem “sure” that streaming will mess up BitTorrent. We’re actually quite certain that this is not the case. I might go on about the technical credentials of a team including the person who invented BitTorrent, or the fact that we have more to lose than anyone if we’re wrong – but that may overdo things. We deeply respect people’s right to be concerned, and interpret the main motivator of these concerns as fundamentally the popular enthusiasm for an incredible piece of technology.

Our streaming prototype is a careful balance of using BitTorrent fundamentals (like rarest-first piece selection and tit-for-tat reciprocity) but introducing a concept of priority windows (which correspond to the portion of media actually being viewed or listened to.) We restrict any download of consecutive pieces (i.e. non-BitTorrent behavior) to a tiny (about 15 second) portion of playback.

Added to the fact that everyone hits the “start” button at a different time, many files are an hour or longer in playback duration, so we’re not surprised that so far we’ve encountered no perceptible impact of streaming on swarm health.

The most important decision that we need to bake into the user experience is deciding the point at which a file is “streamable” – not all files will have enough seeding bandwidth to allow streaming, and some may be marginal. Before any broad deployment, we expect to be quite conservative in determining if and when the “play” button shows up in order to avoid any theoretical impact on less well-developed swarms. Furthermore, we expect people’s behavior will be self-selecting in most cases – if someone tries to stream from an under-developed swarm, it simply won’t work – so they’ll probably give up.

But the important message is that we are confident that it is completely viable to enable streaming in well-seeded swarms without having any adverse effect on those swarms.

What’s more, the basics of the client will change little – streaming will be an option to be used only in cases where it makes sense to the user, and µTorrent will remain “a (very) tiny BitTorrent client”.

–Simon–

Recent coverage of uTP on the popular Torrentfreak blog yielded some interesting feedback in the comments section.

There are a couple of misconceptions that I’d like to address here:

First is the idea that we designed uTP *for* the ISPs. It was not.

While we think there are substantial advantages for ISPs in the broad adoption of uTP, the protocol was actually built from the start as a way to help consumers themselves. The fact remains that when using TCP, a poorly tuned BitTorrent client may well result in an internet connection that habitually gets congested and then drops packets, then recovers and repeats the process. This is not good for anyone.

The second misconception is that uTP will somehow slow uTorrent down. This is also not true. It will certainly result in less headaches for everyone and it may even speed things up.

Our design objectives were always to leave transfer rates unchanged, and we’re still confident this is achieveable. The fact that you don’t have to manually “manage” your client or limit it to some arbitrary % of your connection should mean that in practice it will be reliably faster. What’s more, we may actually be able to make it go faster than an unlimited TCP BitTorrent client. The way to picture this is to consider cars on a highway: you can only drive at 90 mph if there’s not much other traffic. But if there’s a lot of traffic then quickly the whole system will snarl up. uTP is designed to make clients transfer at an optimal speed *without* causing a snarl up. The thrill of speeding along at 90 mph is rather lost if you keep having to slow to a crawl until things recover. By avoiding this “stop/start” we felt that uTP *should* make things go faster overall.

Early evidence is starting to come out now from researchers at the University of Washington who are performing some independent tests on uTP performance. (These results are NOT conclusive at this point, but the early indications are quite good…)

From the first graph below you can see the interaction of uTP traffic (green) with some other application competing to use the connection (red). As expected, the uTP traffic backs off immediately and is replaced by traffic from the competing application – upon completion of the competing transfer, the uTP BitTorrent traffic quickly resumes. The blue data points represent the uTP traffic holding steady against the (right vertical axis) target delay of 100ms (I’d note this is vastly lower than anything achievable with TCP BitTorrent transfers).

The uTP controller is clearly doing its job, spotting a different application trying to use bandwidth and getting out of the way, only to recover just a fast.

But in many ways the more important graphs are the following…. These show you that uTP BitTorrent is just as fast as best-case TCP BitTorrent, and may even be faster…

Now one likely explanation for this is that the uTP overhead (a few % of the traffic which is not actual content) is included, but the TCP measurement excludes it. If this were true then probably uTP and TCP are almost identical.

But if we find that uTP traffic is indeed faster than TCP BitTorrent traffic, there are a couple of reasons why this slightly surprising conclusion might indeed be true –

Either the stop-start nature of TCP-based BitTorrent creates inefficiencies that are being optimized away using uTP.

Or else there were ISP network management measures in place which were discriminating against TCP-based BitTorrent.

Or possibly the UDP NAT-traversal techniques introduced along with uTP were resulting in far more good peers with uTP.

Or possibly something else?

Whatever the reason, this is early evidence that uTP is an even bigger win for consumers than anticipated, as well as being a positive contribution to ISPs.

Much more work remains to be done, but this is exactly the type of result we’re hoping to see more of.

–Simon–