‘ BitTorrent Tips & Tricks ’

How To Switch What.CD Theme To Look Like OiNK.CD

January 05, 09 by sharky   1,548  views  

Ever wanted to take a stroll down memory lane and revisit the beloved music tracker OiNK.cd? We can’t exactly do that, but if you have an account at What.cd you can do the second-best thing — and that’s customize What.cd with a few tweaks to get it (mostly) displaying torrents just like how the old OiNK did. Just follow these three easy steps, and you’ll be OiNKing in no time!

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Fight Throttling: Auto-Restart uTorrent With Random Ports

December 13, 08 by sharky   1,773  views  

A few readers have contacted us in regards to being throttled (or more specifically; sandvined) by their ISPs. As described in these instances, seeding is fine initially but then trickles down to under 10 KB/s. One solution that works well is a simple restart of µTorrent (with a random port number), which seems to temporarily unblock the connections. That is, until the sandvine hardware figures out the established new port number, and seeding winds down to a crawl once again. However, we can’t always be sitting in front of the computer, constantly monitoring the status of µTorrent’s upload speeds - this just isn’t practical. A better solution involves automated stopping & restarting of uTorrent.exe on a pre-determined schedule, each time with a randomized port.

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Firefox Scripts That Integrate Torrent Searching on IMDb

December 11, 08 by sharky   3,373  views  

There are two tools that the average movie pirate regularly uses in his/her arsenal - IMDb.com, and torrent sites. You know what we’re talking about: cross-referencing actors, directors and films with ease at the user-friendly Internet Movie Database, and then head on over to Mininova, IsoHunt or ThePirateBay to seek out the flicks. Well, here are a few Greasemonkey userscripts for Firefox that facilitate the process so much easier, by integrating torrent searching onto a displayed movie title page on IMDb. No longer do users need to switch between tabs, type in or copy/paste titles into the search bar at various public torrent indexers - simply click and go!

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6 Things You Can Do To Test Your ISP for BitTorrent Throttling

December 04, 08 by sharky   3,371  views  

The cat-and-mouse game between ISPs and bandwidth-hogging P2P applications is almost as age-old at the Internet itself. If you’ve noticed deathly-slow torrent downloads as of late, it’s probable that your ISP is manipulating (throttling, rate limiting, blocking or sandvining) your P2P / BitTorrent traffic. ISPs from all corners of the globe are desperately trying to decongest their networks, cut costs & maximize profits — all at the expense of torrenters. Here’s 6 things you can do to verify that your Internet provider is a Bad ISP.

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Is Your BitTorrent Throttled? Try uTorrent 1.9

December 02, 08 by sharky   4,596  views  

As first reported by DSLReports, subscribers of Comcast, Cox, Bell Sympatico or other unpopular BitTorrent throttlers & sandviners may now have an alternative solution with µTorrent’s new alpha version 1.9. Peer-to-peer communications have traditionally used TCP, including BitTorrent trackers, whereby ISPs can quite easily "see" what type of traffic is being forwarded. While still in its infancy stages of development, µTorrent v1.9 (current build 13582) includes uTP, which is a variant of UDP (billed as UDP torrenting or micro transport protocol). uTP is an entirely different protocol (transport layer) than TCP that doesn’t require handshaking, and is thus much harder - if not impossible - to throttle.

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uTorrent: Move All Your Downloaded Files & Keep Seeding

November 02, 08 by sharky   3,066  views  

The Scenario: You finally picked up that dreamy 1 TB hard drive, and the plan is to move all of your seeding µTorrent folders (and torrents) over to their new home. If you want to continue seeding, then technically you don’t need a tutorial such as this; simply stop each of your torrents, right-click, select ‘Advanced’ and choose ‘Set Download Location…’ and then browse to the new location of the directory. This option will work just fine, but if you’re a heavy µTorrent user with a lot of active (seeding) torrents, then this can be excruciatingly tedious. A more practical solution would be to edit just one file to instantly change all of the paths.

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Seed The Same Files To Multiple Trackers in uTorrent

October 24, 08 by sharky   2,247  views  

We’ve already covered a similar topic on ‘Preseeding‘, whereby you can seed previously downloaded files to another tracker, without taking a hit on your download ratio. But if you want to seed the exact same files to multiple trackers simultaneously in µTorrent, it gets a little more tricky. No, you can’t just add multiple private trackers (URLs) to the announce list of a torrent - this would surely qualify you for a big fat ban on most trackers. Nor do you need to copy the seeded folder and/or files to another location, and then seed it to a different tracker from a secondary location - it can all be done from one folder.

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uTorrent Users: Update to Latest Stable v1.8.1 - For Now

October 15, 08 by sharky   2,490  views  

One good thing about µTorrent is its upgradability to a newer (hopefully improved) version, and that this is set to "ON" by default (with user confirmation) in the client. The bad thing about uTorrent …well, ironically it’s the same thing. After a much-anticipated release of version 1.8.0 stable, everything started to go wrong: from ongoing ZoneAlarm firewall and NOD32 antivirus conflicts, Vista problems, connectability issues and a bounty of other mishaps in the last month or so. µTorrent developers have repeatedly scrambled to put out quick betas/builds until finally settling on the latest stable v1.8.1 - a version even the dev team couldn’t have contemplated having to come up with in such short notice. All this for a tiny 263 KB application.

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uTorrent Freeleech Tips Using ‘Labels’ and ‘Scheduler’

October 11, 08 by sharky   2,145  views  

You’ve probably seen this before - your private tracker has announced a "freeleech" coming up in the near future, giving you a great head’s up notice of when it’s going down. If you want to use the opportunity to buffer the account ratio or finally be able to download what you’ve always wanted, µTorrent comes loaded with a couple of handy features that are tailor-made for home seeding. With ‘Labels’ you’ll be able to categorize a select group of torrents, download them beforehand, and start them all at once - at the click of a button. In the event that you’re not at your home PC when the freeleech begins, or have no access to a computer (no WebUI), the ’scheduler’ feature will launch the torrents at a predetermined time.

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Share Private Torrents With uTorrent’s Embedded Tracker

October 08, 08 by sharky   3,559  views  

Making your own torrents from files and folders in µTorrent is easy - use the ‘Create New Torrent’ feature, browse to a folder or file, throw in a public tracker URL in the Tracker list and upload it to your favourite public torrent site for all to use. But what if you only want to share your torrents with a friend or small group of users, and not the rest of the world? µTorrent incorporates a cool feature called Embedded Tracker that allows you to create and seed your torrents privately.

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