How Do I Download?
This question is very common. People often do not realise that BitComet is not where you get your torrents from, well not your primary source. BitComet can be thought of as a torrent download manager. Following is a step by step explanation of the whole download process, from begining to end.
First of all, someone needs to make a file available to the world to download. They do this by creating a special file which has the .torrent extension. Below is information about the .torrent file's contents.
File extension TORRENT description:.torrent files are basically
BitTorrent's equivalent to ed2k links used in eDonkey network. In
essence, .torrent files include instructions for BitTorrent -compatible
P2P clients where to find the "tracker" for the downloaded file, hashed
checksum that verifies for the client that it is actually downloading
the correct file, the full size of the file and the filename of the
file.
So, essentially .torrent files are very, very small
files that simply contain some textual data about the file itself.
Thus, downloading the torrent file itself takes only matter of seconds,
if not milliseconds, but it is not the file that is downloaded from the
P2P network. Instead, .torrent files are typically hosted on just
standard web servers and can be even passed via email. But in a
computer with a BitTorrent -compatible client installed in it,
launching a .torrent file typically starts a process where the
BitTorrent -compatible client first contacts the tracker described in
the .torrent file and if the tracker server is found and "seeds"
(people sharing the file in question) are available, launches a
download process of the file described in the .torrent file.
Mime-type: application/x-bittorrent
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This was gathered from: File Extension Org.
As you can see there is not much to a .torrent file. But without this you will be able to download nothing at all using a BitTorrent client such as BitComet.
Ok, so you now know that if you want to download a film using BitComet you need to find the associated .torrent file, for this is the file you need to download and have BitComet read and process. So where do you get the .torrent file? Well there are lots of places. In the description of the .torrent file above you may have noticed the mention of trackers. Well in general each tracker is a website which you can go to and search for the .torrents that they have available to you. Like all things on the web, there are meta-search engines which allow you to search multiple trackers at once. I personally use Torrents.To.
All you need to do on this site is enter what you are searching for and press enter. A new page appears which takes you to one of a number of .torrent trackers, with the results of your search on that tracker.
Do not just download the first .torrent that seems to suit your needs. There is a skill behind selecting your torrent which can make the difference of you downloading your film in an hour or so, or waiting weeks for it to download.
But before we go into that, If you notice in the next picture there is a small black bar at the top of MiniNova's web page. This is not there normally, and h
as been added by using Torrents.To metasearch engine. If Mini' doesn't have what you want then simply click on one of the other tracker names and have a look there; it is a very slick feature indeed.
As you can see in the above picture I have done a search for the 2008 Olympics. MiniNova returned a number of results. The first few showed 
the following information. It shows you size of the file, the number of seeds and the number of leechers.There is also the little blue speech balloon. This shows you that there are comments related to this download. Not all trackers have this feature on the front page. But I believe that all trackers now carry a comments section to assist you in deciding if this is the file for you.
Before I do anything, I re-arrange the list by clicking on the underlined word
Seeds, positioned on the second last column of the above table. This would then make the torrent file with the most seeds be displayed first.
Having done that I find that instead of having no seeds and leechers we have a file available which has 649 Seeds, and 1656 Leechers. That means each Seed has 2.55 leechers downloading from them at any one time. Nevertheless, each of the leechers will also be uploading so this should be an ok download. But what about those comments? Well I clicked on the torrent file name positioned to the left of the comments speech balloon and a new window opened with further options. Most trackers are like this, some however, allow you to get the torrent quicker. The problem is most people then miss stages out and end up with a very poor download. Or instead of Ice Age 2 appearing in front of the kids they see some porn film.
So the next page had the following details and options displayed.
What I noticed was there were a lot of thanks. It is uncommon for any file to be thanked quite so much as most people are greedy and lazy and do not think about the time and effort someone has gone to, to prepare and provide the files you download... so always say thanks! I read the comments and there were plenty of complaints, it was the NBC version not the Canadian version of the opening parade, it was slightly too large for a standard DVD, and very small for a Blu-Ray (HDDVD). Some were complaining about totally unrealted things - like the BBC version was commentated by a Welsh person and a Scots person... like that has anything to do with the torrent. Some people added their thanks in the comments section. After all the reading, and being sure I was not downloading a dead duck... I am as it happens, for I have no interest in this file, I am purely doing this for your benefit. I right clicked on the Download this torrent link and selected "open. The file was downloaded and opened. As soon as it was asked to be opened by Windows, BitComet sprang into action and opened the file. I click the start now button that I was presented with and the download started about 4 minutes later. BitComet has a number of things to do before it starts downloading the files.
The download was not the fastest I had ever seen, I would have got faster if I left it longer, but ten minutes was long enough for me to waste my bandwidth. Nevertheless, it was the fastest download I had for the day!
So to recap.
- Go to a torrent tracker and search for whatever it is you are wanting to download.
- Make sure you are downloading a torrent with the highest seed to peer ratio that you can find.
- Check the comments of the torrent, make sure it is not a fake. If it is report it!
- Right click on the download torrent link and choose "open"
- Wait until you are shown the task window by BitComet press "Ok" or "Start Now"
- Don't watch the client download - it does not like it!
- When the download is finished, Check it. If it is good thank the original poster.
- Do not stop sharing the torrent straight away. We hate leechers and we can ban your IP address to stop you getting your nice download speeds.
- That's it.
Oh, if you do have problems finding the file you are looking for. Try "Googling" for "<yourfilename> Torrent", Google will find sources you have never heard of. Happy BT'ing!
