20 BitTorrent Tips and Tricks

Written by Ernesto on September 03, 2007 

Here’s a list of 20 BitTorrent resources, tips and tricks, useful for both newcomers and more advanced users.

Tip: Want to download Torrents anonymously? Try TorrentPrivacy, the only way to download torrents securely.

BitTorrent For Beginners

1. How and Why BitTorrent Works

BitTorrent is often referred to as the best filesharing protocol for sharing large files. But why? What makes BitTorrent so unique? Well, lets take a sneak peek under the hood of your BitTorrent client, and list a couple of features that make BitTorrent as fast, stable, and robust as it is.

2. How to Make a Torrent

Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. We show you how.

3. uTorrent Beginners Guide

The uTorrent website has a great beginners guide for BitTorrent newbies. Worth a visit if you just started using BitTorrent.

4. Where to find Torrents

By now you probably know how BitTorrent works, now you need a good place to find .torrent files. Here’s a list of 10 great BitTorrent sites. There’s also a list of 20 less known BitTorrent sites.

Fight Throttling ISPs and be Anonymous

5. ISPs Who throttle BitTorrent Traffic

Some Internet providers try to slow you down when you use torrents. The Azureus wiki has list of ISPs who throttle BitTorrent traffic. It also suggests what encryption levels you should use.

6. How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic

More and more ISP’s are limiting and throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decreases, and high speed downloads are out of the question. We show you some techniques that should help you evade some of these measures.

7. How To Tunnel BitTorrent over SSH

Sometimes it is impossible to use BitTorrent, if you’re at work, school, Comcast! or connected to a public hotspot for example. But there is an easy solution to overcome this problem. If you use a secure connection (SSH), you will be able to bypass almost every firewall.

8. How to make BitTorrent Transfers Anonymous

The Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous (VPN) service called Relakks. Relakks makes it possible to browse the web, and use p2p-applications (like BitTorrent) without being monitored by your ISP or anti-piracy gangs like the MPAA and RIAA.

Speed up your BitTorrent Downloads

9. How to Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed

BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current speeds? These suggestions might help you to optimize your download pleasures.

10. How to Speed Up Bitcomet and uTorrent

90% off all people use the default settings on their client, and that’s a problem. Azureus users might want to try this tutorial by Paul Stamatiou.

11. Calculate Your Optimal BitTorrent Settings

Configuring your BitTorrent client is extremely important if you want to get the best out of BitTorrent. However, the settings pane of the average BitTorrent client might be a bit overwhelming, and some people just don’t know where to start.

12. How to Protect Your Torrent From Failing Trackers

Nothing is more frustrating than your download getting stuck. The fact that a torrent has stopped downloading can have several reasons.

BitTorrent and RSS

13. How to Use RSS & BitTorrent to Download TV shows

Are you tired of scanning several BitTorrent sites for the latest episodes of your favorite TV show in HDTV? You should definitely try using RSS feeds then. RSS and BitTorrent are a perfect match.

14. How to Make a Custom TV Torrent Feed

How to create a personalized TV torrent feed, and have all your favorite TV torrents in one feed.

15. Subscribe to TV Shows Using BitTorrent and TVNanny

TVNanny is a BitTorrent site specializing in the indexing of TV show torrents. Using a subscription based interface, it’s possible to automatically download your favorite TV show episodes to your PC, utilizing the RSS feature in your chosen torrent client.

16. How to Use Gmail to Search Torrents

Gmail is more than a useful email service. In just a few steps you can turn it into your personal torrent search engine. And by using labels and filters you can keep your inbox clean.

uTorrent Tips and Tricks

17. How to Run uTorrent on a USB Stick

A portable version of uTorrent may come in handy when you’re with friends, at school, or at work. It will fit perfectly on every usb-stick, iPod, mobile phone, or any other device that is recognized a “removable disk”.

18. How to Run uTorrent in Mac OS X

uTorrent is currently only available for Windows. But that doesn’t going to stop us from running it in OS X.

19. How to Use Firefox to Remotely Control uTorrent

The uTorrent WebUI can be used to access uTorrent from an external computer. This Firefox extension will make it even easier.

20. Use uTorrent to Organize Your BitTorrent Downloads

BitTorrent is great, but all those downloaded torrents have the habit of making a mess of your harddrive. Do you still have all your downloaded stuff in a single folder? Take action, organize your torrents.

Feel free to drop a comment if you have anything to add to this list. Happy torrenting!

Previously: BitTorrent Brings Evil Villain Back from the Dead

Next: Opera 9.50 Kestrel Adds BitTorrent Peer Exchange

132 Responses

1 Sep 03, 2007 at 21:56 by Anonymous

Nicely compiled, just recently I had some trouble finding the article regarding the optimal settings for Bittorent programs. I’m sure this small index will be of use to any curious/troubled member.

2 Sep 03, 2007 at 22:14 by Ernesto

[quote comment="158066"]Nicely compiled, just recently I had some trouble finding the article regarding the optimal settings for Bittorent programs. I’m sure this small index will be of use to any curious/troubled member.[/quote]

Thanks, I’m glad you like it. We used to write more tutorials than we do now. It might be a good idea to make them a little more visible, perhaps in the sidebar or on a separate page.

I had to google most of the articles myself ;) The archives are a bit messy.

3 Sep 03, 2007 at 23:27 by Bolt_Gundam510

wow this is pretty good Ernesto i thought the archives would stright it self up but who am i to moan about it. i am going to post this on the pirate bay fourm for every one to read this. when ever i post your artical or any one elses i all ways bold yalls name to give the credit to when it’s due. but over all it’s a good artical to me. keep up the good work Ernesto!!!!

4 Sep 04, 2007 at 04:49 by Furik

check out http://www.bootstrike.com/Articles/BitTorrentGuide/ it helped me boost my speeds from 25 to 150!!

5 Sep 04, 2007 at 07:29 by Mary

Great post, thanks a lot!

I think having the how-to’s sectioned off in the sidebar or somehow otherwise grouped together is a great idea :)

6 Sep 04, 2007 at 09:13 by DK

Great summary of some of your excellent articles Ernesto.

A good place to show friends who are still BT virgins.

7 Sep 04, 2007 at 09:28 by Merav

Great post!

check out torrent-search-bar.com (edit: spyware) i use it every day… so cool!

8 Sep 04, 2007 at 09:37 by pJ

thank you :)
i’m newbie for bittorrent
this article help me a lot

9 Sep 04, 2007 at 09:46 by agmon

thank you

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if you have any ideas

10 Sep 04, 2007 at 10:15 by BvTaa

You are talking about fully encrypting the data stream but isn’t the encryption in µtorrent only protocol header encryption? That’s “hiding” the torrents but not encrypting any traffic itself.

11 Sep 04, 2007 at 12:17 by jamie

is there seriously no other way to make our BitTorrent annonymous unless we pay? 50 euros is qutie a sum in my country..

12 Sep 04, 2007 at 12:28 by Ernesto

[quote comment="158364"]You are talking about fully encrypting the data stream but isn’t the encryption in µtorrent only protocol header encryption?[/quote]
You’re right, the title is a bit misleading, it is more clear in the actual post.

13 Sep 04, 2007 at 19:07 by funchords

[quote comment="158364"]You are talking about fully encrypting the data stream but isn’t the encryption in µtorrent only protocol header encryption? [/quote]
µTorrent has encrypted the entire stream (headers AND data) since beta 1.4.1 build 407.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption#Development_of_MSE.2FPE

HTH,

Robb

14 Sep 04, 2007 at 19:28 by Ernesto

[quote comment="158364"]
µTorrent has encrypted the entire stream (headers AND data) since beta 1.4.1 build 407.
[/quote]

True, uTorrent supports message stream encryption, but it is still easy to see what you’re downloading, so it doesn’t make you anonymous. This might confuse some people.

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16 Sep 07, 2007 at 01:55 by Riskable

Regarding the comments about uTorrent encryption… It isn’t anonymous. It is quite easy to see what you’re downloading via a packet sniffer or similar. It also doesn’t hide your IP address which is what you really need if you want to stay anonymous.

The only way to truly use Bittorrent anonymously is over a VPN or SSH tunnel. More importantly, that tunnel’s endpoint should be shared by many people (otherwise it isn’t really anonymous now is it?).

There are many services that do this but only a few actually allow you to use Bittorrent and even fewer are optimized for it (i.e. they have to have UPnP setup–without it, torrents start up very slowly and may never really get to your top speed).

If you’re in Europe, Relakks is probably a good option (no idea if they’ve setup UPnP). If you’re in the USA (especially if you’re on Comcast or an AT&T connection), you can try https://vpnout.com (disclaimer: I’m the owner/admin).

I’ve gone through great pains to make sure that Bittorrent and UPnP work through VPNOut and I’ve optimized iptables on the server to make sure that Bittorrent traffic stays as fast as possible.

It is my way of “doing something about” the crap that companies like Comcast have been pulling lately. By mucking around with your packets they’re invading your privacy *and* violating Network Neutrality. Why give them the option?

-Riskable
https://vpnout.com
“Security for who? The government, businesses, or the people?”

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120 Mar 08, 2008 at 10:13 by christmann

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