Following the announcement came a two month investigation to ensure that sites were complying with the new rules – inevitably some fell foul. In March the authorities announced that dozens of websites would face penalties or be shut down for broadcasting material described as obscene, violent or fear-inspiring, or that could be detrimental to national security. Many were punished for simply not having the appropriate government certification.

Around a year later the government flexed its muscles again, shutting down more than 150 more video sites, bringing the total to more than 400 since the new regulations were announced.

In early November 2009, SARFT said it would continue cracking down on what it described as “unlicensed” video websites.

Continuing with its earlier justification, the government said it wished to provide a healthy environment for the country’s 200 million online video consumers, to eradicate what it described as lewd, obscene and violent content which had “severely undermined” the health of the country’s children. Although they weren’t initially mentioned, this time round authorities did included copyright issues as one of the reasons that the sites were to be closed.

Included in this swoop were several BitTorrent sites, including the very popular BT @ China. A notice on the site’s homepage explains that in the absence of an appropriate audio/visual license, the site has been ordered to shut down.

Another site, UUbird, which lists dozens of US shows such as Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, Heroes and Lost, said it would delete all links to TV shows and movies by mid-February.

As reported here on TorrentFreak a few days ago, BitTorrent is very popular China, with its main torrent client usage even surpassing that of uTorrent.

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

What is new to many is that contrary to most other parts of the world, people from China also prefer to use a local BitTorrent client to manage their downloads. This new insight comes from data collected from three of the largest BitTorrent trackers adding up to a sample of 357 million unique peer IDs.

With the help of other tracker operators, EZTV’s NovaKing has gathered statistics from the OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and Denis Stalker trackers. Spanning over a week, the overall statistics show that it’s not uTorrent but actually the Chinese BitTorrent client Thunder (also known as Xunlei) that has the largest market share.

We have to admit that this data came as a complete surprise to us and that we initially doubted its validity, but TorrentFreak is assured that these statistics are indeed correct. Previously we have reported on the market share of the various BitTorrent clients, but Thunder never made it into the list of most used clients. In this list below, however, Thunder/Xunlei actually beats uTorrent.

The logical explanation for this surprising result is that the previous statistics were gathered from a sample of torrents that did not include many Chinese downloaders. Apparently the Chinese prefer to use a local client (and local content) that’s available in Chinese, instead of uTorrent or Vuze which have a dominant market share in the rest of the world.

When we go through the rest of the stats we see that uTorrent has a small lead over Vuze (formerly Azureus). However, the difference is much smaller than our previous market share reports have suggested. This is another indication that the sample used for our previous reports was not as representative as it should have been, despite the large sample size.

Transmission and BitComet have a market share of 3.3 and 4 percent respectively, which is in line with previous reports. In ninth place we find another Chinese client, Tuotu, which is listed as Unknown in the list above.

The new data sheds a new light on the market share of BitTorrent clients. More than anything it reveals that there are quite a few regional differences when it comes to BitTorrent habits. By itself this is nothing new, but that a BitTorrent client used by tens of millions of people can fly under the radar for so long outside China has certainly surprised us.

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

For the 2009 Oscars, 26 movies were nominated. In alphabetical order they are: Australia, Bolt, Changeling, Defiance, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges, Hellboy II, Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, Milk, Rachel Getting Married, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, The Duchess, The Reader, The Visitor, The Wrestler, Tropic Thunder, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Wall-E and Wanted.

Of these 26 movies, 25 were available online by yesterday’s nomination day – only Rachel Getting Married made the date piracy-free. An MPAA-worrying 23 of these were downloadable in either DVD Screener or Retail DVD format (Region 5 included). In the past months many of the nominees appeared in our weekly download charts, with The Dark Knight as the absolute winner topping 7 million downloads in 2008.

Of course, the MPAA is always keen to point to the ‘evils’ of camcorder piracy and has clamped down heavily on this in recent years. However, it doesn’t seem able to deal effectively with its own internal issues. Of the 26 nominated films, 20 were distributed to Oscar voters in DVD Screener format. Many of them leaked onto the web, with the exceptions countable on one hand.

In 2003 the MPAA temporarily banned Oscar screeners to prevent them from leaking, but this decision was eventually reversed. Since then, the industry has touted technical solutions such as Cinea to protect their content, but for various reasons it hasn’t stopped the leaks. This year the average time from DVD Screeners being delivered to voters and subsequently leaking out to the web, was just 6 days.

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

The film’s success doesn’t stop at the box office either. Earlier this week the DVD was released, and on the first day in stores 3 million copies were sold in the United States, Canada and the UK.

Alongside these impressive real-world sales, the film beat the competition on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks too. With more than 7 million downloads on BitTorrent alone, The Dark Knight now holds the title of most pirated movie of 2008. Comments on various BitTorrent sites reveal that many downloaders obtained an illegal copy after they had already watched the movie in the movie theater.

As with every other blockbuster, ‘The Dark Knight’ was leaked onto the Internet in various formats. It began right after the premiere in July with a cammed version, which was celebrated by the folks from The Pirate Bay. The ‘cam’ was followed by a DVD-screener in early September, and a DVD in November. The latter release turned out to be the most popular among filesharers.

As we look over the rest of the top 10, we see that there are quite a few differences between popularity at the box office, and on filesharing networks. ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’, for example, came in second at the box office, but only came in 30th place in the download chart. On the contrary, ‘The Bank Job’ is the third most pirated movie on BitTorrent, but just 66th at the box office.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All formats, including cammed versions are counted, and based on previous experience a correction is made for smaller .torrent releases that we might have missed.

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

The film, produced by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, is set for a Sony Pictures DVD release in the USA on December 30. A few days ago it leaked onto the Internet and since then it has already been downloaded a million times via BitTorrent.

This is not the first time that a movie quickly became popular online due to the release of a pirated copy. “The Man from Earth” is another example of a film that became immensely popular due to its distribution on BitTorrent. Contrary to the opinion of the big studios, many independent filmmakers see piracy as free promotion instead of a threat.

We doubt that Sony Pictures will respond similarly to the leak of ‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’, which tops our weekly download chart. Below is the full list of this week’s most downloaded movies on BitTorrent. The Dark Knight, which led the chart three weeks in a row, has dropped to third place. Later this week and following on from our top 10 most downloaded games chart, we will publish the top 10 most downloaded movies in 2008.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

This success is a truly remarkable accomplishment in times where piracy is rampant. As with every other blockbuster, ‘The Dark Knight’ was leaked onto the Internet in various formats. It began right after the premiere in July with a cammed version, which was celebrated by the folks from The Pirate Bay. The Cam was followed by a DVD-screener in early September.

Although Hollywood did its best to prevent the movie from hitting BitTorrent, their efforts were not very successful. In July, just a few days after the film premiered, the police arrested a 40-year-old man who tried to record the movie with a camcorder. However, around the same time someone else had already put up a cammed version from another source.

This week, in another round of leaks, DVD-rips of ‘The Dark Knight’ found their way to BitTorrent. Unsurprisingly, given the commercial success of the movie, these were downloaded well over a million times in just a few days. From the looks of it, Batman will crush Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Transformers, as it will easily become this year’s most pirated movie.

First things first though. Below is this week’s list of most pirated movies on BitTorrent. The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

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

Cap’n Slappy: So long as these pirate parties of which ye speak center around the two pillars o’ pirattitude; Rum and Roistering – they have me full support!

TF: Do you feel they’re ’stealing your thunder’ a little?

CS: Thar be plenty o’ thunder to go around – we’re not greedy! One o’ the charms o’ International Talk Like a Pirate Day is that it doesn’t cost anyone anything! Sure, we sell t-shirts on our site – but there are many other web sites that sell Talk Like a Pirate Day t-shirts and we don’t begrudge ‘em that! We put the day out thar for all to play with as they please – so, if they want some thunder, they be more than welcome to whatever they can handle. (We do hope thy buy our books, though.)

TF: Any views on historical parallels between letters of marque and recent RIAA/MPAA actions, such as those regarding the Pirate Bay?

CS: Ye have to understand, I’m an old pirate who has naught but a weak-ass computer-box what can barely download a picture o’ me nephew balancin’ a banana on his nose! So RIAA/MPAA be just letters to me – but a letter o’marque be a nice reminder o’ the ol’ sayin’ “The enemy o’ me enemy be me friend – at least till a better offer comes around.”

TF: How long do you envisage TLAPD going for?

CS: I’m surprised it’s gone on this long! But each year its roots seem to run deeper – I think thar be somethin’ about the pirate personae that resonates with folks. So, I’m thinkin’ it’ll last until 2241. That’s me best guess.

Our thanks to Cap’n Slappy, and happy TLaPD.

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

For those who are not familiar with the term, RSS is an acronym that stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It allows you to keep up-to-date on content from sites you are interested in. Most news sites, blogs and podcasts have RSS feeds that let you automatically receive updates when a new article (or episode in the case of podcasts) is published (we have one).

These days, many BitTorrent sites have also started publishing RSS feeds of their listings. These feeds are often highly customizable, and can send you updates on whatever you want. Some even enclose .torrent files like podcast feeds enclose media ones.

In this article we will focus on RSS feeds for TV-torrents. Here are 5 ways to use these feeds. From completely automated downloading and watching, to simple updates when a torrent for your favorite TV show is published.

Downloading TV-shows can be illegal in some countries. If so, consider moving to another country, download share friendly shows only, or collect the torrents just for fun.

First, you might want to know where you can find these feeds. A great site to find TV torrent feeds is tvRSS.net. Click on one of the shows and you will see a list of the torrents for the latest episodes. In the blue bar above the search results you might notice the “search based RSS feed”, that is the feed that indexes releases of a particular show. This is the feed were going to use, so copy the url.

It is worth pointing out that other, less TV-focused sites like mininova also offer search-based RSS feeds. The reason they’re called “search-based feeds” is because they are feeds that relate to particular search terms. For example, if you search for ‘Rocketboom’, at the top of the results page you will get a feed that will send you updates on all torrents with the word ‘Rocketboom’ in their name.

OK, so now you know how to find a feed for your favorite TV show. Although, you might still be wondering what you are to do with these feeds. Some people prefer to receive only an alert, others might want to have their torrents start downloading automatically. Here are a couple of suggestions.

Torrents in your feed reader

This is probably one of the easiest ways to receive updates on the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows, especially if you already use a feed reader. You can use either a desktop or a web-based reader. Some popular web-based feed readers include Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. Desktop feed readers vary from platform-to-platform. The most common desktop reader for Windows would have to be the appropriately named Feedreader. On Linux, Liferea is a good option. And on Mac OS X, Vienna is possibly the best free desktop reader available. All three of these are Open Source too.

Torrents by Email

If you use an email application like Thunderbird with RSS support you can directly add the feed in there. If not, you can try a feed-to-email service that will forward the latest torrents to your email account. FeedBlitz and Squeet are two popular feed-to-email services.

TV Torrent Software

TVTAD and Ted are applications that help you to get the latest TV torrents by using RSS feeds. Both applications are advanced feed readers that you can customize to find and download your favorite TV shows. These applications have a pre-loaded list of TV torrent feeds and some advanced filter options built in. They are especially useful when you use a BitTorrent client that doesn’t have RSS support.

BitTorrent Clients with RSS Support

There are a couple of BitTorrent clients that are able to handle RSS feeds. Azureus, Bitcomet and uTorrent for example can all subscribe to RSS feeds. You can check this list to see if your favorite BitTorrent client supports RSS feeds. uTorrent has a great tutorial how to configure the feeds to automate downloading.

Broadcatching / Internet TV Applications

To quote the Wikipedia entry on the topic, “broadcatching is the downloading of content that has been made available over the Internet using RSS Syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers”. These internet TV players allow you to automatically download and watch the latest TV shows, video podcasts and more. These players might be useful for people who only use BitTorrent to download video files. Personally I’m not too excited about these players yet. Most players are still pretty buggy, and not very advanced in their configuration options. The EFF has its own such application. It was previously known as Broadcast Machine, but was subsequently renamed to Democracy Player. It too is still quite buggy, hogs RAM and crashes often. Here’s a review of three popular “broadcatching” applications we did a while ago.

Did this tutorial help you? Or do you already use BitTorrent and RSS to download and watch content?

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

Here it is, after 2 months the first installment is ready. Be sure to tell your friends. It’s huge, 43.8GB! It contains over 300 videos of various TechTV/G4TechTV shows including: The Screen Savers, Call for Help, X-play, Unscrewed, AudioFile, Big Thinkers, Conspiracies, CyberCrime, Extended Play, Eye Drops, FreshGear, GameSpot TV, Internet Tonight, Max Headroom, Silicon Spin, Tech Live, Thunderbirds, and some really old ZDTV shows.

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

(Note that downloading TV-shows can be illegal in some countries. If so, consider moving to another country or collect the torrents just for fun)

Step 1.

Go to the shows listing on RSStv.net. You’ll see a list of all the available shows. Browse through the list and click on your favorite TV-show.

Step 2.

You’ll now see a listing of the latest episodes. Take the Prison Break list for example. Notice that there are double postings in the list. This is because there are more distribution/release groups releasing the same episode in different qualities.

Use the search field on the top of the page to narrow down the results untill only see one release per episode. For example, select EZTV as the distribution group and LOL as the release group. Hit “search” and you will see that you narrowed the search results down to one release per episode.

Perfect.

Step 3.

Now we want a rss feed for these customized results. All you have to do is Click on the “Search-based RSS Feed” link

Now you have your custom TV-torrent rss feed.

Step 4.

If you have more that one favorite TV-show you have to merge those custom feeds into one. So repeat step 1, 2 and 3 for all your favorite show and save the links to the custom feeds somewhere (copy / paste, I wouldn’t advise to write them down, ;) )

If you have all the feeds you need, go to Feedjumbler, or another feed-merge service and merge your feeds into one.

Step 5.

Congrats, you’re done. Now all you have to copy the feed in your favorite rss reader.

Check out the 24 & Prison Break example (available feeds or html)

You can auto download the torrents using torrent clients like Azureus or uTorrent. Another option is to use thunderbird, or other email apps that support rss feeds to receive the latest torrents. Or just import the feeds into bloglines, my yahoo, newsgator, google desktop, windows live, netvibes… you’ll get it…

Have fun.

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

Ted has some predefined shows, and you have the option to edit these, or create your own. When ted finds the torrent you will be notified, unlike tvtad, ted only downloads the torrents and not the tv-shows itself.

Check it out

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

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

But there are more successful newcomers. Seedler.org, Newnova.org and Snarf-it.org all made it to the top torrent sites within a relatively short time.

But not only newcomers jumped into the gap. Sites like torrentspy.com and thepiratebay are now far more popular than a year ago. This is not just because suprnova died. The sites themselves made quite some progress, and BitTorrent’s popularity is still growing.

A second gap that needed to be filled was the TV-torrent “gap”. Btefnet.net was the most popular TV-torrent site until the MPAA decided to target TV-torrent sites in May 2005.
Lately new TV-torrent sites gain in popularity, tvtorrent.info and btseasonpass.com look promising.

But the combination of rss and BitTorrent is also well suited to catch the latest TV-torrents. You don’t even need to visit torrent sites anymore, just use Thunderbird or TVtad.

part 1: A rough start
part 2: Legal stuff
part 3: Going Down
part 4: Bram Talking
part 5: Filling the gap
part 6: Torrent Clients
part 7: Advancing

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

Browsing torrent sites to search for your favorite tv-shows is history…

In this “tutorial” I will use the rss-feeds of the latest TV-torrents published by VTV and EZTV (mininova). Those two, publish about 10-20 new torrents a day, and therefore are perfect for us.

This is how things work:

Step1:
Open thunderbird and “create a new account”. You should choose the option “RSS, news and Blogs”, and give it any name you like (torrent feeds or something).

Step2:
Now a new folder should appear in Thunderbird and you are ready to add your favorite rss feeds. In this example I use the EZTV and VTV feeds, you can easily import these feeds using this file, or add them manually.
If everything went like it should, you should see all the latest tv-torrent releases appear in your inbox.

Step3:
Now because you probably don’t want to check these feeds manually every hour or so, we are going to monitor these folders by a “saved search” folder. RightClick on the feeds folder and choose “search messages”. Now select the folders (feeds) you want to search.

The next step is to enter the search terms. You probably want to search for the name of a tv-show. To do this you let Thunderbird search the subject name (pic). Beware, some torrents in have a . in their name, so you should search for “sesame.street” instead of “sesame street”. If you want to be on the safe side, or if you use multiple feeds like we do you could always search for just the keyword “sesame”.
Now the important step, once you entered the search terms (you can add more later on) you should choose “save as search folder”.

Now choose a place to save this folder (not in your feeds folder), and everytime a torrent is released that matches your search term, it will be show up in this folder. So you never have to check the actual feeds, just wait till the torrent shows up in your search folder.

Once the torrent arrives, you can open it by clicking on the message… Easy, no more endless browsing on torrent sites…..

Happy torrenting, but beware.. don’t download copyrighted stuff if you’re not allowed to, it’s wrong, and eventually it will kill you.

Notes:
The use of rss-feeds can be used by other clients too (gmail). You could use message filters instead of “saved searches”.
You could search for other stuff than torrents.. Use your imagination.

RSS-feeds are only usable if the amount of new torrents that are published is relatively low, or if you never shut down your computer. Otherwise you would miss certain torrents because those were published “overnight” and weren’t new anymore when you woke up.

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