The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only. A list of the most pirated TV-shows of 2008 was published two weeks ago.

Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Up until now, central servers have always been required in order to use BitTorrent effectively. Although the transfer of files via BitTorrent has always been decentralized, the .torrent files that are required to start sharing are always hosted on central servers, those of The Pirate Bay or Mininova for example.

The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work, without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam.

BuddyCast, the decentralized search feature of the Tribler client is able to do so. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak: “It has taken us many years to get the zero-server search infrastructure called ‘BuddyCast’ running fast and efficiently. We believe that today BuddyCast is the most efficient, scalable, and battle-hardened algorithm out there which is also ready for user tagging and ratings in true buzz-compliant 2.0 style.”

In addition to the decentralized torrent distribution and search capabilities, Tribler aims to make the BitTorrent experience more social. For instance, users will have the option to boost the download speed of friends, the client will give recommendations based on your download behavior, and it rewards users who are good sharers while punishing those who leech.

“Tribler peers all work together towards a common purpose: fast search and downloads,” Pouwelse explained. “Peers recognize fellow ‘tribe’ members and are pre-programmed with the notion that embracing mutual self-interest is good. This is a radical deviation from the core BitTorrent tit-for-tat mantra dictating pursuit of self-interest only and no memory of past experiences.”

Although this is only the first public implementation of the decentralized search feature, it seems to work pretty seamlessly. Obviously, the content is more limited than on the large BitTorrent sites, since it comes exclusively from other Tribler users, but this will grow as soon as more people start to use the client.

Decentralized BitTorrent search has the potential to make public BitTorrent sites no longer necessary. For now, we think that such a radical shift is not going to happen anytime soon, however, since the top-three BitTorrent sites are involved in legal action in some way or another, you never know when you might need it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The data presented here is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It’s Heroes that breaks all the records though. Our statistics show that, across all BitTorrent sites, the two episodes from Heroes’ season opening were downloaded well over a million times each – in just one day. The vast majority of the downloads come from outside the US (92%), where shows usually air weeks, months or even years later.

The show was downloaded the most in the UK (15%), where the official season opening is scheduled for October 1st. Canada, France and Australia complete the top 5. Although most TV-broadcasters won’t be happy to read these figures, one could argue that BitTorrent has actually helped TV-shows to build a stronger, broader, and more involved fanbase.

Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of ‘Heroes’ told TorrentFreak that he thinks this is indeed the case. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience,” he said.

Let’s hope Alexander will be heard in Hollywood. Below is the TV-show download chart of the past week, Heroes is not included in the list, but it will surely appear in next week’s chart.

Top Downloads September 14 – September 21

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Like the other sites we mentioned, Instant-Torrents downloads the torrents to their servers. When the download is finished, users can download it to their computer. What’s different is that once a torrent is downloaded to Instant-Torrent, it will stay hosted on the server, and other users can find the files via the site’s search, and download them instantly.

Instant-Torrents is still low on content, but with enough users it will become unnecessary to add torrents by yourself, since most popular files will be hosted on the server anyway. The downside for the owners is of course that the MPAA, IFPI and RIAA will be keeping an eye on it as well.

Instant-Torrents shares all torrents till they have uploaded what they have downloaded, which makes it ‘share friendly’. Users are allowed to have 5 torrents running at the same time, and there is no limit in size or numbers for completed torrents. “As long as there’s enough disk space, people can download as much as they want,” ‘Zero Endorphine’, one of the Instant-Torrents co-founders told us.

The service also has an option to make a watch list, to downloads torrents based on specific keywords, as soon as they are available. In addition, the site has lists of the last added, most downloaded and most recommended torrents, and it allows users to recommend torrents to their friends.

Instant-Torrents is itself a free service, but in order to download you’ll have to get a VPN account at Ivacy. This is because the files can only be downloaded to your PC if you’re connected to the (private) Ivacy network. There is a free 1GB trial available, so potential users can play around with it for free. A paid account costs 0.50 Euro ($0.70) per GB, or 10 Euro ($14.20) a month for unlimited bandwidth.

‘Zero Endorphine’, one of the Instant-Torrents co-founders told us that they get a revenue share from Ivacy, to cover the expenses they incur, such as bandwidth and server costs. The site has only been up and running for a few weeks, and ‘Zero Endorphine’ ensured us that they will add more innovative features in the near future.

“We already added Usenet support, in a few days we will support Rapidshare downloads as well, and we’re also working on integrated BitTorrent tracker search,” ‘Zero Endorphine’ said. Instant-Torrents offers an interesting addition to the most basic BitTorrent download services. Although we prefer BitTorrent to be free, the private nature of the site, and the instant downloads might make it worthwhile for some.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Other releases of the Olympics ceremony are popular as well, such as an iPod ready version of the first hour, a standard definition release of the opening ceremony, and a high definition capture of the torch lighting and fireworks. Three Olympic shows would have made it into our weekly TV-download chart, but we decided to count them as one.

The data of the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

Top Downloads August 03 – August 10

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Since there’s always a lot of debate about what works and what doesn’t, we decided to ask an expert to share his thoughts with us. Olivier Chalouhi, developer and CTO of Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) was kind enough to give us some of his own tips and tricks. Since Olivier was the person who initiated the Azureus Open Source project in 2003, which went on to create one of the most popular BitTorrent clients ever, if anyone knows how to get the best out of your torrent client, he does.

Here are some of Olivier’s tips for optimizing your torrent download speeds. There tips work with every BitTorrent client, except for the last one.

1. Seed.

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be connectable.

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed.

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.

TF note: Want an easy life? Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right torrents.

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be realistic.

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

6. Get a Friend Boost.

I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed :). When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously, ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.

Mininova downloads since 2005.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while – possibly 12 hours – because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.

Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.

Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.

For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.

update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This list of BitTorrent sites is not extensive, but it covers the three most popular torrent sites. A search for the recently released second part of Steal This Film returns quite a few results which are presented in a clean way. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds/peers), but they can be further sorted by date, size, and search engine.

If you can’t find what you were looking for you have the option to check for related and popular searches in the sidebar. At the moment the site has no ads and is pretty fast, but that might change in the future. Overall, for people who like meta search engines, I think that YouTorrent is worth a visit.

More useful BitTorrent sites can be found in our roundup of the 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. Do you know any other BitTorrent sites with some innovative features that we haven’t covered yet here at TorrentFreak? Let us know and leave a comment.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.