Torrenting for Pros
June 24, 2007Follow this guide if you want to download movies, download tv shows automatically or access your download interface remotely.
I figure that most of my closer associates already know all about this stuff but for the benefit of all Ill share the torrenting set up guide used by pros in “the industry”.
1) Get uTorrent, its quicker, it uses less resources, its fully featured and its free. www.utorrent.com
2) Install it and set it up.
Yes you want it to handle .torrent files
Most ADSL2+ fiends will be able to rock about 640k upload. You might think that ADSL2+ privileges you to 1Mbit upload but guess again. For starters, its unlikely you are syncing at the full 1Mbit unless you are close the exchange and then you can only expect about 85% efficiency of your line when it comes to torrenting data. So, take your line speed, and multiply it by 0.85 and you have your capability. I have my upload speed set to 50Kb/s because I find that any more slows my http response time a bit (slows my web browsing). You might be tempted to set this higher because it might seem it will make you faster but it wont, find a point where your connectionis near saturation but not quite. You might have to play with it a bit until you find the sweet spot.
Port forwarding- most modern routers use uPNP to forward ports for you but you will get the best results if you do it manually. Take a note of the number you put in the port box, then, go to http://portforward.com/routers.htm and find out how to forward TCP and UDP on your router or modem.
3) Now you should be ready to download something. Get a .torrent file from http://www.mininova.org or www.isohunt.com and see how it goes.
4) Auto downloading. If you watch a series religiously then this is what you want to do.
Options>RSS Downloader>Feeds(tab)>Add
tvRSS has a nice syndicated feed for us to use care of EZTV. EZTV index a lot of TV shows including US, UK and Australian ones. Chances are that most popular shows are on it.
http://tvrss.net/feed/combined/ is the url that you want to enter as a new feed.
Now you want to tell it what shows you want it to download. Ill use Entourage as an example. If you haven’t seen it then you should follow this next bit and add it for yourself.
Go to the Favourites tab and click Add
Give it a name “Entourage”
The filter we want will be “Entourage*”, this means that any file with the show name starting with Entourage will be downloaded. The “*” is a wildcard which means that anything can follow Entourage for example the whole name could be “Entourage S03E05 – Some stupid title”. Use your discresion on where you put the *’s. Shows like The Ultimate Fighter need to be entered like “*Ultimate Fighter*” because they have been known to be entered as The Ultimate Fighter and Ultimate Fighter, The, the aformentioned rule will catch both cases.
Specifying the episode number will stop it from downloading early ones if they happen to re-release them. Some shows dont use ep numbers. I find it handy to not use them because then you dont have to change it when a new season starts.
Smart ep filter is a good one that remembers if you have downloaded an episode already. Many feeds, especially the combined one that we are using will have multiple copies of the same episode in different formats and sizes. This ensures that we only get the first that comes out for this episode.
We can also limit the quality of the rip that will be downloaded. This generally works on a minimum basis so it will download any better than what you have selected. This is unreliable though as sometimes the show doesn’t get release in a particular format or the particular format misses an ep. For something like Lost though, you can be pretty safe in selecting exactly what you want because there is a huge supply and demand for it.
You can get an entire list of shows that you can get to automatically download from the EZTV Show List. You can also look on there and get all of the old episodes.
You can get RSS feeds from mininova, Finalgear, diwana and all of those download sites, just go to the category you want and look for the orange rss icon. Remember that Mininova has lots of private tracker torrents and nothing is ordered and organised like EZTV.
4.5) One last thing to make this work properly is to set a download directory- 
Make a seperate temp directory and it works better.
5) For those on on peak-off peak plans. Use the Scheduler from Options>Pref’s and set up your offpeak/onpeak speeds. TPG has just put out a plan with 30GB onpeak / 90GB between 1am and 6am for $70 so this should be useful to a few people.
Its pretty self explanatory.
6) If you have another computer on the net that stays on 24/7 or have a dedicated bittorrent pc OR like to check your downloads from uni. Enable the web UI. Go back into prefs, Advanced, WebUI
Give it a password and put it on port 80. Then go firefox and type in your computer’s IP and it should give you the web interface for uTorrent. Some people mightn’t have any luck with port 80 so change it to something unique then try http://yourip:port .
You should be able to do that from any pc on your network and get the same thing.
To access that from other computers on the internet can be a little tricky but if you have the right hardware then it can be simple. You need for forward the port first of all. Then you need to get a static address for your computer/connection. Sign up for one at dynDNS.com then (if you have a good router) put it’s details in.
If you don’t have a good router then you can try and use noip.com or something but it isn’t as good. Then you should be able to access your web interface using http://yourstaticaddress:yourport .
Thats it.
Good Luck