A lot of us use torrents to download music, movies, books and what not and are always looking forward to finding new ways and means to fasten our download speeds. Ernesto from Torrent Freak put forth a question to the people behind BitTorrent clients on how to get the best speeds possible. Olivier Chalouhi, the Co-Founder and CTO of Vuze (formerly Azureus) has given a wonderful explanation to the question posed and I guess a lot of us will be benefited by this. This is what he said.

“The Low Down on Downloading”

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 are not fire-walled by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router otherwise you will be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed. It is all about striking a balance. You do not 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.

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 are already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you are below average, go back and check some of these other things I have 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.

Chalouhi continues “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.”

Has anyone tried any of these tips before? Do leave your feedback in the comments!

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What does one do to take advantage of a movie doing well in the box office? Associate with the movie in some way or the other perhaps? That’s exactly what the popular torrent site ‘The Pirate Bay‘ did when the movie ‘The Dark Knight‘ became a huge success in movie theaters all over the world. In its first weekend, the film grossed a record breaking $158.4 million, and it’s currently on top of IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time with an average rating of 9.3.

Not only did it taunt the movie industry in general and distributor Warner Bros in particular by distributing the movie for free, in order to garner in more publicity, it also renamed their site to ‘The Pirate Bat‘ and put up a new logo (see below) on its homepage that links to a search for “The Dark Knight”.

As pointed out by Torrent Freak, this is not the first time that The Pirate Bay has rebranded its site to piss off content owners. When Apple’s OSX x86 leaked in July 2005, they renamed the site to the Pear Bay, and linked to the leaked torrent. Back in July 2005 The Pirate Bay put up a logo inspired on Grand Theft Auto for the release of their new website, the Grand Theft Bay. Apart from being creative with their logo’s, The Pirate Bay is known for their hilarious responses to copyright owners who request takedowns.

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