Torcache

Torcache is a free service for caching t. files online. I noticed by accident (got a timeout error…) that one big t. site stores its t. files here too.

Torrent FAQ

Voila 4chan’s torrenting FAQ:

Original place: here.

Decode .torrent files

Motivation
Yesterday I tried Tribler, which is a next generation torrent client. Its novelty is that it is decentralized, thus it doesn’t need trackers at all.

I noticed that Tribler contacts other clients to collect .torrent files that are stored locally. This way every client becomes a small “tracker”. I got curious to see what those .torrent files are. How to decode them?

Solution
.torrent files have a so-called bencode format. At effbot I found a simple decoder in Python that I extended a little bit. My version can be found here (and it’s part of my jabbapylib library now).

Usage

./bdecode.py ubuntu.torrent

Output:

{   'announce': 'http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce',
    'announce-list': [   ['http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce'],
                         ['http://ipv6.torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce']],
    'comment': 'Ubuntu CD releases.ubuntu.com',
    'creation date': 1318500053,
    'info': {   'length': 731164672,
                'name': 'ubuntu-11.10-desktop-amd64.iso',
                'piece length': 524288}}

ubuntu-11.10-desktop-amd64.iso
697.3 MB

_{As you can see, information about pieces is omitted. If you need that too, use the variable torrent.long_torrent.}

Tribler: torrent of the future (?)

“Tribler is an open source peer-to-peer client with various features for watching videos online. The user interface of Tribler is very basic and focused on ease of use, instead of including features. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching. Due to this overlay network Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content. Tribler features include: video-only searching, experimental video streaming, and an integrated video player. Tribler is available for Linux, Windows and OS X.” (source)

_{More info here. (in Hungarian)}

No one can stop The Pirate Bay

“Firefox: If you’re living in a location where local DNS and IP blocks keep you from visiting certain websites, The Pirate Bay Dancing is an extension that undoes that automatically by routing you through random proxy servers.“

More info here.

Proxy list
I looked at the source of the add-on and it takes the list of proxy servers from this source:

http://ilovemafiaafire.net/projects/tpb_dancing/mf_tpb_list.xml

So if you need a list of working free proxy servers…

Increase the number of simultaneous downloads in Vuze

Problem

You use Vuze (formerly Azureus) for downloading torrents and you have a nice connection speed, but still, Vuze downloads only 4 or 5 torrents simultaneously. Why? You want to start all the torrents in the list…

Solution

The option to increase the number of simultaneous downloads is a bit hidden. Go to Tools -> Options…, and choose Queue. Here, the first entry is what we need: “Max. simultaneous downloads [0: unlimited]“. Set the value to 0 and hit Apply.