15 Aug 06
Taming the Torrent Internet and Television
I have spent far too much of my time dabbling in the murky underworld that is copyright piracy using programs like Kazaa and LimeWire. For those of you who pretend to innocent and pure, they are peer-to-peer file sharing applications.
They are used to share files like music and films... for free mostly. Unless you have been dead for the last few years you have very little excuse not to know that P2P applications are not really endorsed by the music and film industries.
Well the new method of getting stuff for nothing is via the BitTorrent file sharing protocol. I won't bother to explain how it works because I spend the best part of an evening trying to explain it to my friend Darren, but he simply couldn't get his head around it.
So anyway, you download a bittorrent client, I suggest Azureus on Windows and Transmission on OS X. Then you search a tracker site, I suggest Pirate Bay, then you download whatever you want- simple! Paul Stamatiou has written some instructions on how to configure your client to work a bit better.
"Painless and Disruptively Cheap"
The words of Bram Cohen, the man who created the BitTorrent protocol. The reason I have got so excited about BitTorrent is not only the lure of annoying the killjoy's at the BPI, but the possibilities that the technology offers. I recently posted about Podcasting, well this is the next step "video podcasting" or broadcatching.
I want RSS feeds of BitTorrent files. A script would periodically check the feed for new items, and use them to start the download. Then, I could find a trusted publisher of an Alias RSS feed, and 'subscribe' to all new episodes of the show, which would then start downloading automatically.
Scott Raymond
The possibility of subscribing to a television channel or particular television series is extremely attractive. I wouldn't miss an episode of Have I Got News for You, because as soon as it was released it would download to my computer. Moreover, it doesn't matter if I fall asleep before 10.30pm of an evening because I can just watch Newsnight in the morning, because it's been downloaded. The scary thing is, I already can- Newsnight is being podcasted now!
The benefit of podcasting and BitTorrent together is that I'll get the program faster, and there is less strain to the BBC servers. If this is the future of broadcasting; Vive La Revolution!