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With the demise of several download sites it's now harder to find the latest episodes of TV programs. I've found the best sites to be private BitTorrent tracker sites. These sites usually have the episodes available very shortly after episodes have aired and because they are private sites download speeds are usually very high. The down side is that these sites are ratio based and expect that for every byte you download you should upload a byte. That is, after all, how peer to peer (p2p) file sharing works but it can be a problem for customers of ISPs like BigPond and Dodo where uploads are counted against your plan limits or Optus where uploading is frowned upon.

Of course there are ways around this problem. The one most commonly used is stealth downloading however even using stealth downloading (which really goes against the spirit of p2p) you'll still need to upload something to ensure your ratio is better than zero. If you don't keep your ratio at a minimum level you can be banned and lose all access to the tracker site. To avoid a long, boring post I won't go into more details here. Ask questions if you need. (Answers to questions charged at $4.95 per paragraph)

The other drawback to private trackers is that you usually need an invite to join one. Two of the best are BitmeTV.org and TVTorrents.com.

To download files you'll need a BitTorrent client. I don't recommend the original client by Bram Cohen as it's fairly basic. Unfortunately BitMeTV has banned several clients because they allow cheating. Of the remaining, allowable clients, the most popular are µTorrent and Azureus are the most popular. Azureus is a bit of a resource hog and can slow your PC down which is why I recommend µTorrent.

Once you've downloaded and installed your BT client, I suggest you visit the following sites if you need more information on BitTorrent and how it works.
Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide
Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide (alternate)
The BitTorrent Wiki FAQ

More help can also be obtained by posting in the Torrent-Talk Yahoo Group.

If you have any more questions, even ones that you think are dumb, ask here.

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How can I have downloaded 663mb of a file which is supposed to be 697mb, with it saying it's only 6.5% downloaded?

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BitTorrent works by getting different pieces of a file from different pieces and the pieces that you get from different people may be non-sequential. Person A might give you pieces 1, 47, 256, 1055, 6122 and 6125 while Person B might give you 37, 2000, 2200 and 9999. Person B might only give you pice 111 and so on. When a torrent starts downloading BitComet preallocates file space and slots the received pieces into their appropriate spot in that file space whenever it receives a piece. The reason that the file is 663MB in windows and 697MB in BitComet is that Windows is reporting the size in binary megabytes (actually called mebibytes) while BitComet is reporting in actual megabytes, probably rounded to the nearest megabyte.

1 mebibyte (1 MiB) = 1,048,576 bytes
1 megabyte (1 MB) = 1,000,000 bytes.

663MiB = 663 x 1,048,576 = 695,205,888 = 695.2MB

Quote:

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However, in bitcomet it says it's only 6.5% done which is far smaller than it should be according to the size of the file.

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As I said, the reason for this is that BitComet has preallocated the file space when the torrent download started. What you see is an empty file that is being filled with pieces as they arrive.