Intro Interactive – ICM501a

One of the assignments this week is to watch the film Steal This Film 2. Actually, as you may have guessed, it’s not necessary to steal it, as it is licensed for free download. Now the question is how to get it. There is the easy way and the hard way.

The easy way is to google the title. You’ll find copies of the film on Google Video and elsewhere. That’s fine–the important thing is that you see the film.

If you go to the official site for the film, you will see links to downloads in much higher resolution: that is, non-postage-stamp sizes. Now, the problem with these larger files is that they are too big to be effectively hosted and downloaded. The XVID, for example, is over 600 mb. So, the links they have on the site are used to locate the torrents for those files.

It’s useful to know how to use bittorrent. It’s an important way of distributing large files like this one on the internet. Bittorrent disrupts the client-server model a bit. When you start downloading a file, you also serve chunks of that file to other people who are trying to download it. By distributing that process in a peer-to-peer way, you don’t need to have huge servers to host huge files.

The trick is, you still need to have some way of getting a handle on those files. Even if you don’t need a central server, you do need a tracker that tells you who is providing the file at any given time. The most notorious of these trackers is probably The Pirate Bay. (It should be obvious, I suppose, that bittorrent–like other peer-to-peer systems–tends to host a lot of “pirated” materials.)

To download a bittorrent file, you need a bittorrent client. My favorite is µTorrent. Once this is installed, when you click on a link to a bittorrent file, it will load into your client. Then just let it run. It will likely take at least overnight to download a large file like one of these–so just give it time.

Episode 171: BitTorrent Unscrambled – These bloopers are hilarious