So, you have a shiny silver (or white) Apple Mac running OS X and you want to download a torrent. It really isn’t that hard, so don’t stress. Of course you should only download legal material using your Mac and BitTorrent client, so for the sake of this exercise – our example will assume that you want to download the public domain movie Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
The first thing you are going to need is a client to download the torrents with. Searching Google returns quite a few applications. Most of them are fairly easy to get up and running, but keep in mind that a lot of them are “works in progress” and still being worked on by different groups of people.
I use Transmission, it is small very easy to install, setup and use. Which ever application you choose to use you will need to “open” or “forward” ports from your router to your Mac. There are some Bit Torrent clients out there that allege they have support for UPnP in the case of the more prominent one, BitRocket, this is a misleading claim as the software in its current form does not actually support UPnP.
Getting back on track… If you have chosen to use Transmission then by default you will need to forward TCP port 9090 to your Mac.
Once you have your software, you may want to flick through the preferences and set where you want to save the downloaded files to, how much bandwidth you want to allow to flow in each direction, and anything else you want to customise. It is important to keep in mind that by the very nature of torrents you should share at least as much as you download. When you are downloading a torrent off the internet, you are not downloading from one central server, but from several other people just like you – who have an interest in the same file. As you get bits and pieces of the file, other people can get those bits and pieces off you.
Now that you have your BitTorrent client up and running, you need to find something to download. As you may be aware, there are some files on the internet that there is ongoing debate over as to the legality for people like you and I to download them, so for today we will be downloading a file that is without a doubt in the public domain.
I like to use a site called torrents.to for my torrent searching, it is a portal to several other sites and is quite easy to use. Once you are at the site, simply enter what you are looking for, select a search engine from the list and click the “Search Torrents” button. For our example, you would type in Star Wreck, select MiniNova as your engine and click the button.
Assuming nothing goes pear shaped you will have a list of the available matching torrents. You would click on one of those and follow the instructions to download the torrent.
This will not actually download the movie, it will simply give you a very small file that ends with the extension .torrent. It is now up to you to drag this file on to your chosen torrent client and let it do the work.
Some torrents take minutes while others take days. It all depends on how many people are interested in the file you want, how much of their bandwidth they decide to share with you, and the quality of the network connectivity between you and them.
It should be said that many of the things covered here have an associated risk with them. Downloading files from the internet and not knowing their original publisher is a risk which can of course be mitigated with virus protection, another risk is opening holes in your firewall. This is not absolutely essential to the operation of torrents, but you will notice significant improvements if you do. As with anything – make sure you understand what is going on enough that you are comfortable before you do it and you should be fine.
