Torrents 101: a client, the big torrent sites, and Big Buck Bunny

This guide takes you into the wild part of the internet with a hand on your shoulder. You will install a torrent client, visit one of the big public torrent sites, find Big Buck Bunny — a short animated film its makers released for anyone to share — check that you have the genuine article, download it and play it. Along the way you will learn to read a torrent listing, judge whether it will download at all, and spot the traps. Allow about 40 minutes.

What BitTorrent is

BitTorrent is a way of sharing files without a central server. A file is cut into small pieces. Everyone who wants it — together, a swarm — downloads pieces from each other at the same time, and passes on the pieces they already have. The more people share a file, the faster it moves.

A few words you will see everywhere:

• Torrent file or magnet link. A small description of the download: the file names and sizes, and a fingerprint of every piece. It contains none of the content itself. A magnet link is the same thing packed into a single link.
• Info hash. The fingerprint of the whole torrent, a 40-character code. Two listings with the same info hash are the same download, byte for byte.
• Seeders. People who have the whole file and are only uploading.
• Leechers. People still downloading. They upload the pieces they have, too.
• Client. The program that does the downloading and uploading on your computer.
• Torrent site (index). A search engine for torrents. It lists magnet links; it hosts no files either.

BitTorrent is a neutral tool. Linux distributions, game updates, the Internet Archive and scientific datasets all travel over it. Whether a particular download is lawful depends on what it is, and on the permission that comes with it — not on the technology.

The legal part, in plain words

• Using BitTorrent is legal, and so is installing a client.
• Visiting a torrent site, or mentioning or linking to one, is not by itself copyright infringement. The sites list a mixture: openly licensed films and music, free software, Linux images — and a great many copies that nobody had permission to share. A link being on a big site tells you nothing about whether you may download it.
• What counts is the work. Downloading and sharing is fine when its licence or its owner allows it: Creative Commons works, the public domain, free and open-source software, Linux distributions, things you made yourself. Downloading or sharing copyrighted films, series, music, games or software without permission is infringement in most countries.
• With BitTorrent you upload as well as download. Sharing is what most enforcement is aimed at.
• Your IP address is visible to everyone in the swarm. Rights holders' agents join swarms of popular titles, record the addresses they see, and send warning letters or bring claims through internet providers — routinely in some countries.
• Some countries' courts have ordered internet providers to block certain torrent sites. If yours has, that block is the law where you live; getting around it can be unlawful in itself.

Laws differ from country to country, and this is a plain summary, not legal advice.

Do I need a VPN?

A VPN sends your traffic through another company's server. To other peers in a swarm, your IP address becomes the VPN's; your internet provider sees only encrypted traffic to the VPN.

• It does not change what is legal. An infringing download is still infringing over a VPN.
• It moves your trust from your internet provider to the VPN company, which can see your traffic's destinations. Choose one with an independently audited no-logs policy.
• Many free plans block torrents. Proton VPN's free plan, for example, does not allow peer-to-peer traffic.
• Some countries restrict VPNs themselves.

For an openly licensed film like this one, you do not need a VPN at all.

Step 1: install a clean client

A client full of adverts and bundled offers is a bad start. Tixati is free, small and has no ads or bundles; it runs on Windows, Linux and Android. On a Mac, use qBittorrent instead — the steps below are the same in spirit. Avoid µTorrent: its installer carries partner offers and antivirus tools flag it.

1. Open the Tixati page here and press DOWNLOAD. Its official site opens in a new tab.
2. Download the installer for your system and run it. Accept the licence and the suggested folder.
3. Start Tixati. If Windows asks whether to allow it through the firewall, allow it on private networks. That lets other peers connect to you, which makes downloads faster.
4. Leave the settings as they are for now. The defaults are sensible.

Step 2: get your browser ready for the wild

Torrent sites pay for themselves with aggressive advertising: fake Download buttons, pop-ups saying your player needs an update, "your PC is infected" pages, requests to allow notifications.

• Install uBlock Origin first (on Chrome, uBlock Origin Lite). It removes most of this.
• Never install anything a torrent site offers you — no "player", "codec", "download manager" or "VPN required" software.
• Never click Allow when a site asks to show notifications.
• Close any tab that opens by itself.

Step 3: visit a torrent site

These are well-known public torrent indexes. The links go to each site's front page, not to any particular listing:

There are also torrent sources that only list things you are allowed to share: the Internet Archive (every item there has a torrent), the download pages of Linux distributions such as Fedora, Academic Torrents for research data, and Nuxtre's own torrent index, which lists openly licensed films and software and plays many of them in your browser.

For this walkthrough we use The Pirate Bay.

Step 4: find Big Buck Bunny

1. Go to thepiratebay.org.
2. Type Big Buck Bunny in the search box and press Enter.
3. You get a list of listings. Each row shows the name, the date it was uploaded, its size, SE (seeders) and LE (leechers), and who uploaded it.

Reading the results

• Seeders matter most. A listing with dozens of seeders will finish in minutes. One with 0 seeders will probably never finish, however many leechers it has.
• Size should make sense. Big Buck Bunny is about ten minutes long. Real copies range from roughly a hundred megabytes to around a gigabyte, depending on the resolution. A 40 KB "film" or a 30 GB one is not what it says.
• Older listings with many seeders have been checked by thousands of people. Brand-new listings of famous things are where fakes hide.

Open a listing and check it

Click a promising name to open that listing's own page. That page — a specific torrent — is what you are judging, not the site.

1. Look at the file list. You want video files — .mp4, .mov, .mkv or .avi — perhaps with a subtitle file (.srt) and a poster image.
2. Treat these as a fake: an .exe, .scr, .bat or .lnk file; a .zip or .rar that wants a password; a "codec" or "player" you are told to install.
3. Read the comments. People flag fakes and bad quality quickly.
4. Find the info hash. The Pirate Bay shows it on the listing page as Info Hash. A widely shared, authorised copy of Big Buck Bunny — the one the WebTorrent project hosts, and the one in Nuxtre's index — has this info hash:

dd8255ecdc7ca55fb0bbf81323d87062db1f6d1c

If your listing shows that hash, it is that exact copy. Other genuine copies exist with different hashes — the official release came in several resolutions and formats. For those, rely on the file list, the size and the comments.

Step 5: download it

1. On the listing page, click Get This Torrent — the magnet link. (On 1337x it is Magnet Download.)
2. Your browser asks whether to open the link with Tixati. Allow it. If it does not ask, your browser may need the link handler: copy the magnet link, and in Tixati use the option to add a transfer and paste it in.
3. Tixati opens a small window for the new download. Check the folder it will save into, then confirm.
4. The transfer appears in Tixati's list. First it fetches the torrent's details from other peers (a few seconds for a magnet link), then the pieces arrive. You will see the number of peers, the speed and the progress rise.

Verifying the file

You do not have to do anything to check that each piece arrived intact: BitTorrent does it for you. Every piece is compared with its fingerprint in the torrent, and a damaged or tampered piece is thrown away and fetched again. When Tixati reaches 100%, the files match the torrent exactly.

That proves the files match the listing — not that the listing was the real film. That is why you checked the file list, the size, the comments and the info hash first.

Step 6: play it

1. When the download finishes, open its folder from Tixati (or find it in the folder you chose).
2. Open the video with VLC media player, which plays every format the film comes in.
3. It runs about ten minutes. The opening and closing credits name the Blender Foundation.

Because of its licence, you may copy this film, share it with friends, put it on a website or seed it to strangers, as long as you credit the Blender Foundation.

Seeding: keep the swarm alive

A torrent lives as long as someone seeds it. Leave Tixati open for a while after the download completes, and it uploads to others. Your ratio is how much you have uploaded divided by how much you downloaded; 1.0 means you have given back what you took.

• If uploads slow your connection, set an upload limit in Tixati's bandwidth settings.
• When you are done, remove the transfer from the list. Choose to keep the files, not delete them.

Staying safe in the wild: a checklist

• Read the file list before you download, every time.
• Never run an .exe that came from a torrent site, unless it is software its own publisher distributes by torrent.
• Keep Windows Security switched on, and scan anything you are unsure of.
• Keep uBlock Origin in your browser; install nothing a torrent site offers.
• Use a client without ads or bundles: Tixati or qBittorrent.
• Only download and share what you are allowed to.

Where to go next

• Lawful torrents, plenty of them: the Internet Archive, Linux distributions, and Nuxtre's torrent index, where many films play straight in your browser.
• Torrents that won't play in a browser: the guide to hybrid clients explains why, and how one desktop program bridges a classic swarm to browsers.
• More open films: the Blender Foundation made several; search for Sintel, Tears of Steel or Elephants Dream, all under Creative Commons licences.