9) Finding Good Torrents
How to spot a good or bad .torrent file
Unless you’re looking for something obscure, you want to download a torrent with at least 20 or more “seeds.” A “seed” is someone who has finished downloading the whole torrent file; the more seeds the better. A “peer” is someone who is currently downloading the file; peers are less important – but still, the more peers the better. A very popular torrent may have 40,000+ seeds! This will pretty much guarantee fast download speeds, although that will also depend on your internet connection speed.
Here’s an example of a badly seeded torrent from ISOHunt (note that S = Seeds, L = Peers aka Leechers)
Here’s an example of a well seeded torrent from ISOHunt
Note that 3 people have given this torrent a good rating, 6 people have commented, it’s 350mb (which is good for a 1 hour video file, as you’ll read shortly), and it has more than 40,000 seeds!
Several web sites like ISOHunt and BT Junkie offer feedback, comments, and ratings. So, before downloading a torrent, make sure to check out what other users are saying. This is especially important for movies, where there may be fakes going around.
Many torrents also include descriptions. For movies, look for keywords like “dvdrip” (meaning it’s from a dvd), “dvdscr” (meaning a dvd screener, like for award consideration) or CAM (meaning it’s from a camera in a movie theater – in other words, bad quality). Keep in mind you can’t always trust descriptions, but user-generated comments are usually reliable.
Make sure to look for files with appropriate file sizes. For example, a good quality 2 hour video file should be at least 650MB. Long DVD quality movies can be up to 2.5GB in size. A good quality MP3 album should be around 60-80MB, 120MB for high quality. Make sure to also look for high bitrate mp3s in the torrent’s description. I usually download nothing less than 128kbps and aim for 256kbps or higher.
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