BitTorrent

Introduction

A BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) communications protocol for file sharing. There are 2 parts to a BitTorrent. The first been the torrent tracker and the second been the torrent client application.

The Tracker is simply that. It tracks what client applications are sharing what file. The client then connects to the tracker to find out where it has to connect to retrieve the required file. The tracker is the only thing that is consistent as clients can stop sharing files or start sharing different files.

There are multiple trackers on the internet. You will need to choose what tracker to use. You can use multiple trackers. Usually the selection is already made for you. When you select a BitTorrent to download the torrent file will have an embedded tracker to connect to.

Naming Standards

There is no official way of naming a torrent file that I could find but there is an acceptable naming convention that seems to be used. As torrent files can comprise of anything, I will use TV shows and Movies as an example. Both use the same naming standard.

Torrents are named as follows.

	TV Shows:		show.name.SxxEyy.RipSource.AudioCodec.VideoCodec
	Movies:		movie.title.year.Ripsource.AudioCodec.VideoCodec.Language

An Example of the TV Show How I Met Your Mother, Season 3 Episode 10, that was recorded form the TV using High Definition using the standard XviD video encoding with MPEG audio.

        How.I.Met.Your.Mother.S03E10.HDTV.XviD

An Example of a Movie: The Simpsons Movie, which was encoded with audio AC3 rather than the typical MPEG codec.

        The.Simpsons.Movie.2007.DvDrip.AC3.English

TV RIP Sources

The most common sourced are HDTV or PDTV.

TV: Recorded from analog TV, lowest quality of all TV rips DS: Recorded from Digital Satellite, good quality rip PDTV: Recorded from Pure Digital Source, but not HDTV. The quality is similar to a DSRip SDTV: Inbetween HDTV and PDTV HDTV: Acceptable quality. Recorded from an HDTV source. Good video and sound quality. The video resolution is often 624×352, and the audio stream 128kb/s MP3. A 45 minute show is usually 350MB.

Audio and Video Codecs

Video: XviD, MPEG2, DVD, DivX, Audio: AC3, MPEG