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Made for movie buffs
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Torrents let you download movies with ease
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The Hollywood movie you were dying to watch ignored your local theatres. The DVD isn’t out yet or is too expensive. So what’s a movie buff to do? Download the movie, of course. With a 256 kbps connection and a free BitTorrent client like
utorrent or Azureus, one can download a 700 MB movie in about seven hours. And millions do it everyday, despite the illegality of it.
Sudarshan, a doctor living in Barkatpura, Hyderabad, has his computer on and humming, downloading movies 24 hours a day. The hundreds of movies he has downloaded so far are stored on DVDs (his hard drive ran out of space for them a long time ago). The movies are typically 700-800 MB in size, with the video in a letterbox format and excellent audio.
Superfundo, Torrentspy, mininova, btjunkie, thepiratebay, and isohunt are his go-to sites for the latest movies. Once the DVD version arrives on Amazon.com, it takes only a couple of days for some dedicated uploader to post the torrent online. Axxo, the legendary and prolific uploader, is Sudarshan’s favourite source for DVD Rip movies.
Using a BitTorrent client instead of an old-fashioned p2p client like Kazaa or Morpheus has distinct advantages. The BitTorrent protocol makes the most efficient use of bandwidth, ensuring downloaders do not crowd each other out, and you are more likely to finish the download. A fake file is more easily caught by the torrent community, and viruses are difficult to slip through. A free programme like PeerGuardian will block most dubious IP addresses.
Torrenting is not just for new and popular movies. It is especially useful for classics that are hard to find. Want to watch Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) or Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu)? How about building a film noir collection, or having all 180 episodes of Seinfeld on a single hard drive? Torrents is your answer.
Torrents have one disadvantage: it is quite easy for the recording industry to know your IP address. However, in India, the theoretical possibility of legal action does not deter hardcore movie addicts. Convictions have been very few even in the West, where the recording industry prefers to go after torrent sites rather than individual downloaders. They recently shut down Demonoid. But Axxo and others like him continue to upload on sites like superfundo.org, and the torrenting world hasn’t skipped a beat so far.
RAJIV. M
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