Crenk » Bittorrent

The Pirate Bay Closing Their Torrent Tracker for Good

Steven Finch — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:08:53 +0000

The big news this morning is that the Pirate Bay is closing down their torrent tracker for good. After launching the torrent tracker back in 2003 it quickly became one of the worlds largest Bittorrent trackers on the Internet, with some 25 million peers using the service. The Pirate Bay was launched by a few friends in Sweden and was never supposed to turn into a business, and never really did (probably the ultimate open source project).

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Additionally, Torrentfreak has learned that The Pirate Bay operators are talking to other Bittorrent site ownwers to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can easily replace traditional torrent files.

There are still other services for users who dont want to go trackerless just yet, which include OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent.

Its really sad to see the end of this famous tracker, however times change and technology moves on, and all credit to The Pirate Bay team for trying to push the move even quicker.

KickAssTorrents: Lightning Quick Torrent Search Engine

Steven Finch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:33:53 +0000

There are so many torrent search engines in the market and as we all know most of them are considered illegal by all major media companies. I find it funny that these torrent search engines are normally just indexing where files are stores online in the same way as Google, and not even hosting the files on their own servers.

The newest torrent search engine on the market is KickassTorrents. KickassTorrents has a great user interface that is very easy to use and search through. Additionally, the site has an amazing index of music, files, documents, movies, games, tv shows, applications and more.

The community around KickassTorrents seems to also be on the rise as they have a growing number of leechers and seeders on the site. Plus, they have additions like a Firefox addon, Vuze addon and others.

If you are looking for a Torrent Search engine that is on the rise and is already in the top 5,000 alexa, then KickassTorrents is for you!

uTorrent Market Share Is Up but Vuze and Bittorrent.com are Struggling

Steven Finch — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:59:11 +0000

Bittorrent is currently a huge market on the internet. Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology has reported the current marketshare numbers between the top bittorrent clients available at the moment.

uTorrent remains the client of choice for over 60% of all BitTorrent users. Vuze is in second place, but its market share has dropped to 14%. Transmission, on the other hand, continues to gain ground, with the client’s market share increasing by 23% in the last two months.

The data is based from over 17,221 unique user in a few dozen public Bittorrent swarms. Bittorrent is still by far the lading file-sharing technology with millions of people using the protocol every day.

BitTorrent Client Market Share, October 2009
Ranking	Client	Market Share %	Change %	Platform

1	uTorrent	60.16%	+5.90%	Windows, Mac
2	Vuze	14.22%	-21.56%	Windows, Mac, Linux
3	BitTorrent Mainline	8.65%	-26.63%	Windows, Mac, Linux
4	BitComet	4.43%	-5.95%	Windows
5	Transmission	3.65%	+23.73%	Mac, Linux
*	Unknown	7.97%	+89.31%	na.
*	Other	0.92%	-34.29%	na.

BitSnoop: A New Torrent Search Engine with No Duplications and Amazing Search Results

Dean Sherwin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:47:07 +0000

BitSnoop is a new torrent search engine that is supposedly better than its rivals because of a new tactic it uses when searching for torrents; indexing and combining of torrents and getting rid of duplicated ones.The torrents are generated by Tracker Match. It locates all the relevant trackers to your search and removes duplicated torrents or ‘bad’ torrents to avoid slow downloads.

I think that the homepage which you can see above is quite nice as it’s minimalistic – after all it’s there for one purpose and one purpose only. Google has had much by employing the purposeful look by using minimal text and images. The results, seen below, are also well presented and spaced out; again a minimalistic look.

Overall, I thought it was okay. I didn’t really notice much of a change in my regular download speed but the fact that it was taking away duplicated torrents was comforting, I guess. Check it out for yourself here.

Torrent Scan: Multiple Torrent Search Engine

Steven Finch — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:01:02 +0000

Previously we talked about Torrents.to in which allows users search various torrent search engines in one place. On of our readers has let us know about TorrentScan, in which is another torrent meta search engine but it has a lot of great features that some others dont.

TorrentScan is a torrent meta search engine which allows users to search across various torrent search engines all in one place. TorrentScan allows you to search Mininova, SumoTorrent, BTjunkie, Isohunt, Fenopy, Torrentz and more. TorrentScan also lets you customise your search and even the entire look and feel of the site itself. With a simple click you are able to see your search results between the torrent search engines.

If you are looking for an easy and simple way to search through multiple torrent sites at once, then TorrentScan should be your first option.

The Pirate Party List of Countries

Steven Finch — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:26:36 +0000

With the emergency of the Pirate Party in Sweden in which won a European Parliamentary place at the last elections, I just wanted to run through what countries currently have a Pirate Party.

The Pirate Party – Sweden

The Pirate Party – Canada

The Pirate Party – UK

The Pirate Party – Germany

The Pirate Party – Finland

25 Amazing Pirate Bay Alternatives

Steven Finch — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:13:09 +0000

Our friends over at TorrentFreak have put together an amazing list of Pirate Bay alternatives in a variety of areas. Here is the basic list.

Full Pirate Bay Alternatives

The only full Pirate Bay alternatives are sites that index torrent files, are open to everyone and also have a working tracker. Unfortunately, there are only a few sites out there that offer this full package -there are four of them below. We decided to include Demonoid here because it tracks many public torrents.

1. Torrentbox

2. 1337x

3. H33t

4. Demonoid (semi-private)

Torrent Indexers

Torrent indexers are sites that have a searchable directory of torrent files, but don’t host a (public) tracker of their own. Mininova has a tracker, but they only allow ‘featured’ torrents uploaded through their content distribution service. The most used torrent indexers are:

5. Mininova

6. isoHunt

7. Torrentreactor

8. BTjunkie

Torrent Meta-Seach Engines

BitTorrent meta-search engines are yet another brand of torrent sites. They don’t have a tracker and don’t host any torrent files on their servers. Instead they search for and link to torrents hosted on third party sites.

9. Torrentz

10. Nowtorrents

11. Qtorrents

12. Torrent-Finder

Private Trackers (open signup)

Most of the larger private trackers require an invite to join, but there are always a few that allow new members. Below are four of these (open) private trackers and more can be found on Btracs.

13. RTN

14. BiteMyTorrent

15. BitShock

16. TorrentIt

Standalone BitTorrent Trackers

Torrent indexers and meta-search engines can be used to find torrents, but none of them will be of much use without a stable BitTorrent tracker. Standalone BitTorrent trackers are much needed, they handle the communication between downloaders but don’t index any torrents themselves.

17. OpenBitTorrent

18. PublicBitTorrent

19. The Hidden Tracker

20. Denis.Stalker

DIY Pirate Bay Alternatives

The last category of Pirate Bay alternatives are the do-it-yourself projects. By using the three ingredients below The Pirate Bay can be easily rebuilt. It might take a few hours, but then the path to world domination is clear.

21. Pirate Bay Torrents Clone

22. Pirate Bay HTML Clone

23. Torrage: Torrent API

24. Tracker Software

Last but not Least

Google, the mother of all search engines has a filetype:torrent search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet. Don’t tell the MPAA and RIAA.

25. Google

IsoHunt Improve Search and Indexing

Steven Finch — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:45:35 +0000

Last week isoHunt updated its indexing code and performed a thorough re-crawl of the indexed sites, resulting in an increase from 1.65 million to 3.49 million torrents. This week the team tackled another problem, namely, how to find the right torrent more effectively.

isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung mentioned that they made several changes to the search algorithms resulting in a superior quality of the search results. The changes should make it easier for the site’s users to find what they are looking for.

Aside from the improved results, the team also added option to narrow down the results to a specific source, Gary explained on Facebook.

isoHunt is currently the third largest torrent site ranked by the number of daily users.

Pirate Bay Ordered Out Of The Netherlands

Dean — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:16:47 +0000

Pirate Bay, a site that “helps users commit copyright infringement’ is now under more heavy fire than ever with ruling made by a Dutch court ordering all access to the site be shut off in the Netherlands within the next ten days.

The case was made against the sites three founders who were not even present, nor aware of the proceedings. When they found they sent a letter to have the ruling dismissed as they are currently seeking to make an appeal.

As it stands, if they do not comply with the ruling and remove all access to the site in Holland

within the next ten days then the company will be fined three million Euros. They will also be fined 30,000 Euro for

every day that the site remains up and running in the Netherlands.

In April, the three owners, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg along with a financer in Sweden were ordered to pay around 3 million in damages to various production companies and were to serve a year behind bars. Currently, a company called Global Gaming Factory has plans to buy Pirate Bay, which is only adding to the pandemonium.

The Pirate Bay to Charge Users a Monthly Fee

Steven Finch — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:27:03 +0000

It was reported that The Pirate Bay was sold last month for $7.8 million. In the past few days there has been a lot more news about how The Pirate Bay will change within the new ownership and how they plan to turn the site into a legal entity.

The new owners GGF have appointed a new CEO Wayne Rosso who has previous experience in failing p2p services – came out with a few crucial additional details on the site’s future business model. osso said that under the new management, the 3.7 million Pirate Bay users (or whatever userbase remains) will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site.

The money collected from user subscriptions and advertising revenue will then be used to pay off the copyright holders. The exact monthly fee is yet to be decided, but Rosso did confirm that the more files people share, the lower it will be.

“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso told Cnet.

I dont really think that new owners GGF understand the concept behind The Pirate Bay and that the only reason the community uses the site is because it is free. Thus a Pirate Bay in which users have to pay is going to do little or no traffic compared to the current numbers and thus will have an impact on advertising revenues, thus them not being able to pay copyright holders and then losing content.

I think The Pirate Bay guys have the right idea about selling the site and then moving on to a completely new project like The Video Bay.

Vuze: Bittorrent Media Player That Lets You Download and Stream from the Internet

Dean — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:25:10 +0000

Vuze is a handy piece of kit that lets you stream or download videos from the internet. Similar to services already available such as MegaVideo, only now you have the added functionality of a media player, library and subscription services for podcasts and specific genres.

You download Vuze here (less than 10Mb) and install it in under five minutes. No need to restart your PC or do any complicated set up, so already it was in my good books. Upon opening the program for the first time I was greeted by a fairly simple interface that the average computer user could navigate. Search Bar, Library, Current Downloads and even a helpful ‘Getting Started’ section to guide you through the stages (although you really shouldn’t need it).

One thing that caught my eye was HD. Lucky for me, my new laptop was indeed HD compatible so I decided to search for a HD clip. I typed in ‘Public Enemies’ into the search bar and up popped a load of results. I could either watch the whole movie or simply a trailer. The HD quality was outstanding which surprised me as the download took less than a minute. Sound and playback quality was also top notch. No jumpy movies like you get with browser players.

Another section is ‘Devices’. Now, Vuze is fully compatible with a host of portable devices such as your iPod, iPhone, laptop, and other portables. It also works a treat on the PS3 and XBOX 360.

If you’re a videographer you can also publish your content on the Vuze network. This is great for publicizing your stuff to a large audience and also for Podcasts looking to branch out. It’s really easy to upload etc.. There are also special packages available for those uploading load of content to give them priority and good exposure on the Vuze Network.

One area I think that Vuze could improve is with the extra content. There should be a minimal browser built in to allow you to view the community pages without having to kick-start Firefox. This would give it a seamless affect and just be handy in general.

All things considered however, this is a spectacular piece of software and one I’ll be using a lot from now on. I think web based video torrents are having their final farewells. 9/10

The Pirate Bay Being Acquired for $7.8 Million

Steven Finch — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:44:32 +0000

It has been confirmed by the guys at The Pirate Bay that they are in the process of selling their site. Gaming company Global Gaming Factory X is in the process of acquiring The Pirate bay for $7.8 million (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

The story was broken by Torrentfreak and they are going to keep updating everyone once new information comes to light.

Global Gaming Factory X will not just acquire The Pirate Bay site but they will also acquire the file-sharing technology company Peerialism. Global Gaming Factory X claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world, so this technology will be a great addition to their company.

Global Gaming Factory X is also very interested in changing The Pirate Bay’s business model which will allow the compensation to the content providers and copyright owners.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO Global Gaming Factory X.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.

File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.

I find the amount of $7.8 million to be a little low, based upon The Pirate Bay having similar traffic numbers to Mininova which have 727 million pageviews per month. If each pageview could be monetized at $1.00 CPM (per 1000 views), then The Pirate Bay would be making $727,000 per month.

File Snatcher: Search File Sharing Sites like Rapidshare, Badongo, Mediafire for Free

Steven Finch — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:05:56 +0000

There are so many little search engine out there that help users search multiple sites in one simple search box. Here is a new search engine called File Snatcher. File Snatcher lets users search fiel sharing sites like Rapidshare, Badongo, Mediafire all for free. The search engine run through all of these sites and search for Mp3’s, videos, softare, movies, documents and photos.

The search engine itself isnt very accurate and they dont seem to have too much indexed, but it is a nice way to search for the files you are looking for very quickly. I like how at the bottom of the search engine they specifically says “this search engine is in no way intended for illegal downloads”. Now seriously im sure they are aware of why exactly this search engine is used!

BitBlinder: Free Anonymous Bittorrent Downloading

Steven Finch — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:12:55 +0000

Over at TorrentFreak they were the first to report on a new bittorrent startup like no other, BitBlinder. Most regular bittorrent users are always looking for the best way to hide themselves online and this just may be the answer.

BitBlinder is a new and free cross platform (Mac coming soon) open source project which not only claims to make anonymous BitTorrent transfers a reality but also hides your IP address while browsing the web. Its functionality also extends to the bypassing of some web filters and in the future will be compatible with more applications, such as email, IRC and instant messaging clients.

As one of its creators explains: “We want to make online anonymity fast, usable and ubiquitous to the point that organisations give up on spying and filtering us”.

It’s apparently not as fast as regular BitTorrent use, but it’s fast enough – and the key thing is that it’s free. Previously, using BitTorrent anonymously has involved paying to use a virtual private network (VPN). Among new features promised are the ability to avoid university and corporate firewalls, too.

Torrents.to: Search Various Torrent Search Engines in One Place

Steven Finch — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:39:31 +0000

This morning I came across another great torrent search engine that allows users to simply and easily search for torrents on various leading torrent sites. The site I’m talking about is Torrents.to.

Torrents.to allows users to search for torrents on various leading torrent search engines, such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, BTJunkie and over 150 others.

Additionally, Torrents.to also allows you to search specific torrent sites for specific mediums, such as Jamendo for Music, GamesTorrents for games and software.

Torrents.to runs as a search toolbar at the top of the page and when you are searching for a specific item you can then view the torrent page below and also click easily between torrent sites.

Torrents.to is a great search tool to help you find your torrents quicker and easier on various leading torrent search engines. For easy of use I think that Torrents.to is a much better product than competitors such as Sumotorrent.

Top 10 P2P File Sharing Clients and Applications

Steven Finch — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:28:37 +0000

Previously on Crenk we have discussed the top 5 bit torrent trackers and the top 5 tools for multi-search for torrents, but this time I thought I would go throught the top 10 peer-2-peer clients.

1) Bittorrent :

This is one of best, fastest, safe and widely used p2p program. Performance of BitTorrent is way better then any other available P2P programs.

Supported Operating System: Windows, Linux, Mac
Download Bittorrent Client

2) Limewire:

LimeWire is clean, safe, virus and malware free p2p software.it has build in media player with optimized search result.supportes download from multiple hosts.

Supported Operating System:

Windows, Linux, Mac
Download Limeware Client

3) Shareaza:

This was one of early p2p program when p2p was still new concept. It supports wide variety of networks like Gnutella, Gnutella2, EDonkey Network, BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP network protocols and which can handle magnet links, ed2k links, Piolet links, and the now deprecated Gnutella links.

Shareza has billions of users and uncountable numbers of files shared across shareaza network

Supported Operating System:

Windows XP, Vista
Download Shareaza Client

4) Kazaa:

Like Shareaza, Kaaza was one of best and most popular p2p during early days of p2p evolution. but in past few year due to many issues like virus infected files, lawsuite, spywares, Kazaa has lost its

popularity.

However kazaa has been continually trying to make Kazaa network virus and spyware free with many new features like built in virus scanner, infected file blocking made available in latest Kazaa Client to protect users.

Kazaa Lite is one of best client of Kazaa P2P network for file sharing.
Supported Operating System:

Windows XP, Vista
Download Kazaa Lite

5) iMesh:

iMesh another popular and

spyware, adware free
p2p file sharing with application multi language support. iMesh claims to have over 15 million FREE songs & videos Over 2 million original high quality songs licensed from the record labels.

Personally I liked iMesh for downloading music and videos but haven’t found it good for downloading any freeware software or application.

Supported Operating System:

Windows XP, Vista
Download iMesh Client for Windows

6) Bearshare Lite:

Bearshare is pretty good

p2p file sharing program with having pretty good user base and millions of files shared on Bearshare also supports for Multilanguage.

Bearshare is good for downloading music and mp3 files
Supported Operating System:

Windows XP, Vista
Download BearShare Client for Windows

7) eMule:

eMule is one of the biggest and most reliable peer-to-peer file sharing clients around the world thanks to its open source support and based on edonkey2000 client.

eMule has Multilanguage support with ability to connect to multiple servers and intelligent file corruption detection system to help you in getting genuine files. eMule is free from

spyware, adware and its completely free.

eMule is also available in portable form to run from your USB derive

Supported Operating System:

Windows XP, Vista
Download eMule Client

8 ) KCeasy:

KCeasy is client based on giFT

peer to peer file sharing protocol. This protocol improves the overall usability of peer to peer network, ability to downloads single file from multiple peers simultaneously. KCeasy supports multiple networks for file sharing.
Supported Operating System:

Windows XP, Vista
Download KCeasy

9) Ares Galaxy:

Ares is one of my favorite p2p program and I have been using it from last 4 years, ares network is not that much big as compared to other p2p but its completely free from viruses, spywares and adwares.

I haven’t got any infected files or corrupted installer. Ares List is used more then normal Ares client because of its low size, speed and performance.

Supported Operating system:

Windows XP, Vista
Download Ares for Windows

10) Soulseek:

Soluseek central server type of P2P file sharing application. Soluseek is good old

p2p file sharing program best of sharing music files. i haven’t tried soluseek ever but have heard that soluseek is best of music, audio, Mp3 file download.
Supported Operating system:

Windows XP, Vista
Download Souleseek Client

TorrentZen: The Live Bittorrent Search Engine

Steven Finch — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:46:13 +0000

Have you ever struggled to find the torrents you are looking for? This means that you have to travel to 10 different sites until you find something that vaguely looks like the right torrent! TorrentZen aims to come to your rescue. TorrentZen is a live bittorrent search engine that brings the results of some of your favourite bittorrent search engines.

TorrentZen works in the same way as other torrent tracks but instead of actually hosting pages with the results, they provide a link to those pages on other search engines. Therefore TorrentZen functions in the same basic way as a meta search engine.

Top 5 Multi-Search Tools for Find The Best Torrents

Steven Finch — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:00:12 +0000

Previously here on Crenk we have talked about the top torrent trackers on the web and this time I want to outline the top 5 multi-search torrent tools.

NowTorrents. Searches up to twelve sites at once. I like the file type tabs and health indicator, and they offer a Firefox and IE compatible search plugin.

uSniff. I wrote about uSniff before, and I use it quite often. I don’t really search a lot of different sites, usually just Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and they’re both supported (along with six others). The interface is clean and responds quickly – the search box throws some people off, though. I don’t understand why, it’s giant, orange, and says “search” on it. They also have a search plugin for IE and Firefox.

ScrapeTorrent. Offers a nice preference page and searches nine sites at once. Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and Demonoid are included, and they’re my go-to sites anyways. I approve!

Speckly. I hate the way it displays results: gobs and gobs of text, Google style, and all on one page. There aren’t any sorting options, though you can at least view by file type.

Torrentz. Technically it searches multiple sites, but you’ll get a general results page first. Clicking one of the results will take you to a listing of all the individual torrents. I find it an annoying process, and don’t use Torrentz as a result.

The Pirate Bay Launches Interactive Torrent Map

Steven Finch — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:39:14 +0000

Torrent giant The Pirate Bay has launched an interactive map showing where people are seeding and leeching torrents around the world, with data for every country giving a percentage of users, and how many connections are going through that country.

It’s a Google Maps mash-up, which is already serving up some fascinating data. “In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region,” claims TorrentFreak, which reported the news.

Google Ads Appear on Isohunt and TorrentFreak Gets Details a little Wrong

Steven Finch — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:39:22 +0000

Today it was repoted by Torrentfreak that according to a report in the Norwegian press today, some companies have reacted uncomfortably to the news that their Google Adwords text ads have been appearing on IsoHunt, the world’s third largest BitTorrent site.

Google has a policy of not displaying ads on sites that are involved in or linked to copyright infringement, with many torrent sites previously excluded from the scheme. Of course, some still carry Google ads, purely because Google is unaware of the nature of those sites, but with IsoHunt the situation is different. On IsoHunt the Google ads aren’t directly served by Google, but by Ask.com, a Google AdWords ‘reseller’.

Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, works with several other BitTorrent sites. Only on IsoHunt have they displayed search based ads that came from Google AdWords campaigns. They have been doing so for several months, perhaps years, but up until now nobody complained, or knew.

In a statement, Jan-Henrik Ohme, head of digital marketing at Sony BMG said “We have stopped the section of the campaign that goes to the third party until Google cleans up the issues. We have contacted Google, and they took immediate action.”

For its part, Google Norway has apologized for the situation, and said that the advertisers should not be held responsible for the placement of the ads, since due to the 3rd party involvement, they had no way of knowing where they would appear. The campaigns are not limited to Norway though, and Ask.com certainly has something to explain to Google.

This situation was bound to happen but some of the companies dont really understand why it happened. Ask.com was only allowed to have their ads on Isohunt because the deal they started with Google was done after the Isohunt deal. Thus, Google allowed all historical deals to continue as normal. Therefore, it is impossible to now have Google ads on new bittorrent related sites.

Additionally, the ads are not done through Ask.com, they are from Ask.co.uk. This is because Ask.com sell their own adwords type program still and Ask.co.uk controls the Google Adwords reseller program.

The Pirate Bay Launches a Free Video Converter and Toolbar

Steven Finch — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:11:56 +0000

The Pirate Bay is at it again but this time they are actually offering something useful to its users. The Pirate Bay’s new offering is a ViO converters which reduces AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV and others videos to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality, and claims to do it faster than any other converter.

The ViO converter is currently completely free and pre-configured for popular mobile devices.

Additionally the Pirate Bay are offering an optional toolbar that can be installed. The toolbar is a dynamic video directory guide of all streaming video sites on the net, featuring a tube site ripper, powerful media search engine and one-click access to ViO video converter straight from your browser!

TorrentAds Launches: Worlds First Bittorrent Only Advertising Network

Steven Finch — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:22:03 +0000

TorrentAds is the worlds first Torrent tracker/search related advertising network. TorrentAds brings together some of the worlds largest websites in the Torrent sector and allows advertisers to target their audience easily and effectively.

TorrentAds is currently working with various Bittorrent sites in which serves over 500 million monthly pageviews and growing.

Bittorrent sites are growing at a rapid pace and look for them to become more dominant in the near future. Normally advertisers are happy to advertise on these types of site, however they are still classed as legal and their users defintely worth advertising too.

Random Posts

Top 5 Bit Torrent Trackers on the Net

Steven Finch — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:07:31 +0000

Bit Torrent search engines have been in the news a lot lately. There have been always issues with sites like the Pirate Bay who find it really hard to get out of the news, and with a blog called TorrentFreak you are now able to track all this new instantly. Below are the top 5 bit torrent trackers if you are looking to get your hands on all the free music, games or movies you can get.

Isohunt.com – If you want to use this tremendous Canadian site, you better use it while you can. Note: any torrent listed as “ISOhunt release” means that it is a file verified by the administrators…a nice feature to help you get authentic torrents, not fake files.)

The Pirate Bay – by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay also has an immense database of 600,000+ torrents, the single largest database available on the web.

Torrentspy.com – March 24, 2008: Torrentspy has voluntarily closed its doors. Instead of conforming to the American court mandates to change their privacy policies, the Torrentspy team has opted instead to cease operations. A sad day for downloaders everywhere.

Torrentscan.com – (a meta-search engine: Torrenscan is a search engine that searches other torrent search engines)

Bitsoup – Bitsoup is a growing favorite amongst P2P downloaders. As the trend towards private torrent sharing continues, you will need to signup and join as a member to participate in the Bitsoup swarm.

P.S. Mininova should probably be in the list, but I thought I would let you find new services than just the biggest.

Bittorrent Sites Still On The Rise, But Will The Internet Ever Get Control Back?

Steven Finch — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:05:18 +0000

As we all know Bittorrent sites are on the rise and continue to grow. That being said I thought I would just write a short but sweet article about this growth and try to work out if the internet and piracy is ever going to get control of these sites. Every month it seems as though there is a new bittorrent site on the net, but at the same time we keep hearing about torrent sites being taken down and people getting sued for piracy. That all being said is anyone going to take control of these types of sites on the internet and either change the world piracy laws or simply just allow them to exist and work out was to monetize their content for the content providers.

Currently, in Alexa there are 3 bittorrent sites in the top 120 worldwide, these sites are ThePirateBay.org, Mininova.org and isohunt.com. These sites are all run on the same basic premise, whatever you want is available for FREE. Below I have published the Compete graph which shows the basic traffic trends of all these sites, obviously rising at a steady pace. That being said Compete still has no grip at all on the traffic numbers for these sites, because they are probably about 100 times more than what they are on Compete.

Since these sites are so on the rise, how come they arent getting more widely accepted? Organisation like the IFPI and MPAA think that heavy handed tactics can get these sites shutdown and offline, but we all know deep down that is never going to happen. Now that is mainly never going to happen because of the piracy laws. Currently, the piracy laws are different in nearly every country in the world and these organisations and governments still havent realised that the Internet (in law terms) shouldnt be thought of differently in each country, but should really be through of as its own country. The internet should have its own universal laws that control the entire system, because otherwise the same cycle is going to happen for a long time to come.

Im not really anti bittorrent sites and im not totally the other way either. I just think the governments need to get their act together and start thinking of the internet as its own specific territory, and then these bittorrent sites would have to stick to these laws. Until that time bittorrents arent illegal and they are totally here to stay!

Torrent Relay: Simplifying The Bittorrent Process

Steven Finch — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:10:19 +0000

Bittorrent traffic is currently at an all time high with 3 bittorrent sites inside the top 120 on Alexa. There popularity is unquestionable and they will be around for a long time to come, but currently this smart file sharing service is a little difficult for beginners.

That being said a new site called TorrentRelay simplifies the entire bittorrent process. TorrentRelay helps to convert downloaded urls into links in which can be downloaded from within any internet browser. This site is unique because it allows newbies to get their torrents without having to install any extra software. No installations allows this service to be run on any computer, mobile or games console.

There currently is only one problem with this service and it is that users can only downoad files up to 400mb in size, once this can be lifted then torrents with be available to even more of the internet populations without having tech issues.