Discovering BitTorrent

keeping with the general interest threads (and i like them, as i'd rather read
long threads about people than even longer threads requesting shows,) i thought
it'd be interesting to find out how everyone came to discover bittorrent. i'm
sure we've all found bittorrent/eztv through a variety of different paths. so
let's hear 'em.

for me, i first discovered file-sharing from using ftp warez sites, where one
was required to upload a specific ratio of content before being granted access
to download.

from then i moved to napster (when it was free) which was later locked-down by
the powers that be.

after that i went through a stage of various different p2p applications, before
settling with shareaza, then a few of my friends introduced me to the gem that
is bittorrent.

i think the first (and only) index i used was suprnova.org, and after that i
discovered btefnet. after suprnova shut down, i moved to mininova and found the
bnbt tracker. then there were some private trackers before btefnet closed
operations, from there it was bt-chat, vtv and then bnbt changed to eztv (i
believe).

which brings me to now, i regularly use eztv, mininova, bt-chat, demonoid and
revolution tt.

heh...i just cant write that much

first on kazaa and other crap p2p programs
then irc
and now irc 5% / torrents 95%

i grab most of my stuff from private sites as they provide faster releases most
of the time and very good speeds because of ratio's that need to be kept.

but this place is nice as it keeps track of my favorite shows :d

i agree. i reserve the private tracker to my more favourite tv shows (24,
heroes, lost) -- so i can grab them in a few minutes. the shows with lesser
priority i get from here.

it would be great to have a standard download, ie. multi-rar's or just avi. i
have no problem with either, but it'd be nice to grab from a private tracker and
help seed here too.

well i believe my first download would have been back in 2001ish. i googled
star trek enterprise, trying to find a way to get it 3yrs earlier than
television, and somehow came accross a board that had people talking about
downloading it,
i asked for one of them to record to vhs and mail 2 me, but he did one better,
he hooked me up with some dos based file sharing *frantically searches for r e
a l l y old back up cd's* ok, it involved using java, vgcp, and winrar, the
idea was you typed some commands into this dos screen, and it would start
downloading the file in 5mb pieces, once all were down, obviously (now) use
winrar to unzip.

i believe it was only for star trek, and all the files were spread out with
users using their 5mb free storage given with most dial up plans at the time,
@56k it was a painfully slow process, and as it happens, was shut down before
i got the last 5mb piece. .

as it turned out, a friend sent me the mpg on a cpl of discs, it was then i
discovered morpheus, and then moved to kazaa

still slow going with dial-up but through file names also discovered emule, by
this time had gotten my broadband, and started to get the part 2's to those
season cliffhangers ,

i discovered bittorrent also by file names that included a phrase
like 'downloaded from asite.org' so google to the rescue again, downloaded bt
of brams site, at first, being a newb, thought it wasn't any good and deleted
it, but after a few weeks tried it again, this time with all the right
settings, and the rest is history

google seemed to be my way around, sometime discovering filesoup forum, and
then went directly to tvtorrents at efnet as well as i think btefnet. filesoup
kept us up to date will all the address changes until finally they both died.

*edit just for interest sake, these were the days when the first release of a
show was a larger vcd conversion of the file the .avi would follow much later*

supanova, torrentspy, and more recently mininova were my main haunts for
anything that didn't turn up in filesoup, but like a lot of you, have been
coming directly to eztv and vtv for lots of months now (i'd like to say cpl of
years, but its all a blur)

also got into tvt 2 mnths ago, which has been good for older, hard to find
shows from the dark ages

dam forgot to put in the clients, from original bt went to bit tornado, then
az and been useing ut for bout 6-8 months.

but needless to say, when i get home from work and press that ie7 button on
the task bar, it opens with 2 tabs one for here and the other loads vtv (along
with about 6 pop unders) but honestly, there is no need to go anywhere else
for my daily fix of all the current shows


well ctu_bauer, you said you wanted a long one


thanks again to all involved at eztv

i too have been around a while.
i started on audiogalaxy. from there to many other temporary installs of sharing
software till i eventually got to bit lord.
got sick of it and now use utorrent.
i used to have only dial-up speeds.
thats downloading at !!! 5k per second !!! i used to be overjoyed if it got to
6k per second.i used torrentspy and isohunt mostly until i stumbled across eztv.
now i hardly leave.

all hail the iron fish.

hahah! i remember dial-up, and leaving *webpages* downloading overnight. now i
complain if an episode of '24' takes longer than 10 minutes to download =)

and the dos/5mb downloads sounds like heaps of fun! imagine how cluttered the
boards would be here if that were the case today. "request: 30th '5mb' file of
prison break s02e20 -- when will it be up! lol!?"

started back in the bbs days on a 300baud modem... tree grew from there. 🙂