Bittorent - How does it work?

I would like to think I have gotten better with time in doing what I want and need to do on a PC, but something new has come up I need some help with.

What is Bittorent? How does it work and what do I need to do to get files from Bittorent?

The reason I ask is because I found all the episodes from "The Office" BBC on a Bittorent site for my iPod, but I have no clue how to download them and such.

Can someone please explain this a bit more and help me better understand what I might need to do to successfully download these episodes?

Thanks in advance!

 

Here's a good overview for you Tom: http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/#what

It works like any other peer-to-peer file sharing program but it allows very large files to be efficiently distributed to a very large amount of people. Thus, what it does is that, as a file becomes more popular, it becomes easier to download by giving that file more space/bandwidth on the bit torrent server.

 

Thanks a lot Mike! It is making more sense now. I will read that tutorial and download the program later this weekend at home. I will let you know how it goes. Thanks again!

 

I like the download available at bittorrent.com as I haven't had problems with it yet. A great site to find torrents is mininova.org and when choosing which file to download look for the one with the most seeds.

 

I really like a program called Azureus for my client. It can be found on http://azureus.sourceforge.net/. It has a nice MAC client for us OSX lovers out there.

If you have a firewall of some sort at home, don't forget to allow the specific port whatever program you use for it through, for Azureus it's 52525, I think. Doing so will give you a more solid connection and quicker download times.

My personal bias is still using old school Usenet with GrabIt.