If you’ve heard about downloading movies off the Internet, but don’t quite know how it’s done, this is the article for you.

When most people talk about downloading movies, they’re talking about using BitTorrent. Sorry to get just slightly technical, but it’s useful to know just a modicum of terminology relating to the subject, in the same way it’s useful to know the difference between an engine and a transmission when if you’re going to be driving a car.

What Is BitTorrent?

Normally, when you go to a website, you download the home page (or other pages) directly. Your web browser tells the website server that it wants a certain file, and the file gets sent in its entirety to you. A single server sends files to many clients (computers that are downloading).

BitTorrent is different, though. It uses what’s called peer-to-peer model. Each computer is a peer because no one computer is only a server or only a client. Rather, each computer serves part of the file in question, and also downloads parts too. The process of a a file being downloaded in this way is called a “torrent” because, like a rainstorm, it’s composed of many different small parts flowing together.

It’s a cooperative enterprise, and, of course, to get started, you have to download a bit from some peers before you begin to share.

It’s normally considered polite to upload at least as much as you’ve downloaded.

Downloading Through BitTorrent

To do direct downloads from websites, you use a web browser. To do shared downloads through BitTorrent, you use a BitTorrent client.

There’s one more thing you need: After you decide on what movie you want to download, you have to get a torrent file. This is a file, about 100 KB in size, with file extension of .torrent. It contains information that allows the BitTorrent client to identify the torrent and the names of files included in the torrent. (There may be more than one file included, such as subtitles.)

There are a number of BitTorrent clients from easy to advanced, like Azureus, Transmission, and Deluge.

But since this is an introduction, I’ll just be covering the absolute simplest BitTorrent client, Miro.

Installing Miro

Miro is a program that allows you to easily download and watch video podcasts. But it’s also the simplest BitTorrent program available. Miro is free and open source software.

To get started, go to http://www.getmiro.com/download/ . The Miro website will detect if you’re running Windows, Linux, or Mac and offer you the appropriate version for your computer.

If you’re using Firefox in Ubuntu and you have the universe repository enabled, just click here to install Miro.

For Windows, download the installer and run it. You can go through a default installation, or specify custom options. Be aware that, in a default installation, the installer will set Ask.com as your Internet Explorer homepage along with installing an Ask toolbar. Here is a more detailed walkthrough on installing Miro, if you need it.

Using Miro

When you open Miro, the window is divided into the main viewing portion and the sidebar, where you choose an action.

For now, we want to go to the Sites portion in the sidebar. Click on LegalTorrents. This is a website (legaltorrents.com) that offers fully legal downloads of various kinds. The files are being torrented by their creators.

When you click on LegalTorrents, the website opens in the main Miro viewer. Find a movie you like, and click on it to go it’s detail page. >From there, click on Download.

That’s all you have to do. Miro starts downloading the torrent immediately. What happened behind the scenes is that you downloaded a .torrent file, and Miro used it to find and participate in the torrent.

You can also find torrents outside of Miro. For example, you could use Internet Explorer (or Firefox) to find and save the torrent file. The way things are set up in a default installation of Miro on Windows, you only have to click on the .torrent file, and Miro will start the download.

Another place to find torrents is on Google. Note: You should only download torrents that are legal to download whereever you happen to live.

Playing Downloaded Movies

While a movie is downloading, there’s a count of current downloads in orange in the sidebar:

Once the torrent is downloaded, a little green “1? appears in the Library/Video section of the sidebar to indicate that one downloaded video is available. To play it, just click on the play button:

The movie plays right inside Miro:

You can make the movie full screen if you want to (click the full screen icon). If you want to set Miro options or download another movie while the first one is playing, click pop out. The movie player separates from the rest of Miro:

You don’t need an external movie player, but if you want to play it in another application, select the movie in the list of downloads, right click, and choose View: File in Explorer.

Advanced BitTorrenting

That’s it for basic downloading of movies through BitTorrent!

Miro is a really simple and easy-to-use BitTorrent client when you’re getting started. Once you’ve used it for a while, you may be ready for more power. That’ll be the subject of future articles, though. Be sure to subscribe to both the What’s Good Blog RSS Feed and Digitivity.org RSS Feed to watch for this and related content:

• Day/night scheduling. Some ISPs have different speeds at night vs. day. How to take advantage of this.
• Throttling. Some ISPs try to block BitTorrent. How to avoid throttling.
• Avoiding ads. Blocking annoying ads.
• Avoiding bad peers. Some peers, for whatever reason, give out bad data which slows your download.
• Specifying where to save downloads. Miro saves all its files where it wants to. If you want to organize your downloads, you’ll have to step up to a more powerful BitTorrent client.
• How to get better download speeds. Small settings changes can have a big effect on your download speeds.
• and more.

Disclaimer: What’s Good Blog and Digitivity.org do not endorse the use of torrents to download illegal files. Torrents are only allowed to be used to download legal movies. What’s Good Blog and Digitivity.org cannot be held responsible if you intend to use torrents for illegal purposes.

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