what is a torrent?

Question

as in something to do with downloading?

Answer 1

It is a type of file used for downloading. You need a program like BitTorrent to use them.

Basically what the torrent is, is a file that looks for other people who are hosting the file you want. Similarly to a P2P program like Kazaa or Limewire, you download directly from other people. The difference is that rather than searching for other people on the program, they search for other people who are:
1. running the program (such as BitTorrent)
2. hosting the file (they have completely downloaded it and are allowing it to stay open so that others can download it from them)

This way of downloading can be very effective for popular files. If a lot of people are hosting them, you can often get very fast downloads from a lot of people at once, making your download quick and easy. It is a way of getting around having to chop the file into pieces to upload it to a free service like Rapidshare or Megaupload, which makes the downloads take forever.

The downside of this is that if the file is not popular, there will be nobody hosting it, and you will not be able to find it anywhere. Fewer people host torrents than have their files available on Kazaa/Limewire type programs.

The upside versus Kazaa/Limewire type programs is that there is very low risk of viruses and spyware. Those other programs come bundled with lots of garbage you don't want, but BitTorrent is free and doesn't put garbage on your computer. You can also be sure that the file is what it says it is, unlike other programs.

Answer 2

Bit Torrent (and its clones) is a program which allow you to share files between computers on the Internet. It is often used to share music, movies and other material for free. (Which is illegal to do). A Torrent file is a small file used by the Bit Torrent program to find computers that have the file you want and download it. The Torrent file itself is small and can be downloaded in seconds. It has the instruction to then download the music, movie, etc, that you want. Downloading that may take minutes, hours, or even days depending on the size of the file and how many people are sharing it.

Answer 3

A torrent is a file that is downloaded to your machine, if u opne it in a program like uTorrent it will begin to download from other compuers around the workld small parts of a big file (movie, music etc) until the whole thing is complete.

Answer 4

A Torrent is a file, that programs such as BitTorrent, BitComet, uTorrent, and others use to download the file or files that the Torrent file represents.

Answer 5

BitTorrent is a computer program developed by Bram Cohen and BitTorrent, Inc. used for uploading and downloading files via the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent was the first client written for the protocol. BitTorrent is often nicknamed Mainline by developers denoting its official origins. Version 4.20 of the client was dubbed Allegro by BitTorrent Inc., in reference to protocol extensions developed by the company to accelerate download performance and ISP manageability. BitTorrent is written in Python. Its source code, as of version 4.0, has been released under the BitTorrent Open Source License, a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License; BitTorrent is therefore free software. Versions up to and including 3.4.2 were distributed under the MIT license. More on Wiki - link below.

Answer 6

All of the above answers are true. What no-one has mentioned is that most of the content if highly illegal. And movies, music, computer software etc is pirated material. Some TV shows are probably ok as most newer ones are available over the internet anyway. Just don't risk it.

Answer 7

Sounds like a downloading programme

Answer 8

it is a place you use to download anime, i say don't do torrents it can get alot of trojans on your computer, i say use tv links (look it up on google it should something like tvlinks.co.uk or sumthin), they have all the anime you can think of.

Answer 9

It,s what you have first thing in the morning