Gems

Hello,

Im addicted to Heroes, Prison break and Lost. (Have to admit now preferring Heroes to Lost)

Anyway Ive found when they air in the USA. But when do they air in Australia and what channels?

USA dates:
Prison Break 3 - September 17
Heroes - September 24
Lost - Feb 2008! (What, thats ages away! )

I was in a non english speaking country so usually watch them all online the day after they air in the USA. But now Im in WA hoping to see them on the tv.

Anyone know what channels I can see them and when they air here? Hoping its near the USA dates and not months away. Finding Foxtel a big let down, and hardly anything decent to watch.

GEMS

stevemich

They are all channel 7 here in Sydney - and they are advertising a lot of new series as being shown almost immediately after they have been aired in the US.

Hutch

Yep - to combat the downloaders. Like me. If they don't air the same time here, I snag 'em off the torrents.

emmyjc1

I can't understand how to use torrents. I wanted to download the X Factor

Hutch

I sent this small guide via PM a while back ... might help ...

To download TV shows, movies or whatever you need to use a Torrent program.

Torrents are a cool way of downloading stuff which means that there isn't one single place you get a file from - but rather you download little bits from everyone else that's downloading. Movies or whatever are split into little chunks by the software and you might get one bit from a bloke in France, one bit from a bloke in America and so on. But all of that stuff happens in the background and is invisible to you - just helps to understand it when you wonder why things download the way they do. So ... to download you need a torrent program - bit of software that orchestrates all the different pieces, assembles the TV show for you and deposits it in the directory of your choosing.

The torrent files you find on all the websites are little more than placeholders which tell your download software where to find all the different bits and pieces. This confuses a lot of people - they go to a torrent site - click on the link to download - it takes all of five seconds and they wonder whats going on. All that initial download is, is the placeholder file that looks for all the segments that make up the TV show or whatever.

So - probably the best torrent software is uTorrent, which you can get here. Install it and then run it. Now we need to get a file. British TV shows can be found here. Software, films and stuff can be found here. You'll need to register to use the first site, but not the second one.

Pick a show you like the look of on thebox site by clicking on the Browse option. Then click on the title of the show. You'll see a description of the show and possibly some comments from people about it. At the top of that page you'll see 'Download' and next to it a link. Click on that link and a uTorrent window will pop up. Click OK and it'll start downloading.

The speed that torrents download depends entirely on how many people are sharing the file. If only three people are sharing it'll take a while - if more than 100 are, it'll be fairly quick. It won't download at one uniform speed either - they normally start off really slowly and then gather pace.

You can monitor the download in the main uTorrent window. If you look at that window you'll see two columsn - one's named 'Seeds' and one is 'Peers. Seeds are people who have downloaded the whole file and are simply sharing - Peers are people who are still downloading, but are also sharing.

Generally speaking you're supposed to share as much as you download - so if you've downloaded at 500Mb TV show, you're supposed to let uTorrent upload 500Mb too. However. It's only the sites you have to register for (such as TheBox) that you have to care about that for. If you download from Mininova you can stop the file uploading as soon as you've finished its download. Not exactly the done thing to do, but bandwidth is precious.

Once a file's finished downloading (and if you've uploaded as much as you want to in order to keep your ratio high at sites like The Box), you can click on its name in the main uTorrent window and hit the delete key to remove it. This will not delete the actual TV show or whatever, just the torrent details from within uTorrent. As long as a file remains in that main uTorrent window it will continue 'seeding'. If you let it, uTorrent will use *all* your upstream bandwidth, which can make things very slow for web browsing and the like - so you can either limit it, or just leave it going overnight (which is what I do). If you want to limit the upload speed, so you can browse the web etc without slow-downs, open uTorrent and go to Options > Preferences > Connection ... and in the bottom right where it says 'Global maximum upload rate' set it to 10. This won't harm the speed things download at - just the amount of upstream bandwidth you donate to sharing the files.

stevemich

I am with you there - but Hutch's earlier post puts it really well, and even I understand them now!!

Now that Mininova site is awesome!! Although it is always worth reading the comments section before you download the torrent, as you can get some really bad quality stuff, films thatr end 10 mins early or some odd file versions that you have to root around to find software to play it...

Oh, and always try to go for the version that has a lot of/the most seeds, as this means you are not reliant on 1 or 2 people with the seed to be online to complete your download...

Goodluck!