Creating and publishing a torrent file
Any person, who wishes to share a file over the torrent protocol, first creates a torrent file for that file. The facility of creating a torrent file is available with most torrent clients. We will look into setting up a torrent client on your computer in some detail in the coming section. The torrent file contains the information about
tracker, a computer that co-ordinates the file distribution. The torrent creation, also allows the file to be treated in several pieces of sizes typically ranging between 64KB and 4MB. Any person having the torrent file and any piece of the file requested is called a
peer for sharing that file. The person who first creates a torrent for any file is said to be an
initial seeder. Persons who have all the pieces of the files along with the torrent file are called
seeders. Torrent files once created are then registered with a tracker. The tracker maintains a list of all peers and seeders for every particular torrent.
Torrent download
Numerous search engines, allowing users to look for their torrent of interest, exist. Anyone interested in downloading any file using this protocol can look for the torrents and download it from there. Some commonly used torrent search engines are piratebay.org and isohunt.org. You can also try the
custom Torrent search engine here to look for torrent files of your interest.
Sharing Files
Once the torrent file has been downloaded it has to be run in a BitTorrent client. The client then connects to the tracker to collect the information about all the peers having pieces of the file. BiTorrent client uses techniques to download the pieces of the file in the most efficient manner. At any time, the client can be connected to several peers downloading different pieces of the file. This is one reason why an incompletely downloaded file like a video file cannot be run, because the file is not available in a continuous manner. Even when the client might have downloaded only one piece of the file, it can start sharing this with other peers in the network. Torrent file sharing hence, is different from conventional, HTTP file sharing in many regards.