jb1sprint;968975; said:
Hello all, new member here... always wanted to find a way to download old Buckeye games, and saw a link on the o-zone about this site. I have downloaded Azureus and was successful at d/l a couple CD's just to test out the program. I'm really excited about these Buckeye games, but really just don't understand the whole torrent deal with the seeing, etc.
I have a computer which is online 24/7 - high speed internet - but can someone point me to an explanation of the whole concept here with the download sites, what is seeding and how does it work, etc. Once I get a handle on things, and get some games downloaded, I'll be happy to help others with the seeding and whatever else you need to be able to download games.
Thanks in advance (and sorry for being such a rookie at this stuff - I'm a quick learner though!)
Imagine a regular download: you have one PC sending, and one PC receiving. After this download is completed, another PC requests the file, the sender must send again, and so on and so on. Propagation of the file is dependent on one host of the file always being available.
Torrents are a peer filesharing system. A torrent is a file that is broken into many, many smaller pieces, and those pieces are tagged as file parts with checksums to ensure they're transmitted completely. At first, there is only one host (or seed) that sends the file pieces. As these pieces go out over the network, the receiving computers in turn re-broadcast the parts they've completed as being available for download. The net effect is that once enough people participate (a swarm), there are enough fragments out on the net to recreate the original file, even in the event the original host disappears. Everybody essentially shares the responsibility of hosting at the same as downloading.
Put it in this context ...
Lets say you and 599 other people wanted to download 600 different songs Elvis recorded. The "traditional" alternative was everybody stood in line and took turns downloading all 600 songs from one source all in one shot. The source sent 600 songs 600 times each, and you and all the clients only "leeched."
The methodology of a torrent is that you and your 599 peers all download one different song each from the source, then duplicate all the other data amongst yourselves, while the original host (or seed) would now be free to host something else.
Better use of bandwidth and Internet resources ...
A seed is a PC that has a full copy of the data and is now re-offering it for download (re-seeding) as the original host had done.