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A New BitTorrent Downloader

Lets websites offer large files, easily downloaded, using a small fraction of the bandwidth.


BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer system that works well for large files. Instead of searching on a network like typical peer-to-peer software, users download a small .torrent file from a website. The torrent file tells the BitTorrent application where to find computers that are hosting the large file you are looking for. In many ways, it’s a better user experience than most filesharing software— download begins with a single click from a website, rather than a tedious search process. The BitTorrent Easy Download System that we made for this site, includes BitTorrent software and a .torrent file. It let's users being downloading a large file with a single download.

During the Grey Tuesday online protest, several sites offered .torrent files so that people could get the Grey Album without overwhelming central servers. Unfortunately, most internet users don’t have BitTorrent, and downloading it, installing it, and then getting the torrent file was too much hassle for the average user. But Grey Tuesday also showed how important p2p systems like BitTorrent are, because many of the sites that were hosting the Grey Album directly on their servers were overwhelmed by download traffic. If everyone was using BitTorrent, bandwidth wouldn't have been a problem.

When we decided to make BannedMusic.org, we knew we needed a peer-to-peer distribution system that was as easy as a direct download. The goal of BannedMusic.org was to make suppressed music available to everyone. We certainly didn't have enough bandwidth to host large music archives that could potentially be in very high demand, so it had to be p2p. On the other hand, if the system for getting the music was too complicated or too much hassle for people who had never used filesharing software, that narrowed our potential audience and compromised our goal of extreme accessibility.

The best solution seemed to be a simple modification of BitTorrent: an installer that runs BitTorrent and begins download of an included torrent file. Windows users can click on the “Easy Download” button on an album’s download page to get a 3mb executable. When they launch this executable it installs BitTorrent (which happens very quickly in the background) and immediately begins downloading the album they were seeking. After they've used the “easy download” once, they can simply click on the .torrent files to begin downloading. And they'll be able to use other sites that require BitTorrent.

The easy downloader consists of the BitTorrent software along with the .torrent file for the large download, all wrapped in a Nullsoft installer program.

1. First you'll have to make a torrent file, and upload the file to a tracker. There's a good tutorial on how to do that right here. Then download the latest version of BitTorrent here, and install it on your computer.

2. Download and install the Nullsoft installer (NSIS). Find it here.

3. Download our Easy Download NSIS file, and follow the instructions on how to customize the installer for your torrent.

That’s it.

There are a number of ways that this system could be improved to make downloading even smoother and creating a downloader even simpler. We hope that people will pursue some of these ideas (ordered from simplest to best).

-If BitTorrent were registered as a plugin (like Realplayer or Flash) users could click on a download link in any browser and if they didn't have bittorrent already they'd be forwarded to a place where they could get it. This seems like an easy initial step to spreading BitTorrent.

-Instead of being bundled with a full client (about 3mb), the torrent file could be packaged with a script that downloaded the latest version of BitTorrent from a site like Sourceforge. This could reduce bandwidth costs to the host by two orders of magnitude, and it would be pretty easy to do.

-A BitTorrent client written specifically for this purpose could have a smaller initial download size and could have a built-in and streamlined process for creating the easy downloader.

-A BitTorrent client that ran as a Java applet could begin downloads with a single click, in a browser, without installing any software.

-The most complete solution would be full integration of BitTorrent into an open-source web browser like Mozilla.

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