When I first heard about BitTorrent, I immediately went to the official BitTorrent website to try to understand how it works. Somehow it seems a little complicated compared to Peer-2-Peer. P2P such as limewire is way easier because all I need is a client, search for what I am looking for and then download. Everything is done from the P2P client.
As for Torrent, I need to find out which bittorrent client suits me the best, what are the tracker sites I can use to search, what are seeders, peers, leechers, and finally how to optimize the bittorrent client in order to obtain the best download speed. Bittorrent is already very popular but there are still people asking me how it works.
Yesterday one of my friend who isn’t so good in computers wanted to download OpenOffice but he somehow he wasn’t able to download from the direct link. Another alternative to download OpenOffice is by using BitTorrent but the problem is he has never used BitTorrent. Instead of complicating him more, here is how I easily got him downloading OpenOffice using BitTorrent.
Torrent2Exe is a free web based service that can convert a .torrent file into an executable file. You usually have to install a client on your PC to download files shared with BitTorrent. However, you’ll do perfectly well without the client if you use Torrent2exe. What I did for my friend was I converted the OpenOffice.torrent file into an executable file and send it to him. He then runs it and it will automatically start downloading. How simple is that? If you still don’t get it, see the steps below.
1. I go to OpenOffice.org to download the OOo_2.4.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent file.
2. I then upload the OOo_2.4.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent file to Torrent2exe to have it converted to an executable file. The converted executable filename becomes t2e.exe
3. I send the t2e.exe to my friend and he runs it.
4. OpenOffice starts downloading.
You can either upload the .torrent file from your computer or specify the URL of the torrent file to have it converted to executable. I found a small problem on the URL function. When the URL of the torrent file contains reserved or excluded characters such as ] [ = ? & < > etc, it will show a 404 Not Found error when it tries to convert the torrent file to exe. When this happens, you’ll need to manually change the escape sequence to normal characters.
For example, Little_Voice_%5B2007%5D.torrent. You will need to replace the %5B and %5D to [ and ] respectively. You can refer to the chart below to know which escape sequence is for which character.
Very simple isn’t it? If you have a website or blog and you offer downloads via torrent, you can provide both torrent file and executable file for you visitor’s convenient. I am sure basic computer users would appreciate it.