is bit torrent worth it?

[mlbt]

Everyone raves about it, but I find the choice of media quite poor, and find older programs such as limewire, even tho theyre a little slower, much more useful.

Am I looking at the wrong sites, could someone explain what all the fuss is about? Are there decent sites that im avoiding ,Im just not seeing the benefit of p2p.

Ta all.........

[vehelpfulguy]

limewire and the like is fairly good for downloading individual songs or short video clips.

And even then it is a bit hit-and-miss and they can easily be mis-labelled

bittorrent is great for downloading whole CDs (or even sets of CDs) and whole films.

I recently downloaded a whole audio book that comes on 15 CDs in one go from bittorrent.

[vehelpfulguy]

http://thepiratebay.org/

[aceizace]

Ahh, but limewire is p2p! At the core bittorrent and limewire work in very simmilar ways, you connect to other people who are sharing the file and copy it across. The difference is that limewire has a search built in, and you share your entire library by default, whereas torrents have to be found externally (I recommend www.isohunt.com as well as the pirate bay) and you generally only share it until you've uploaded as much as you've downloaded (or thereabouts).

So why do I personally think torrents are better? I guess because torrents have a much shorter life, which sounds bad but is actually good. With limewire if you download a dud file most people just forget about it, but with torrents you would stop sharing it straight away, meaning that the dud files die out quickly, and the good ones live longer, although perhaps not as long as on limewire.

The problem you seem to be having is finding stuff to start with, check out those websites. It's true that the integrated search in limewire makes it slightly simpler, but torrents are quicker in the long run due to there usually only being a few (less than 10) versions of a file so they go faster (same number of people sharing, less versions), and you're less likely to get junk so long as you just go for the torrents with a high number of seeds.

One other thing, can I promote buying real DVDs, CDs and programs as well? The quality is far better in the case of video, and either way you get a case, a booklet, etc. And even if it isn't much, some of that money you paid goes to the author, and they deserve it. Of course, if a company decides not to make something comercially available, well, then what can you do? :-p

[LostSheep]

Try http://www.torrentspy.com/ as well