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CF: Yeah, that's right at Pwop, we distribute all of our content with BitTorrent as an option and we've put together a bunch of Pwop ambassadors of which Scott is one, and these guys basically have some decent bandwidth, doesn't have to be huge bandwidth, but you know cable modem bandwidth. And they've put together a BitTorrent client that's looking at all of the feeds that we offer. And so basically whenever we publish any new show, these guys have agreed to, you know, download it and seed it and so what we end up with is for every show we have a at least 25-30 seeds. And then on top of that we've got, you know, more people that aren't Pwop ambassadors, that are just using BitTorrent, and using it correctly. And we also stagger the RSS, so that when we first publish a show, all of the ...only the ambassadors get access to it and when they're seeded about a half-an-hour later then we actually publish the main feed and everybody else who's looking at it gets it really, really fast.

SH: Right, so the fastest way to get any of the shows, including this one, is with BitTorrent. One of the problems, of course, is that BitTorrent uses a lot of ports and often times most corporate offices won't allow BitTorrent.

CF: Right.

SH: So BitTorrent for you as a personal protocol...as something that you'll use at home...

CF: Yeah.

SH: ...is really great, but because you're connecting to a lot of other computers, a lot of other peers, you'll have a number of problems or you may have a number of problems you might want to deal with. The first one is that your router, whatever router you may be using, may not be prepared for such an aggressive protocol opening so many outgoing and incoming ports. So there are some optimizations you can do on various firmware and if you just search for the name of your firmware, the name of your router and BitTorrent optimization, you'll find it. I've got an article about Linksys firmware optimization using the DDRT firmware at shrinkster.com/fi2 and it's just as a matter of changing some of the...how many connections are allowed open, how many do I accept to be allowed open on my router. And now some people have said, and I have not found this to be the case, but some people have said that when Windows XP Service Pack 2 came out, that they were having some problems. One gentleman blogged about this at shrinkster.com/fgh, saying that they had locked down the TCP stack when Service Pack 2 came out and it was connection attempts that they would lock down to, I think, 10, and this was to avoid worms. So BitTorrent can look like a worm to you, your TCPIP stack, or your firewall, because it's so aggressively opening at ports but I haven't had to go to any of the lengths that these other folks have done, trying to raise the number of connections. The limit for connections used to be 65,000-plus in Windows XP and now apparently it's 10. Have you had to deal with any of this, Carl?

CF: No, I haven't. We're running MicroTorrent on a server and that server doesn't have - hasn't complained yet of any such connection problems and it's been...

SH: So, you're running Windows 2000 or Windows 2003, I would assume not Windows XP?

CF: We're running it on 2003. That's right, we are not running it on XP.

SH: So I don't know if there is a difference between the two but I have not seen that to be a problem, but if you search for XP Service Pack 2 and BitTorrent limits, there's a lot of people out there who insist that you need to actually go in and patch your TCPIP.sys. I've gotten BitTorrent downloads in excess of 600 to 700K a second over a Comcast cable modem, so I've not found that to be the case.

CF: Same here, yeah.

SH: Yeah, but be aware that that might be one thing. The more common thing is to just go in and tweak the number of connections. Also supporting UPnP, Universal Plug and Play, which is a protocol by which an application can request a port from your firewall, is a useful thing.

CF: Well, here is what I know about this and I think you are about to say it too, which is that a lot of people consider UPnP to be a security hole.

SH: They do.

CF: Yeah, UPnP means an application can open a port and if you allow applications to open ports, if some rogue application wedges itself in there by some other, you know, means, it can use...

SH: Or by using UpnP, right.

CF: Or...

SH: You have a very polite virus that requests the port.

CF: Yeah, right, there you go. So you know if that happens then you could be opening yourself up for a lot of problems.

SH: Yeah, so what I've done with MicroTorrent, which is the utility that you've mentioned that's at utorrent.com or shrinkster.com/fi0. MicroTorrent, which I cannot say enough nice things about, what a fantastically, just a - it's a small Xcopy deploy, no install, doesn't crash, runs in the background. It's just fantastic.

CF: It is wonderful.

SH: This little tool will tell you whether or not you have the appropriate ports forwarded, and I just picked a high-level port and opened it up and forwarded it to my system. Typically before version 3.2 BitTorrent used to use port 6881-6889 and now they've extended that all the way up through 6999; these are all TCP/IP ports because BitTorrent isn't using a UDP. But I've just opened the one port and had no trouble.

CF: But you can open...you can use any ports you want. The kind of the cool thing about BitTorrent is when - and we're going to get into what a tracker is - but when you connect to a tracker you tell it what ports you have open and so as long as your firewall has those ports open... The problem there of course is that by using non-standard ports, other clients may be attempting to connect when those outgoing ports are not allowed on their firewalls.

SH: That is true. You do want to have outbound access no matter what on port 6969, which is what BitTorrent uses to talk to a tracker; this is the server that manages that kind of a process. Typically those are almost always on the 6969, but you just need outbound access. Nine times out of 10, though, BitTorrent will work just fine in your home as long as you allow it on your software firewall and open at least one port on your hardware firewall. Now, an interesting thing, I don't know whether you have had this trouble, but I've been shut down in three different hotels for running Torrents.

CF: No, I don't usually run Torrents in hotels, but maybe that's why I haven't.

SH: Well, so this gets to the kind of the original point of this whole conversation, which was this thing called tvRSS, which I had mentioned to you before I said, well, we've got to do a show on this. I have a tendency to be on the road, I'll miss a show, we've talked about orb.com and different ways that I could connect in stream and show it to myself, but tvrss.net, shrinkster.com/fhv is a place where you can get RSS feeds containing Torrents with copies of the most recent TV shows, popular shows, the "West Wing," things like that. So I wanted to download "The Daily Show" and watch it in high-quality video, not streamed, but just download it and watch it on the plane later. So I started up this Torrent and within 10 minutes I lost all connectivity with that network and they wouldn't give me DHCP. When I called the hotel support, they said that, if you open more than 20 ports going out, that they'll shut you down and ban your MAC address. So I convinced the nice lady to knock that off, stopped running the Torrent, but, check this out, did a couple of downloads, loaded up my regular feed reader, VPN'd into work and tried to check my e-mail and got banned again. So it's not BitTorrent, it's simply opening 20 ports. If you are a multi-tasker, as I am known to be, you'll get nailed. So even doing something as simple as multitasking at this particular Marriott Hotel got me banned and that was a real disappointment. So do be aware of what you're doing. This is probably not a hotel-specific thing. More and more people don't want folks monopolizing bandwidth with Torrents.

CF: Yeah, and it may not be a Marriott thing either, may just be that the IT department in that particular hotel has that policy.

SH: In this case they said that it was the...I forget the name of the provider, but it's one of those providers that you recognize the name of, when you go to the hotel. When I dialed the Marriott extension they forwarded me off to IT for transport or whatever the name of the provider was, but I think that that kind of thing is going to happen more and more as people build that into their firmware. Like I don't think Starbucks wants me to run a Torrent inside of Starbucks. But interestingly, I was able to get it working the next day by going into the MicroTorrent and setting the maximum connections to 10.

CF: Right.

SH: And just told MicroTorrent, don't even try to talk to more than 10. Now, the download was really slow, but it did actually happen. And you can see these ports that you've got open by using Sysinternals' great TCPView utility that we've talked about before on the show shrinkster.com/fhh. Fantastic stuff.

CF: Sysinternals, man. They totally rock!

SH: So, if you go to tvrss.net and download MicroTorrent - you just run it, no install - and you would set up the RSS feeds from the RSS preferences section of MicroTorrent and you can set up a filter. Just put the name of the show you want. You can put in like Lost or West for "West Wing" and it will do a wildcard search and it will download these files. And these are usually high-def files...these aren't crappy ripoffs of some guy's cable. This is a high-quality HDTV rip with commercials removed and that's where we start getting into legality. And then those are about 300-400 megs. I downloaded the whole series of a great show I watch called "How I Met your Mother" on ABC and we discovered it half-way through the season; we wanted to catch up, but it wasn't on DVD so we went back to tvRSS and grabbed it. And here's the cool part, we talked a little bit about this on our second or third show, but once you get those giant files, you want to squish them, right, you want to get them onto your portable devices. And I just can't say enough nice things about Videora, videora.com, shrinkster.com/fhi, this is a converter squisher and there's lots of them out there, but this has the friendliest interface and it's very inexpensive and they have hardware-specific free versions for the PSP, for the Xbox, for your TiVo. So I use this to download these shows. I squish them using the Xbox 360 converter and I just copy them over to my Media Center and then watch them later on the Xbox with the Media Center Extender. You can also squish these for your iPod or squish them onto your PSP using PSP Video 9, shrinkster.com/vhn. Seems complicated, but if you just kind of get that workflow, you set up your feeds at tvRSS, you get utorrent.com, you pick the shows you want, and then when they come down, you squish them overnight with Videora. It's much more an intuitive thing than you'd think and it makes long plane rides really a joy.

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