General Forum

Rapidshare > torrents (long post) 5 replies

ILLiCiT said on: 2009-02-04 10:49 pm
5800 Days, 3 Hrs, 44 Min, 59 Sec ago
Does anybody here use Rapidshare/Megaupload/etc for their "downloads?" I brought a premium Rapidshare account last week and have put 22GB through it so far. Most of that was stuff I'd wanted to download (for months) with torrents, but couldn't be bothered to because torrents have so many problems. I mean, BitTorrent is great because there are no limits outside of what your connection and network equipment can handle, but it's so overcrowded now that speeds are terrible. I've had a 720p movie (~8GB) downloading for roughly 4 days of time, and I've uploaded 8GB and downloaded 6. That's 14GB. I only get 100 a month! It's a public torrent so I normally wouldn't seed (:/), but in this case I can't help it. If I capped my upload speed any more, the torrent would go even slower.

You want to know what's great about sites like Rapidshare? They're http downloads, so no ratios.

Many ISPs do what is known as packet shaping, where certain packets get shoved to the back of the queue to make way for VOIP, gaming, and http traffic. Bittorrent traffic is so regulated on some ISPs that you can't even connect to BT peers properly. There are ways around this, but they're not perfect.

HTTP traffic doesn't get hit by this. You can download as fast as your connection allows from Rapidshare, etc. Okay, it's not that perfect, but it's much faster than BT. As I was writing this post, I was downloading Lost ('cause someone else is watching TV right now...:( ). 350mb download. Started at 9:09 pm dead. Finished at 9:17 pm dead. That's 750 kb/s average (~40% of my maximum download speed). Literally an hour after the episode hit public sites, I'm getting it at 750 kb/s. BT can't do that. Right now the ratio in BT would be like 1000 seeds and 60k+ peers. I'd be lucky to hit 100 kb/s. And it would take at least 5 minutes before I even got double digit speeds, thanks to overloaded trackers. Yeah, Rapidshare isn't giving me my full 1875 kb/s (15 megabit/s) down, but it's doing way better than BT can. I'm sure I could use a download manager and double or triple my traffic usage to achieve ~1800 kb/s down. That's what's so nice about http downloads: you can use download managers which actually do increase speeds!

BitTorrent has this great effect on my connection: it makes hundreds and hundreds of UDP connections which persist for days after closing BT. Because UDP is a connectionless protocol, there's nothing I can do to stop random IP addresses the tracker gives my IP to from trying to connect to me. Let me tell you, it makes trying to play games really fun. BT basically does whatever it wants and doesn't have any regard for your connection. Rapidshare, on the other hand, doesn't give your IP to thousands of BT clients all wanting to get data from you. You finish the download and the connection is terminated, and doesn't come back.

ISPs are known to send letters to customers who go way over their transfer limits. Rumor is, some ISPs look for the ones who use BT and warn them first. Additionally, many copyright holders only sue people who upload their copyrighted material. You still shouldn't be downloading music and movies you didn't pay for, but downloading generally isn't as illegal as uploading. As I said before, Rapidshare, etc. don't require you to send them as much as a bit of music or movies to download their stuff in turn.



A Rapidshare account costs $9 USD for a one month subscription. Consider that renting a movie costs $1-5 depending on the title. You get 80 GB a month transfer from Rapidshare. That's 17 DVD-R quality movies. That's 117 700MB movie rips. That's 20 average sized games. I doubt anybody in the world watches even 50 movies in a month. That's a lot of downloads. Yes, BT is 100% free, but it's also bad enough to be free. I think $9 is very reasonable for trouble free downloads.

http://www.rapidshare.com


http://www.warez-bb.org
HUGE site with links to content on Rapidshare mostly, but a lot of Megaupload stuff, as well as other sites. Seriously rivals TPB for sheer content, and definitely beats TPB for the amount of available content (0 seeds, 1 peers, anyone?...).


http://rapidshare.com/rsm.html
Rapidshare downloader. The best feature is that you can paste a bunch of links in it and it will automatically queue the files. Seriously, it does everything you expect it to. Vista only, but...


http://www.rapidlinks.co.uk/showthread.php?t=26187
Rapidshare Manager for XP! Here's proof it works:
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/1301/rapidsharemanagerav3.jpg






I'm not trying to sell Rapidshare or anything lol. I am seriously trying to be helpful here. Idk how many of you download stuff from BT regularly, but if you download even half the stuff I do, it's definitely worth checking out this alternative.
Sal said on: 2009-02-05 12:35 am
5800 Days, 1 Hr, 59 Min, 18 Sec ago
Whenever I want Smallville, Heroes or Eureka episodes, I get them overnight after it aired, I start download and if it has JUST been released, it takes about 2-3 hours. If I download it when I wake up in the morning, it takes rougly 30-45 minutes. I use BitComet and get my torrents from isohunt.com

Rhunyc said on: 2009-02-05 05:59 am
5799 Days, 20 Hrs, 35 Min, 8 Sec ago
You know, seeing as how I pay $15 a month for a MMORPG I never play, I kind of think that's a great deal. >_>

I might have to try that out sometime soon. :) Thanks for the tip.

I'd check it out myself, but since you're in the know, can you download like mixes of music? I like to download internet-Radio streams off of BT, to find new music to listen to at work.
00 said on: 2009-02-05 01:26 pm
5799 Days, 13 Hrs, 7 Min, 25 Sec ago
I agree that HTTP downloading is much faster than BT but I use both. I might even use eMule once in a while even though it has terrible speeds most of the time since it has some rare stuff.

[Added at 02/05/2009 13:27:44 by 00]
Also another point for your argument is how slow your internet is while BT is downloading vs when just downloading a file from http.
Aderz said on: 2009-02-05 05:53 pm
5799 Days, 8 Hrs, 40 Min, 51 Sec ago
Not sure if this really matters to anyone, but the RIAA(people that sue you for pirating music) made an agreement with some ISPs effective Febuary 23 (I think), now they send a email to your ISP and if your ISP has an agreement with them they will slow your connection down, and if you continue to download music and such, they will cut off you connection. I'm hoping my ISP hasn't made that agreement, but i'm almost certain Comcast and RoadRunner will have.

Back to what you was saying, I personally use Azureus Vuze as my p2p client, and use Demonoid to find my torrents, they have some hard to find files and less fake content, they haven't been enforcing their ratios latelly though.

If any of you need an invite code, let me know
00 said on: 2009-02-05 07:32 pm
5799 Days, 7 Hrs, 2 Min, 4 Sec ago
Azureus used to be my favorite client until they included Vuze which just slows it down and it took up the most resources even before that.

Also link to support your claims? Comcast has already for a while been throttled people using bt and even email them asking to stop or they'll terminate service.

I'll google it right now, but just wondering if you're naming a popular US ISP or if it is indeed RR.

[Added at 02/05/2009 19:34:39 by 00]
Well a few people claim that RR has sent them a notice for downloading. I've had Road Runner for years am constantly using Bit Torrent and have never heard from them so I suppose it's just unlucky people.