FILEnetworks Blog: October 2011

HD-Torrents is currently open for signup. After yesterday’s open registration at HDChina, one could say these are good times for fans of HD content – but some of you might disagree, especially if you are one of the many who got disabled due to inactivity over at HDT. Couple of days ago, HD-Torrents admins launched a massive operation to to purge inactive accounts from the tracker. As a result over 7500 accounts were disabled due to inactivity – this was effectively one third of HDT’s users base. But that’s not all, signups at HDT have been opened once again to fill the vacated ranks with new blood. For those of you hearing about this tracker for the first time, HD-Torrents is a veteran specialized HD torrent site indexing high definition movies and TV shows including scene, non scene and internal releases. Open signups at HDT is quite a rare occurrence so get in while you can.

At the end of last month, there were around 22000 registered members on HD-Torrents. Fast forward three days into October this number has fallen towards 14000. Over 7700 accounts were disabled for inactivity – this is one tracker where just logging in once a month to keep the account active is not going to work. To quote the official rules:

If you have a combined download total in excess of 25 GB and your ratio is below 0.70 you will receive two consecutive warnings. Failure to act upon the warnings and increase your ratio above 0.70 will get your account disabled.
You are required to download at least 15 GB each quarter (90 days). Each quarter starts respectively on 1st day of January, April, July and October and ends on the last day of March, June, September and December. If on the 26 day of the last month of each quarter you are bellow the 15 GB minimum, you will receive a reminder. If on the last day of the quarter you still do not meet the requirement, your account will be disabled

It’s highly likely that it was the minimum quarterly download requirement of 15gb that doomed many of the disabled members. If you are thinking of creating an account here, do not forget about the two rules quoted above.

Coming back to the content indexed on HDT, it is in fact a pretty good HD tracker. With over 13500 torrents and an active seeder/leecher community (most popular torrent on this tracker has over 500 seeds), HD-Torrents is a good place to be if you love high definition content. It tracks lots of 720p and 1080p releases (in x264 container), untouched Blu –Ray, Blu-Ray Remux, etc ranging from movies, TV shows, documentaries, anime to even some high quality lossless music. There are a lot of p2p releases indexed (in addition to scene releases) including some uploads by internal encoder groups which include HiDt (which includes EuReKa who formerly released on Awesome-HD), ViSTA™, DNL, HDMaNiAcS & KRaLiMaRKo.

As said in the title of this post, signups for HD-Torrents are currently open. An official post by administrators on the homepage says:

Dear members, we moved HD-Torrents to a new server and we decided to open the tracker for registration to a total limit of 38,000 members. The site will open at 16:00 GMT on 03.10.11

It is not clear if the site would stay open until the user limit of 38000 is reached (that leaves around 24000 free spots up for the taking). However, if you like HD content, here’s a good opportunity to be part of a decent HD tracker.

Site Name: HD-Torrents (http://hd-torrents.org)

Signup URL: http://hd-torrents.org/account.php

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We are one whole day late in publishing this news but if everything goes according to plan HDChina’s open signups will continue until midnight on 3rd of October 2011 and everyone will have plenty of time to create an account on this awesome HD tracker. First things first – as the name suggest, HDChina is a private tracker that has Chinese origins. But that doesn’t mean it would be useless for those who seek to download English content. HDC in fact tracks a lot of English releases (including scene, non scene and tracker exclusive uploads by affiliated groups) in addition to local content. It is a massive HD tracker that every serious fan of HD content should definitely be a part of. Last time this tracker opened signups was back in February 2010 – which is more than a year ago. This time around they have a limited open signup to celebrate National Day in China.

Although not very popular in the western world, HDChina is a huge private tracker and is one of the largest HD trackers ever. At the time this post was being written there were over 46500 registered members on HDC and it also had a mammoth sized torrent index with over 33000 HD torrents. The reason for it’s relative lack of popularity in English speaking countries might be the whole ‘Chinese connection’. After having a glance at the signup page filled with Chinese characters, many people seem to turn away, assuming this to be a BitTorrent tracker with releases local to China. This however is far from the truth. Majority of the content indexed on HDC are in English language including international releases such as Hollywood blockbusters and HDTV shows aired in the US and UK. Even the site interface can easily be switched to English if required - Once logged in, just click on the English flag icon on the top left corner of the page to change the language. Also note that this site labels almost all torrents including English only releases using both Chinese and English wording. So just know that a torrent having a Chinese label doesn’t mean it’s a Chinese release.

As far as the content goes, HDC is movie/TV tracker. A list of categories and video formats found on this tracker are summarized below:

Movie: Blu-ray, 1080i, 1080p, 720p
TV Episode: TV EP (CN/HK/TW), TV EP (JP/KR), TV EP (US/UK)
TV PACK: TV Pack China (HK/TW), TV Pack JP/KR, TV Pack US/UK
Others: Sports, Animation, Documentary, Music Video
Audio: Lossless, Audio Track

Individual releases (which include 0day uploads) are accompanied by large torrent packs. These are pretty huge, with some packs exceeding 400GB in file size. Additionally, this tracker has no shortage of exclusive uploads thanks to the shitload of affiliated P2P groups that release on it such as HDChina, HDCTV, LU9998, iHD, CtrlHD, beAst & HDS, KiSHD and Pa@Ph. A screenshot capturing part of the torrent index may be found below:

While creating an account on HDC will be easy thanks to the open signups, keeping it from getting disabled would be a harder task. HDC is serious about user activity and all new users are automatically checked by the system after a specific period of time and immediately disabled if minimum upload/download and bonus points requirements are not met. Quoted below is the official announcement:

1. HDChina Will Open for register to celebrate the National Day.
To celebrate our 62nd National Day, HDChina will open for register from 0:00 1st Oct 2011 - 24:00 3rd Oct 2011 and all torrents will be freeleech in this 3 days. We always do our best to provide more HD resources and hope you can experience of a better High-Definition life here.

2. New Check-up system for Newbies
From now on, all newbies must take part in our new check-up system (including open-registration and invitation) to improve the quality of our members.
1.If failed to meet the following requirements, new users would be banned after 30 days from the date of registration, regardless of signing up though invites or open registrations. Further, a new account created by open registration with no upload or download behavior in the first 3 Days will be banned, while 7 Days for Registration through invitation.
2.You MUST 30G Achieve the minimum for both uploading and Downloading Amount as well as gaining "seeding" no less than 4 000 Bonus Points in 30 Days from the Date of registration. These conditions shall be met simultaneously or you account will be banned.
Note: Donors, VIPs, uploaders, encoders, or users with higher rank are excluded from the above check-up system.

-HDChina Staff-

If the above was TLDR, here’s the summary of requirements that a new users needs to fulfill in order to keep his HDC account:

A new account created by open registration with no upload or download behavior in the first 3 Days will be banned
After 30 days from date of registration, you account should have a minimum of 30GB uploaded, 30GB downloaded and 4000 bonus points.

Signups will be open till the 3rd of October or till HDC hits its maximum user limit of 50000 members (3000 more spots remaining at time of this posting). Keep in mind that confirmation E-mail is in Chinese and will most likely land in your spam/bulk mail folder (tested with Gmail).