We sure do have a lot of promising new private torrent trackers popping up these days. Earlier we reported about a new Anime/Comic tracker Animatoonic and now we present you ScienceHD (SHD). ScienceHD is a Gazelle based private BitTorrent site which specializes in Sci-Fi (science fiction) movies, TV shows and premium documentaries related to science, nature, history, physics and lots of other interesting topics. Most of the content found on this tracker are in high definition (HD) format (1080p/720p MKV, etc). If you were looking forward to get into SHD, this could be your lucky day – it’s currently open for public registrations.

It’s only been a week since ScienceHD was officially launched and the site has already gotten off to a great start. SHD currently has a user base close to 800 members and tracks 350+ active torrents – excellent stats considering the site’s been closed to the public for the most part.

Speaking of the content on SHD, they can be grouped into two main categories;  science fiction movies, TV shows (entertainment) and documentaries & other educational content (infotainment). From TV shows such as Heroes, Eureka to HD documentaries from premium publishers such as Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The History Channel, SHD has something for everyone. Following are some of the torrent categories available on this tracker:

Unlike most other torrent sites, SHD is not full of scene releases found almost on every general/0day tracker. They do have a nice collection of unique and exclusive releases (this includes some great ebook packs in addition to the multimedia content) and their dedicated uploader/encoder team will see to it that this collection is continuously expanded.

Another point that must be noted is the download speeds on SHD. When you browse the torrent list, you might come across a lot of torrents with  1 seeder (this may change with the open registrations). Even though there is only one seeder, expect the torrents to have blazing fast download speeds - almost all torrents on SHD are uploaded using seedboxes.

ScienceHD has been closed to the public ever since it’s inception. However we hear from staff that the site is set to have it’s first open signup period sometime today (no one knows the exact time except the SysOP) EDIT: It’s open! All new users will start with a whopping 10GB free upload credit as well as 4 invites. Keep checking the signup URL because this site is well worth being a member of.

Site Name: ScienceHD (http://sciencehd.net)

Signup URL: http://sciencehd.net/register.php

Categories:

• Video
• eBook
• Audio

If you liked ScienceHD you may also like:

• Docs4You – Download BBC, Discovery, History Channel and NGC Documentaries for free
• MVGroup registrations open – Torrent/ED2K links to TV documentaries and other educational content
• Spirit Tracker – History/Documentary/Educational torrent tracker
• SciFiTorrents – Science fiction movies, TV shows, E-books and other torrent downloads

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A PC Game release after what seems like an eternity! Velvet Assassin, a stealth action game developed by replay studios has leaked on the internet right on the game’s street date (official release date). Source of the leak appears to be veteran scene group Razor1911. Velvet Assassin is protected by Valve’s Steam. However,  Razor1911 seems to have cracked the protection present in the main executable. The release does not appear to be a Steam rip – Full DVD ISO’s present in the leaked version suggest that it might be from a retail source.

As far as I’m aware this title was distributed both via Steam as well as through retail stores. Both versions had the same anti piracy protection (much less intrusive that DRM such as SecuROM) embedded into them. Although Razor1911 have previously released several Steam rips with custom installers, and this release too is seemingly based on a custom installer.. Anyways the release has now spread to private trackers, public BitTorrent trackers, search engines, FTP servers and so on.

Speaking of the game, Velvet Assassin seems to be a fun game to play. Stealth elements are tightly integrated into the game and it actually brings back memories of good old Splinter Cell. Minimum system requirements to run the game are given below:

• Microsoft ® Windows ® XP / Vista
• Processor - Pentium ® 4 3 GHz or equivalent Athlon ® 64
• 1 GB of RAM
• 5,5 GB free hard disk space
• 3D-graphics adapter with 256 MB memory that supports pixel shaders 3.0, compatible with DirectX ® 9.0c (GeForce 6800GS or Radeon X1600XT)
• A sound device compatible with DirectX ® 9.0s

Although this title was cracked right on the release date, a major worry for pirates still remains. Chronicles of Riddick : Assault of Dark Athena remains uncracked even after more than 2 weeks since releases. It looks like SolidShied is keeping pirates at bay.

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When you work with video files, sometimes the need may arise to separate the audio from video. For example you might want to extract the audio track on a music video and save it as mp3 format so that you can use it as your phone’s ringtone. There are tons of applications that support this functionality but how about a free, lightweight and no-bullsh1t application that gets the job done? Check out AoA Audio Extractor – a great piece of software that allows audio extraction from multiple file types.

With AoA Audio Extractor, you can easily extract audio tracks from AVI, MPEG, MPG, FLV (Flash Video), DAT, WMV, MOV, MP4, 3GP video files and save them as MP3, WAV and AC3 formats. Note that FLV format is also supported – most services that rip YouTube videos to hard disk save them as .FLV files. You can use AoA Audio Extractor to separate audio from a video download from YouTube and most other social video sites as well.

Download

As mentioned above this software is free. It’s only 7.7MB in file size and wont take up half your hard disk space either.

[Click Here] to download the latest version of AoA Audio Extractor from official server (Link auto updated with latest build – download managers are supported)

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AnimaTooniC (ATC) is a brand new private torrent tracker for anime, cartoons and comics. It’s only been ~2 weeks since their official launch and so far the site’s performance has been nothing short of impressive. Note that ATC runs on the lightning fast Gazelle codebase pioneered by What.cd crew. This is probably the first and only Gazelle tracker currently online that caters for  Anime/Cartoons/Comics niches. Public signups for AnimaTooniC are closed but that doesn’t mean interested readers cannot get in. We give away 75 free invites for this tracker plus an unlimited number of invites can be obtained from ATC IRC channel.

Ever since their launch, both the user base and torrent index of AnimaToonic has been growing at a rapid pace. As of 29/4/2009 ATC tracks 900+ torrents and has an active user base of over 600 members – pretty impressive stats for a two week old tracker that does not even have public signups.

As mentioned above ATC is a private tracker specializing in cartoons, comics and anime (no hentai or porn allowed). There are some pretty rare torrents online along with some great packs. The screenshot below captures some of the popular torrents on ATC:

To get a better idea of the site’s content, refer to the categories section towards the end of this article. Oh and did we mention that the entire site is currently on free leech? All new members start with 2GB upload credit as well as 2 invites.

How to get a free invite to ATC

There are two ways you can obtain a free invite to ATC. The recommended method is via their official invites channel. Here is a step by step guide on how to do this:

1. Take a speedtest from http://www.speedtest.net and have the direct link ready.
2. Make a screenshot of your ratio on any other site and upload it to a image hosting services such as tinypic.
3. Connect to the ATC invites IRC channel.
   Server:irc.p2p-network.net
   Channel: #animatoonic-invites
   Direct Link: irc://irc.p2p-network.net/animatoonic-invites
   If you are an IRC noob, we suggest you read this article.
4. Wait patiently and see if somebody would be kind enough to invite you. Do not PM the channel OPs and piss them off. You will be voiced when they are ready for you.

In addition, Animatoonic admins have been kind enough to give us 75 free invites to give away to FILEnetworks Blog readers. To obtain one follow the steps below:

1. Create a new email message with the subject Animatoonic. In the body of the message clearly specify the E-mail address you want the invite sent to. Do not use hotmail as there are known issues with the service – invites will not be sent to Hotmail addresses (Gmail works fine).
2. Send the email to filenetworks[at]gmail[dot]com
3. Drawback of this method is that it may take us some time to manually send you the E-mail (maybe even 2-3 days). Plus the number of invites we have is limited to 75 while there is an unlimited supply available on IRC.

Please use only one of the methods specified above to request your free ATC invite (either the IRC method or E-mail but not both). Creating multiple accounts will get you banned from the tracker. Do not request invites if you have no plans of actually using the site. And as always, read and respects the rules on ATC. Good Luck!

Site Name: AnimaTooniC (http://animatoonic.org)

Categories:

• Anime/Movies
• Anime/Packs
• Anime/Series
• Cartoon/Movies
• Cartoon/Packs
• Cartoon/Series
• Comics
• Manga
• Music
• Music/Packs
• Stop/Clay Motion
• CG
• Live Action/Movies

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If you haven’t been living under a rock in the past few weeks, you should be well aware of the mass shutdown of Swedish BitTorrent trackers by now. Sweden’s BitTorrent scene sort of collapsed after Pirate Bay lost the first round of the legal battle about a week ago. More than 18 private torrent trackers were shut down, including popular sites such as SweDVDR, SoftMP3 and SceneHD. However, it seems that some trackers have decided not to go down without a fight - At least two Swedish trackers (Swepiracy and Piratetorrents) seem to be in the process of moving their servers to come back online under a new host.

Swepiracy, a popular Swedish general tracker now display the following message on its homepage (http://www.swepiracy.nu): 

Swepiracy will be reborn with a new owner from a new country. Be patient and do not forget to vote.

Although I'm not sure what ‘don't’ forget to vote’ means, the first part of the message is clear enough – the site will be reborn.

Also set to return is the popular General tracker PirateTorrents. At the time of shut down Piratetorrents had close to 20000 members and tracked over 15000 torrents. Following message (translated from Swedish) is now displayed on the site homepage (http://www.piratetorrents.nu/):

We are currently moving servers and it will be better than the previous setup! By 29/4 everything should be ready and back online. All accounts will be retained – only the servers will be moved to a new home.

It’s always good to see trackers rise from the ashes and give anti piracy agencies the finger. Hopefully other sites that have shut down too will be able to come back online in the near future.

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There has been a lot of dedicated sports trackers featured in FILEnetworks Blog before but we have never posted about a site that entirely focused on Tennis. T3nnis.tv is one such specializes Tennis torrent tracker which has a lot of international event (ATP, WTA, etc) videos, highlights, related TV shows and even movies. Even though this is a niche tracker, it has a strong following and is well established in the BitTorrent scene after being online for over a year. Good news is that registrations are open and interested members can now sign up for free.

As of 28/4/2009, T3nnis.tv currently has a user base of 15000+ members (this is a surprisingly large number for a niche tracker). The site also tracks close to 2500 active torrents. Seeding and maintaining a good ratio on this tracker is not that hard – there are tons of free leech and double upload enabled torrents. However in case you need some additional help with ratio building, the integrated karma bonus points system will come in handy.

As for the content, it’s all about Tennis. You can find pretty much anything (both old and new content) related to this sport on T3nnis.tv. The screenshot below captures some of the rare torrents found on this tracker (to get a better idea of what’s available, refer to the categories section towards the end of this article) :

In addition to the torrents, t3nnis.tv has a great community. If you’d like to become a part of this community, head over to http://forum.t3nnis.tv/index.php where the official forums are hosted.

As mentioned at the start of this article signups are currently open. If you are a fan of Tennis, this tracker is a must have. Check it out!

Site Name: T3nnis.tv (http://t3nnis.tv)

Signup URL: http://t3nnis.tv/signup.php

Categories

• ATP - ATP-2007, ATP-2008, ATP-2009, ATP-Retro
• WTA - WTA-2007, WTA-2008, WTA-2009, WTA-Retro
• DOUBLES - Mens Doubles, Mixed Doubles, Womens Doubles
• International Competitions - Davis Cup, Hopman Cup, Olympics
• Other - Official Films, TV Shows

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There are a lot of 3rd party tools such as RivaTuner around for NVIDIA display adapters that offer 100x better functionality than the official NVIDIA control panel. nHancer is one such utility that will enable you tweak your NVIDIA driver settings effectively including an array of advanced customization options that are not available with the drivers by default. A new build of nHancer was released yesterday with support for new ForceWare 182 and 185 drivers as well as Windows 7 compatibility.

Note that the new version (2.5.1) does not support older drivers (pre 182) and older cards (pre GeForce 8000). If you are using older drivers/GPU you should download nHancer 2.4.5. Also note that this software requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 in order to run. You can download it from here.

Features

• Support of Forceware/GeForce drivers version 60 and later (with nHancer 2.4.5), including the new 185+ versions
• Support of all GeForce cards, including the new GeForce GTX 2x0 lines
• Supports Windows Vista, Windows 7 and DirectX 10
• Support for single card, SLI, Quad-SLI and DirectX 10 SLI systems
• On-the-fly control of all global quality and performance-enhancing settings for all games
• Create and manage fully automated profiles for all your games
• Very easy to use, explains all options and their effects, like Anti Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, etc.
• Special options for nVidia's SLI feature, allowing you to to use almost every game with SLI even if nVidia doesn't support it
• Offers additional Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering modes, that are not available through nVidia's control panel
• Allows the modification of fixed settings included in nVidia's predefined profiles.
• Flexible user interface: change the size of the window and all sub areas
• User interface and help texts available in various languages (right now English, German, Polish and Italian)
• Coexists perfectly with nVidia's own control panel and other tools, like aTuner or RivaTuner. nHancer will immediately detect any changes made by any other tool.

Download

[Click Here] to download nHancer 2.5.1 (and older versions) from the official download page

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Currently there is a lot of panic among members of various BitTorrent forums and torrent news blogs. Reason? The world's largest BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay has been inaccessible for the past few hours. We ourselves have got more than 50 emails in the past few hours from concerned members asking whether TPB has been taken down. The panic is justifiable given what's been going on in Sweden since Pirate Bay lost in court. However the good news is that TPB has not been shut down. They are just suffering from a routing problem.

According to information posted on official 'site status' thread on SuprBay forums, a fiber link related to the site's operations is broken. There is however a temporary workaround to access TPB since IPV6 connectivity is not affected:

Originally Posted by Nospmoht

ONLY IPv4 connectivity to the website is down. The site can still be accessed by following this link: http://ipv6.thepiratebay.org.ipv4.sixxs.org/ and all torrents can reconnect if this tracker is added: [http://open.tracker.thepiratebay.org.ipv4.sixxs.org/announce]

Stop the panic!

Although browsing and downloading and is possible with the above workaround, uploading is not. For that you'll wait until the fiber link is fixed. Anyways the site has not been raided or shut down and there is no reason to panic. Just wait till Brokep and Co do their magic and bring it up again.

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There has been some good news on the HD Trackers front in the past few days. Earlier today HD-Bits.Ro opened signups (now closed) and now we feature another specialized HD torrent tracker that is open for public registrations. HDChina is a BitTorrent tracker of Chinese origin which has a lot of English, Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean HD content including movies, TV shows, documentaries and music videos. HDChina is an underrated HD tracker- people seem to get turned off by the Chinese interface but there is actually a lot of English releases available on this site.

Something that most people don’t know is that there is an option to change the language at HDChina. Once logged in, just click on the English flag icon on the top left corner of the page to set interface language to English (there are 3 more language options – Chinese, Japanese and Korean). Also note that this site labels almost all torrents including English only releases using both Chinese and English wording. Just because a torrent has a Chinese name does not mean it’s a Chinese localized release.

Language woes aside, HDChine is in fact a decent HD tracker. It has a 25000+ strong user base and tracks over 10500 torrents. Torrents found here includes US, UK TV shows/movies as well as Asian content (see categories below for more). Asian releases can usually be identified by the following tags on torrent title: CN – Chinese, HK – Honk Kong, TW – Taiwanese, JP – Japanese, KR – Korean. Both scene and non scene p2p releases can be found on this tracker. 

There are some great packs online on HDChina. Some of these are pretty huge. Largest I found was a massive 436GB pack which included 68 Blu-Ray movies released by group ESiR. Some packs however seem to be taken (stolen?) from other torrent sites such as TheBox and HD-Bits.Ro.

Image: Although there is Chinese wording on every torrent, all releases featured in this screenshot are actually English

Signups for HDChina are usually closed and when they do open it’s usually for a short period of time. This time however signups will stay open till the 29th of April:

Free signups will be open from 2009-04-24 12:00pm to 2009-04-29 12:00pm (Beijing time). Please inform your friends about this. Duplicated accounts will be banned! So, please tell your friends to register for just one account.

If you are looking for a place to download HD content at good speeds, this site is worth checking out – get in while you can.

Site Name: HDChina (http://hdchina.org/login.php)

Signup URL: http://hdchina.org/signup.php

Categories:

• 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

Note: If you encounter ‘page cannot be displayed’, ‘page currently not available’ errors or other similar error messages, keep trying. These are apparently caused by server issues and not because the signups are closed.

Thanks to mymsday for the heads up!

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A new release candidate (RC) build of Blender has been released. Blender is a software that allows you to create 3D animations such as TV commercials, technical visualizations, character animation and even business graphics. It’s a powerful yet simple application which only takes about 50MB hard disk space & does not require behemoth of a computer to run. Although it may not have all the features of industry leading 3D animation tools such as 3DMAX or Maya, Blender can be used to create some pretty cool animations quickly and easily – not a bad feat considering it’s totally free.

One of the downsides of this software is that the user interface is not that user friendly – I found it a bit too cluttered for my liking. And note that Blender is not that easy to learn. Thankfully, there are lots of free video tutorials available on YouTube that’ll make things a lot easier. Just do a search for ‘blender tutorial’ on YouTube and you should get plenty of useful results. Once you get the hang of it, you can do some pretty amazing things with this software.

Download

The current final, stable build of Blender (as at26/4/2009) is v2.48a. A new release candidate build 2.49 (RC1) was also released yesterday. Download links to both are included below

[Click Here] to download Blender 2.48a for Windows, Linux and a wide range of other operating systems from official download page

[Click Here] to download Blender 2.49 RC1 from FileHippo– this is a test build.

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