Earlier we used to post about popular movie leaks as separate posts on this blog. However with so many release blogs around (which are often faster than us), we figured this had little use to our readers. So now we only update via Twitter when hit movies are leaked on BitTorrent. Anyway here is a little heads up on several Hollywood blockbusters that would most probably hit torrent sites (DVD quality copies that is, not CAM or TS) in the months of August/September 2009. This speculation is based on the fact that DVD for region 5 (R5) release dates for these titles are scheduled for the next two months.

August 2009

• I Love You, Man (2009) - August 11
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) - August 13
• Killer Bean Forever (2009) - August 13
• Terminator Salvation (2009) - August 20
• Funny People (2009) - August 25
• The Boat That Rocked (2009) - August 25

September 2009

• All About Steve (2009) - September 3
• Fighting (2009) - September 8
• Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past (2009) - September 8
• The Invention of Lying (2009) - September 8
• This Side of the Truth (2009) - September 8
• District 9 (2009) - September 10
• Inglourious Basterds (2009) - September 15
• State Of Play (2009) - September 22
• Aliens in the Attic (2009) - September 24
• They Came from Upstairs (2009) - September 24
• Monsters VS. Aliens (2009) - September 25
• Observe And Report (2009) - September 29
• Young Americans (2009) - September 29

Source – MovieFreak, IRC, Various

Note that the above mentioned dates might not always be 100% accurate. Sometimes the release date is postponed and sometimes leaked copies make it into BitTorrent even before an official release is made ( as you can see from Ice Age 3).

If you don’t know what an R5 is, it’s a DVD release for region 5 (most of Africa, Former Soviet Union, the Indian subcontinent, Mongolia and North Korea). R5 DVDs usually do not have English audio but groups who release pirated versions make it a point to embed an English audio stream from a previously released TS or CAM. This means an R5 has almost the same video quality as a DVDRip but lower sound quality [Read more about R5 on Wikipedia]. 

And it was heartbreaking to see that I have to wait till November for Transformers 2 R5 to be released.

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As we mentioned in our article about TrackeReactor, we are slowly expanding our coverage to include articles about BitTorrent news/invite forums in addition to the usual stuff that’s posted here. So here’s our third featured BitTorrent invite community – InviteThe.Net (not to be confused with private tracker InspireThe.Net). Although few people are aware of it, InviteTheNet is not exactly a brand new invite forum – they’ve been here since January 2009. In fact, they were formerly known as PTiAccess. The site recently got a new name and moved over to a new domain - the old community of members however remain in tact, despite the move.

Speaking of statistics, InviteTheNet currently has around 200 members who’ve made 12000+ posts on close to 3000 threads. The 200 member count is not bad for a forum which recruited members based on interviews since day one (even when signups are open, users always need to go through an IRC interview if they are to get full access).

As for the content you can find on InviteThe.Net, it pretty much has everything you look for in a BT invite forum. Tracker reviews, invite giveaways, bonus giveaways (seedhour bonuses, etc), invite requests, tracker recruitment (18 recruitment threads online so far), torrent news, seedbox reviews, etc are all there. Tracker reviews and invite giveaways sections are very well organized – they are sorted by torrent site category (General/0Day, E-Learning, Sports, etc) and each category has it’s own child forum. It’s not a huge deal but definitely makes it easier to find/request what you are looking for.

Before you giveaway/request invites, make sure to have a look at the ‘Do not offer’ list. Also note that invite trading is banned.

Although InviteTheNet is currently open for registration, gaining full access is not so straightforward.  You cannot see any of the good stuff until you post a welcome message with ratio proofs on the introduction thread. Then you need to connect to the waiting room on their IRC server and post the link to the thread you made in the forums to get approved. Thankfully, everything is described in clear detail (along with screenshots) in the Introduction forum section so this should not be a problem for most readers.

It’s still a young site compared to the likes of FileSharingTalk but InviteTheNet definitely looks promising. Check it out.

Site Name: InviteThe.Net (http://www.invitethe.net)

Registration URL: http://www.invitethe.net/forum/index.php?action=register

Thanks to kemper, RSVP and rest of InviteTheNet staff for the support given.

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Updated beta builds for both leading BitTorrent clients are now availble. Vuze for Windows 4.2.0.7 Beta 1 and uTorrent 2.0 build 16126 have now been released. It seems that the first uTorrent v2 beta build (16081) was quite a hit among our readers. Here is even better news – uTorrent 2 build 16126 fixes a rather annoying issue users of the first beta had to face. Remember those invalid tracker requests errors? They are now gone. As for Vuze it’s mainly a bugfix version of v4.2.0.4 stable. Download links for both these client versions are given below.

Vuze 4.2.0.7 Beta 01 / 4.2.0.4 Stable

Release Notes (v.4.2.0.4 stable)

• Subscription options for auto-starting auto-downloads [Parg
• Support for sharing .vuze files [Parg]
• Added support for adding categories to transcoded content [Parg]
• Added default transcode dir option [Parg]
• Support for keep-alive and more gzip on web contexts [Parg]
• Added percentage complete and eta to content descriptor [Parg]
• UI displays while core initializes [TuxPaper]
• Plugin interface to the search functionality [Parg]

For full changelog please check here.

[Click Here] to download from Softpedia mirror

uTorrent 2.0 build 16126

Release Notes

-- 2009-08-10: Version 2.0 Beta (build 16126)
- Fix: tracker requests are not invalid anymore

Download

[Click Here] for direct download

Note that both client versions featured in this article are beta releases. Some private torrent trackers may not have added these versions to their allowed clients lists yet. Always proceed with caution when dealing with beta/new client versions if you are using private trackers as this could get you banned in some cases.

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Here is a forum you don’t hear about everyday. RetroMags is a forum that offers direct download links to old issues of PC and console gaming magazines (By ‘old’ we mean issues before the year 2000). You can download a wide range of mags such as Atari Age, Blip, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, Official Playstation Magazine and so on. RetroMags even indexes issues of magazines that are currently discontinued. Note that this is not a private torrent tracker  - it’s a forum with RapidShare, Megaupload and other one click hosting download links to a select number of indexed magazines.

Some of you might wonder why anyone would want to download ‘old’ issues of gaming magazines. Well I for one find it fascinating to revisit the past – how about a return to those good old days with Atari consoles? It’s not just Atari really, magazines from just about any PC/Console era are available. Most of the releases I have come across were scanned issues in .CBR format (How to open CBR files). 

As you might have imagined, RetroMags is a pretty small community -It only has around 3400 registered members. However, there is no shortage of content here – hundreds of magazine downloads are indexed. As said above most download links point to RapidShare hosted files. I have not found broken links or any infected files during my time on this site.

Image: RM downloads section 

Above is an screenshot showing part of RetroMag’s downloads section - If you can’t find this section in the forums even after logging in, try linking on the ‘Downloads’ link on the top toolbar.

Image: Screenshot from an old issue of Atari Age magazine 

Retromags is a private community – you need to login in order to enjoy full benefits of the site. Public registrations however are currently open. If you are interested, a free account can be created any time.

Site Name: RetroMags (http://www.retromags.com/)

Signup URL: http://www.retromags.com/forums/register.html

Related Articles

• How to open & view .CBR, .CBZ, .CB7, .CBT and .CBA files (Comic Book Archives)
• Bibliotik – BitTorrent tracker for magazines, ebooks, novels, audiobooks & more

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Full TV season pack torrents on BitTorrent trackers are always a major attraction. Rather than having to watch syndicated re-runs or weekly episodes on TV, you get access to entire seasons of popular television series which you can watch at your leisure. Ideally the best place to get hold of such torrents is through private TV trackers such as TVT.com, BMTV or TVT.ro. However there are a lot of folks who don’t use private trackers and rely on public BitTorrent sites for their torrenting needs. If you are one of them, here is a good site that you can use to download Full TV seasons from.

FullTvSeasons.com (hereby referred to as FTS) is a public site that indexes…wait for it…torrents of full TV season packs. It does not maintain a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead, FTS lists verified, non fake torrents uploaded to popular public trackers on their index. It’s nothing revolutionary but the site makes it easy for those who use public trackers find real and best seeded torrents for a particular TV show. Below is a screenshot depicting part of FTS’s torrent index:

One every torrent description page you will see a list of files included in the torrent, list of trackers that are used to track the torrent, seed/peer details and of course torrent download links. Note that the ‘Secure Download’ button is just an embedded advertisement which will take you to ‘'Torrent Privacy’ web site. ‘Standard Download’ button works just fine.

Judging by whois information, FullTVSeasons seems to be the sister site of xtvi, a public TV torrent index with custom RSS feeds. Just like XTVi, FTS also offers custom RSS feeds for each and every indexed TV show (in this case feeds are updated when a new complete season pack is added, not when new episodes are available).

Once again FTS is a public torrent index – if you are used to the blazing fast speeds of private trackers, chances are that you’ll be dissapointed. However if you just use public trackers or if you are looking for a TV show not available on private sites, FullTVSeasons could be of help.

[Click Here] to visit FullTVSeasons.Com

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Although we’ve covered hundreds of private torrent trackers here on FILEnetworks, the same cannot be said about BitTorrent invite forums (this is one aspect we hope to improve in the future). In fact, TrackeReactor (TR) is only the second BT news/invite site to be featured on this blog, first one being The Pirate Society. Unlike most file sharing related forums, TR is not usually open for signup – users either need to donate or wait for an invite from an existing member if they are to get in. Note that this is not a huge forum such as FST – TR is a small, private community of members that has been around for quite a while.

Although it’s open for signup, the past few days have not been particularly good ones for TrackeReactor. Their domains got hacked and the site was down for some time, leading some members to believe that TR had shut down its operations for ever. However they have bounced back and the forums seem to be fully functional once again. No data loss is apparent – user base of ~2400 members and the database of and 27000+ threads are seemingly unharmed.

Speaking about what TrackeReactor has to offer for its members, you can pretty much expect everything you get from a regular invite forum. Invitation giveaways, BitTorrent news, invitation requests, tracker reviews, tracker support (via site representatives) and seedbox discussions are just a few of the topics discussed on TR. Following screenshot captures the ‘BitTorrent’ section on their forums:

 

Note that if you are intending to create an account and immediately make a couple dozen invite requests on TR’s requests section, don’t even bother signing up. To reap the benefits granted by this community, you need to be an active member – for example invitation giveaway threads won’t be visible to folks who have a post count lower than 50.

As mentioned at the start of this article, open signups are a rarity on TrackeReactor. We do not know for how long the signups will remain open. If you want to check this site out, now would be a good time.

Site Name: TrackeReactor (http://trackereactor.com)

Signup URL: http://trackereactor.com/register.php

Thanks to ‘Oleg’ for the heads up.

Related Articles

• The Pirate Society (TPS) – BitTorrent news, private tracker invites, reviews & recruitment

Read the rest of this article...

With plans to become a pay site soon, The Pirate Bay is viewed by many as a BitTorrent tracker that’s about to die. Surely, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker becoming pay-to-leech would not do any good to file sharing. Or would it? (there are alternatives of course but it IS the largest tracker). As I see it, over reliance on a single tracker is never good for BitTorrent if it’s to survive on the long term. However this has already occurred (to a certain extent) with TPB’s tracker which tracks nearly half of world’s BitTorrent downloads. So what’s the silver lining in TPB’s demise (yet to happen)?. I for one think it’ll trigger the launch many smaller BitTorrent trackers, making it a nightmare for Anti piracy groups to take them down.

If you still aren’t aware of them, several such sites have already been launched; OpenBitTorrent (OBT), PublicBitTorrent (PBT) and Hidden Tracker. In contrast to most existing trackers, both OBT and PBT are not accompanied by a torrent index or a torrent search feature – they are stand alone trackers, free for anyone to use when creating a .torrent file (it doesn’t matter where the .torrent file will be hosted). This of course means it’d be a lot harder to challenge OpenBitTorrent/PublicBitTorrent’s legality in courts. Why? An explanation is given in OpenBitTorrent homepage:

Just to make it clear so people sending DMCA takedown notices understand:

• We do not have any content.
• We are not a bittorrent site, we are just a tracker, we can not see what content is behind an info_hash.
• We don't have any torrent files.
• We can't give you any IP addresses in any other way than normal tracker usage.
• We can't verify any claims when we have no data other than the info_hash.
• We can't block info_hash keys from being registered with the tracker.
• We don't have any logs or ways to trace previous connections, It's not technically possible to trace connection history due to the sheer volume of connections. The only information that is possible to keep is the current torrent swarm.

Then of course there is the new Hidden Tracker – a public BitTotrrent tracker that uses Tor anonymization network to conceal its location. Don’t get into a false sense of security because of the word ‘Anonymisation’. What really gets concealed from spies is the location of the tracker itself, not the peers connected to it. However this is an innovative concept and would surely give anti piracy agencies a hard time determining the tracker location (For more info on HT refer to this TorrentFreak article).

If whois information is correct, one of these trackers is hosted in Sweden and the other in Netherlands. The striking similarity between the user interface and homepages would suggest that both are run by the same folks – but this is not true. An interesting fact (observed before whoise information was masked) is that , OpenBitTorrent’s domain is registered under Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), a co-founder of TPB. Additionally, every single torrent on TPB is currently being tracked by OpenBitTorrent as well. PublicBT tracker on the other hand is run by folks behind BTJunkie. This is veteran BitTorrent admins setting an example for the rest of the world to follow – create more standalone trackers, grow more heads for the hydra.

In addition, if open trackers are combined with a 3rd party torrent storage service such as Torrage, it would be even harder to take them down. Here is a quote from Torrage’s Legal page”

We DO NOT have or track any information about what type of content the torrents point to.
We DO NOT have any type of search or listing system.
We DO NOT run our own trackers.
The original filename of the torrent is NOT saved.
We DO NOT log any IP adresses of uploaders.
You can ONLY download torrents if you ALREADY KNOW the INFO_HASH of the torrent file.
Torrent files are cached on disk in gzip format making it extremely time consuming to search for any data contained within the torrent files.

As you can see, even rumors of TPB’s demise has already created some much needed innovation in the BitTorrent community :)

How to create a torrent using OpenBitTorrent/PublicBT:

If you add any of the following trackers to your torrent during creation, it’ll be tracked by OPT/PBT/HT:

• http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
  udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
• http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
  udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
• http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion:8080/announce (HiddenTracker – with Tor installed)
• http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com:8080/announce (HiddenTracker – without Tor installed)

(UDP versions too were included as they will now be used more with uTorrent’s support for UDP)

[Click Here] to visit OpenBitTorrent homepage

[Click Here] to visit PublicBitTorrent homepage

Related Articles

• Pirate Bay alternatives – 12 BitTorrent trackers that could replace TPB

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You’ve all heard about popular TV trackers such as TVTorrents.Com, BitMeTV and Freshon.tv. Apart from differences in community, download speeds, etc, all of these trackers have more or less the same content. How about a TV tracker that offers something different? TorrentsRMine (TRM) is one such private tracker that specializes in TV talk shows, documentaries and other TV series that are not readily available on other similar sites. Although it’s been open for signup before, public registrations for TRM are currently closed. However if you are interested in becoming a member, invites are available on their IRC channel.

When compared to leading TV trackers, TRM is a small community. However it indexes and tracks some of the rarest TV torrents around. How does TRM get hold of such content? They have their own ‘cappers’ – folks who capture television shows from sources HDTV, DSTV, etc (best examples are releases by NewWorld and bjdw). At the time this post is being written, TorrentsRmine tracks over 1250 active torrents, some of them being full TV season packs. Additionally, TRM has an excellent requests section with a high request fulfillment ratio. Check out the screenshot below which displays part of this tracker’s torrent index (more info on indexed shows can also be found in our old article located here):

Note that new members do not have access to all content on the tracker immediately after signup. To download some exclusive releases and season packs you need to be Power User rank or higher (getting promoted shouldn’t be too hard – minimum upload is 10GB and you only need to be a member for at least 1 day). And it’s worth mentioning that this is not an easy tracker to seed – since TRM requires you to maintain a minimum ratio, be very careful about what you download, especially at first (there are freeleech torrents of course) .

As mentioned earlier TRM is closed for signup and users can only get in via an invite. You can ask for invites on TRM’s IRC channel – you will however need to show ratio proofs from other private torrent trackers you are a member of. And when/if you do get invited, make sure you read the FAQ and Rules in full – TRM is not likely to give you a second chance if you screw up.

Site Name: torrentsRmine (http://www.torrentsrmine.org)

IRC Channel Details:

• Server: irc.purplesurge.com
• Channel: #torrentsrmine
• Key: trminers
• Direct Link: irc://irc.purplesurge.com/torrentsrmine?trminers

Special thanks to Bowser and the rest of TRM staff for the support given.

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Interesting news for fans of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent. uTorrent has released the first beta of the upcoming uTorrent 2.0 series of builds . The release was officially announced in uTorrent forums (“1.9 is now 2.0, and we've hit beta!”) and µTorrent 2.0 beta 16081 is now available to the public. One of the major new features implemented in this update is the support for UDP trackers. UDP is generally more efficient than HTTP based trackers and consumes less resources on the server that tracks torrent files [Read more on UDP]. UDP based trackers are not supported in any of the stable 1.X versions of uTorrent and are only supported in v2 beta.

Release notes for the new build are quoted below:

• We've added UDP tracker support!
• uTP has been improved significantly over the previous alpha, with many bugs fixed and performance improvements. It's no longer hidden in Advanced settings.
• The setup dialog has been overhauled to make it much easier to use and with a built-in speed test. It's still not quite complete yet, but this will give you a good taste of what we're up to with it!
• Transfer caps are now configurable, with usage tracking and graphs.

Apart from the above a number of minor features and bugfixes are included in this build – complete version can be found on this forum thread.

Download

uTorrent is free and is not bundled with any adware or spyware. However please keep in mind that v2.0 build 16081 is still a beta version – you may run into undiscovered bugs or stability issues while using it. User feedback for this build can be found on official thread for v2.0 beta on uTorrent forums.

[Click Here] to download uTorrent 2.0 beta build 16081 (Direct Download)

NOTE: If you are using private torrent trackers, make sure your tracker has uTorrent 2.0 beta in its allowed clients list. Using a non-allowed client version can result in your account getting banned.

One a side note, uTorrent does not seem to get bloated with every new release unlike most apps out there (Nero anyone?). –v2.0 (beta) is still very lightweight and the installer is only around 400kb in file size.

Looking for the latest stable build?

[Click Here] to download uTorrent 1.8.3 Stable (Direct Download)

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Good news for HD fans and a welcome addition to our HD trackers section – HDStar (HDS) is open for signup. For those who don’t know what this site is all about, HDStar is a Chinese private torrent tracker specializing in movies, documentaries and TV series encoded in high definition formats. It’s right up there in the list of top HD trackers based in China along with CCFBits, CHDBits and HDChina. With a lot of English content indexed, HDS is one of the Chinese trackers that is friendly to international, English speaking users. Both scene and non scene releases are indexed on this site, including releases from their own internal encoder team.

With over 9400 users and over 6500 torrents, HDStar is by no means a small tracker. It’s a mature private tracker with an active user base and excellent download speeds on most of the torrents. When compared to other China based trackers such as HDChina and CCFBits, HDStar has a much cleaner interface which is more user friendly to international users. Site language is changeable and thankfully there is an English option available as well.

As mentioned above HDStar trackers movies, TV shows and documentaries in HD formats (obtained from Blu-ray, HD DVD, MiniBD, HDTV, DVDR sources and encoded using H.264, VC-1, Xvid, MPEG-2, DTS, AC-3 audio/video codecs). In addition to scene and p2p releases, HDStar has quite a few exclusive torrents released by their own internal encoder team ‘HDS’. Given below is an screenshot of part of this site’s torrent index:

 

As you can see the torrent index has color coded torrents – a different background color means the torrent is either free leech, 2x up, 2x up and free, 50% download recorded, 2x up + 50% download recorded, etc. Information on which colors mean which benefits can be found at the bottom of Browse.php page.

Also note that most torrents have Chinese characters in their name. We’ll give you the same advice we gave when we posted the review for CCFBits – don’t be fooled by this. Just because a torrent has Chinese characters doesn’t mean it’s dubbed in Chinese. In fact most of the releases on HDS have English audio – sometimes you’ll be able to know this for sure as ‘Spoken language’ is mentioned in the torrent description page of most releases.

For those interested in joining, HDStar is currently open for signup. We do not know till when the signups will remain open so get in when you can.

Site Name: HDStar (http://www.hdstar.org)

Signup URL: http://www.hdstar.org/signup.php

Special thanks to Jeffrey for the heads up.

Related Articles

• CCFBits – Chinese HD torrent tracker with English releases
• HDChina – Chinese BitTorrent tracker for US, UK and Asian HD content

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