How To Use Torrentz2 and Download Torrents

If you’ve spent any time on the internet since the early 2000s, you’ve probably heard of BitTorrent, the popular file-sharing tool used for movies, programs, and other large chunks of data. But BitTorrent is a bit more complex than the file-sharing tools that came before it, so it helps to acquaint yourself with its ins and outs before using it. Our guide can help you get started.

How to Use BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer media sharing tool, but it’s not as simple as downloading content in a browser. Our guide shows you how to Torrent, and how to stay safe while doing it.

Updated September 11, 2019
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-use-bittorrent

If you’ve spent any time on the internet since the early 2000s, you’ve probably heard of BitTorrent, the popular file-sharing tool used for movies, programs, and other large chunks of data. But BitTorrent is a bit more complex than the file-sharing tools that came before it, so it helps to acquaint yourself with its ins and outs before using it. Our guide can help you get started.

What Is BitTorrent?

When you download a file from the internet, you’re typically downloading it directly from a server somewhere. How fast you download that file can vary depending on the server’s location, speed, and how many people are trying to download the file at the same time. So, while you might have a 200Mbps connection from your internet provider, you may download a file much slower than that if the server providing the file is slow or getting hammered with requests.

BitTorrent is an alternative way of downloading big files that doesn’t share the same weaknesses. BitTorrent isn’t just a program—it’s a peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol that any program can use (though there is a program called BitTorrent, owned by the company of the same name that develops and maintains the protocol itself).

Instead of downloading a file from a single server, with BitTorrent you download pieces of that file from other users across the globe who have the same file on their PC (hence peer-to-peer). The file or group of files you download is called a torrent, sharing those files is called seeding, and the group of people you download from is called a swarm. The more people connected to a given swarm, seeding a file, the faster you’ll be able to download that file.

BitTorrent is commonly known as a piracy tool, thanks to its efficiency in sharing large movie files, music albums, software, and porn. Using BitTorrent isn’t inherently illegal, and the protocol has seen many legitimate uses as well, including the sharing of open-source software like Linux, delivering updates for programs like World of Warcraft, syncing files between computers Dropbox-style, and sharing media released over BitTorrent by the artists themselves. Microsoft even uses similar tech to optimize Windows updates.

All that said, BitTorrent is often used for piracy, since its efficiency, decentralized nature, and popularity have produced a bustling community around sharing those files. If there’s something you want to download, there’s a good chance someone’s sharing it with BitTorrent, legally or not. To be clear, we at PCMag do not condone piracy. If you use our instructions for that purpose, you do so at your own risk.

How to Download a Torrent

1. Get a BitTorrent Client

Downloading files with BitTorrent is a bit more complicated than just clicking a link in your web browser. Most browsers don’t have built-in support for BitTorrent, so you need a specific program, called a BitTorrent client, that knows how to download and assemble the pieces of a file in a torrent.

I’m personally a fan of qBittorrent, a free open-source client that’s easy to use, available on multiple platforms, and provides a good amount of advanced features for those who like to dig in. Other popular programs include Transmission, and Deluge. We’ll discuss the differences between all these in a future article.

2. Find a Torrent to Download

You can find torrents to download in a few different ways. If you’re downloading something that the creator has made available on BitTorrent, you’ll probably find a link to download the torrent somewhere on their site—for example, the Linux distribution Ubuntu offers torrents on its Alternative Downloads page. You can also visit a torrent search engine like the aptly named Pirate Bay to find things.

3. Download the Torrent File

Once you find what you’re looking for, you’ll need to download the .torrent file—a tiny piece of data that points your BitTorrent client toward the swarm, so it can download the actual files you’re looking for. So, if you’re downloading a video, you’ll download the small .torrent file first, then double-click it to open it up in qBittorrent, where it’ll start downloading the actual video.

This may seem a bit roundabout—downloading a small file that points you to another file—but that’s the way BitTorrent works. Many BitTorrent sites and clients also support “magnet links,” which allow you to bypass the .torrent file and point your client to the swarm with a simple click of the mouse. You’ll find .torrent files and magnet links on the download page of the file you want (if the creator supports BitTorrent), or on a BitTorrent search engine like Pirate Bay.

4. Open the Torrent in Your Client Software

You just double-click the Torrent and tell your OS to open it in the client software. From there, you will need to tell the software where to download your file and you may also be able to prioritize it among whatever other things you want to download at the same time. These are client-specific steps, however.

How to Torrent Safely and Speedily

These are the absolute bare minimum basics you need to get started with BitTorrent, but they won’t likely give you an optimal experience. Below are a few things that can help you stay safe and keep your downloads moving fast.

Watch Out for Malware and Fake Torrents

Just like elsewhere on the internet, you need to be careful about what you download. While many, even most, torrent files contain what they purport to contain, some will trick you by promising one thing and offering malware instead—especially if you’re browsing shadier corners of the web for torrents.

Many torrent sites have comments on each page, which can help you determine a given torrent’s authenticity based on what other users have written. Some directories put badges next to the uploader’s username, denoting users with good track records of uploading safe files. And, of course, you should be running good antivirus software, which scans everything you download automatically.

Use a VPN

Since you’re connecting directly to other users in order to download your torrent, you can see the IP address of every user in the swarm—and they can see yours. That IP is traceable to you, allowing anyone who joins the swarm to see what you’re downloading. Some ISPs, particularly those outside the US, may also throttle your speeds if they see you’re using BitTorrent. In order to prevent both of these issues, you should use a trustworthy VPN whenever torrenting—it’ll obscure your IP address from the swarm and encrypt your traffic so that your ISP doesn’t know what you’re doing.

Avoid Dead Torrents

BitTorrent allows you to download files faster and more efficiently than a direct connection to a server—as long as there’s a big enough swarm sharing the file. If a torrent only has a couple seeders, you’ll probably download the file very slowly, and if there aren’t any seeders, you won’t be able to get the file at all. When you download the torrent, make sure you download a recent one that has a lot of seeders to ensure the best speeds (many sites will list the number of seeders on the torrent’s download page).

Make Sure You’re Open to Connections

These days, most torrent clients are set up optimally out of the box—they create a Windows firewall rule for themselves, and use UPnP or NAT-PMP to automatically open a port so that seeders can send you their pieces of the file. If a program has a lot of seeders and the file isn’t downloading, though, you may need to manually forward a port on your router, or go through other troubleshooting steps to ensure you’re connectable to peers in the swarm.

Follow BitTorrent Etiquette

While this isn’t crucial to success, it’s generally considered nice to pay it forward and seed files after you download them, allowing others the opportunity to download the data themselves. After all, if there were no seeders, BitTorrent wouldn’t work very well, and we’d all be stuck downloading files at a snail’s pace. If you can’t seed the file forever, at least seed it until you’ve shared as much as you’ve downloaded (also known as having a 1:1 “ratio”) before deleting the torrent from your client.

There’s even more we could delve into here, as BitTorrent is a remarkably powerful tool if you’re willing to dig into your client’s settings. But for most beginners, this should get you started, keep you safe, and allow you to avoid the dreaded “slow download server” as much as possible.

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How To Use Torrentz2 and Download Torrents

If you’ve been searching for how to use Torrentz2 to download torrents, this article will take you through the process quickly. Follow the simple steps below to get started:

Security Gladiators in no way encourages or condones any kind of copyright violation or circumvention of restrictions. That includes torrenting or downloading illegal content. Torrenting is a great way to access and share all kinds of content on the internet and there are plenty of opportunities there to engage in legal and safe online torrenting. You need to do your own research to see if these services and torrents are legal in your own country. We suggest to always use a VPN while torrenting.

Table of Contents

Step 1 – Download uTorrent

The first thing you need to download torrents from Torrentz2 is to install uTorrent (or any other torrent client). uTorrent is widely considered the best software available to both download and share torrent files, so it’s the one we’ll discuss here.

uTorrent has a free version and a pro version.

If you need the pro version, you’ll have to pay to download it. However, the free version will work fine for downloading torrents. uTorrent is considered the best in this regard because it has the following features:

• You can pause your download and resume it at a later time.
• If your computer turns off, you can still resume the download when it restarts without affecting the download.
• You can transfer the data you’re downloading from one computer to another even when the download hasn’t been completed.

How To Download uTorrent

• If you’re ready to start, click here to begin downloading uTorrent.
• After downloading the file, double-click it and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.
• Click the Finish button on the last screen of the installation.
• Since you don’t need to start uTorrent manually for it to run you can uncheck Launch uTorrent before clicking Finish on the last installation screen, as shown below.

Step 2 – Launch Torrentz2

• After the installation, head over to Torrentz2 to start searching for your favorite content.
• Remember that Torrentz2 is blocked in many countries. Therefore, the link will redirect you to https://torrentz2eu.org, a mirror site of Torrentz2.
• The screen below shows the homepage of the site where you can search for your favorite content.

Step 3 – Define Your Search Category

The contents of the site are arranged in the database according to different categories. There’s the action film category, comedy category, seasonal film category, game category, etc. To continue:

• Type your desired category into the search box.
• Specify your interest by clicking on your choice from the drop-down menu.
• Hit the search icon.

In the example below, the choice of category is action movies.

After clicking on the search icon after typing your favorite search category, the screen below will display:

Step 4 – Choose Your Favorite Subcategory

Every category also has subcategories. For example, the action movie category has subcategories like science fiction, kung-fu, Asian action movies, etc. To choose your favorite:

• Click on your choice of a file from the listed titles to begin your download. For example, Asian.Action.Movies.Pack.RoSubbed-FileList (download torrent) – TPB is the third on the list. If that’s what you’re looking for, click on it. Clicking it may pop up a dialogue box that will request your approval to allow uTorrent to handle your download. If that happens, do the following:
• Click Allow to launch uTorrent.
• If you don’t want to see the dialogue box in the future, click on Always open magnet links before clicking on Allow.

Clicking Allow, as shown above, takes you to the screen below. Then click on GET THIS TORRENT to activate the uTorrent software to download the file.

Step 5 – Activating Your Download

You’ll find two nearly identical screens below. One has banner ads and the other one doesn’t. Whichever version you get shouldn’t matter. Proceed with the following steps:

Clicking on GET THIS TORRENT takes you to a screen with the full list of your choice of category. All files are ticked by default, as you can see on the screen below:

• To download all the selected movies, just click OK.
• If you don’t want to download all the files that are shown, click on Select None.
• Choose the file you want to download and click OK.

In the example below, all of the files were unchecked by clicking Select None. Afterward, the first folder was clicked on to select it. Clicking on OK will take you straight to the download screen to see your file downloading, as shown below:

Conclusion

Your smooth ride to using Torrentz2 to download torrent files after this tutorial shouldn’t make you forget your safety.

It’s advisable to arm your computer with a strong antivirus to block viruses and a VPN to shield your identity online.

We hope you found this guide useful and look forward to showing you more ways to use torrent software in the future.

Ali Qamar is a seasoned blogger and loves keeping a keen eye on the future of tech. He is a geek. He is a privacy enthusiast and advocate. He is crazy (and competent) about internet security, digital finance, and technology. Ali is the founder of PrivacySavvy and an aspiring entrepreneur.