Once it receives portions of the file, your computer becomes able to 'seed,' or upload, the file to other users. When the torrent file is opened by a torrent program, the torrent program connects to other users who have portions of the file and downloads those pieces from them. The torrent files contain all of the information about a specific torrent: who started it, what the torrent contains, and how to download and upload information corresponding to that torrent. These programs enable your computer to send and receive pieces of files on a specific port and interpret the data from torrent files.

Examples of torrenting programs include uTorrent, Azureus and the original BitTorrent. For this reason, companies such as Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, and Canonical, makers of Ubuntu Linux, use BitTorrent to distribute their software, as of February 2012.Īll torrenting takes place using a torrent program. Because of the distributed nature of BitTorrent sharing, and the fact that small pieces of the files are downloaded and then reassembled by the software, BitTorrent uses less resources than direct downloading of files, resulting in faster speeds for the downloader and lower bandwidth costs for the file provider.

Hundreds of millions of people use BitTorrent globally, as of January 2012, according to the protocol's creator. You can quickly and easily search Torrent files in the world.Ī torrent file stores data about files for use with BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that enables users to send and receive files in small pieces to and from computers across the Internet.

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