[Americas]

(09-18-2014 01:01 AM)brianmark Wrote:  

Fortunately or unfortunately I've lived the American dream/scheme! I have been downsizing for years for my long term escape. Please tell me how digitize all my DVDs. What software do you recommend? How about a lesson in how to torrent and stream? Are you keeping everything on the cloud or how do you do it? Any recommendations would be appreciated.

You can rip all of your current DVDs into digital files if you want:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2045217/h...cloud.html

But honestly, it's probably just faster to sell/donate/throw away all your DVDs and start from scratch by torrents.

I don't use clouds. I do use dropbox for work and saving certain files that I don't want to lose, but I don't use them for entertainment or media files. If you want to cloud for free, you will have to set up multiple accounts under different services because these services don't give you a lot of space for free. Or, you can pay a monthly fee to have unlimited storage under one account. Here are some cloud services you can take a look at:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413556,00.asp

I personally use an external drive because I like to have it with me and easily accessible rather than manage multiple accounts and all that hassle. Something durable that has a TB or more is more space than you really ever would need:

http://www.amazon.com/ADATA-USA-DashDriv...B00HF8JXUI

Some people prefer to stream rather than download, but I prefer to download. I do stream on occasion (particularly sports and sometimes TV shows). Finding places to stream is fairly easy and straightforward. There are tonnes of websites with free streaming of multiple TV shows and/or movies, such as this one:

http://watchseries.lt/Watch

For sports, I use:

http://www.wiziwig.tv/index.html?part=sports (you can pretty much watch any sporting event on here).

Or you can just search for something + 'stream' or 'streaming' and a bunch of sites will come up for that show or movie.

As for torrent downloading...first you need to install a bit client such as utorrent. I have been using utorrent for years, and I think most of the clients are pretty much the same thing so I just stuck with them.

http://www.utorrent.com/downloads/win?us

Just download the free one.

Then you need something you play the movies on your computer. You may already have an application for this, but I think VLC is by far the best:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

Now you just need to find torrent hosting sites and search for whatever you want to download. There are a bunch of them such as:

http://thepiratebay.se/
http://kickass.to/
http://www.demonoid.ph/ (need a referral for this one)
http://torrentz.eu/
http://isohunt.to/

I usually use the pirate bay the most for movies/TV shows/music just because they have probably the best selection and have a lot of seeders. But I do use kickass torrents as well. Demonoid is good for pirated computer applications/software.

A few basics about torrenting:

Once you have downloaded the bitclient, and found a torrent you want to download then you just click on the 'get this torrent' link (usually has a magnet right beside it). For example, say you wanted to download the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street." Just do a search for it in one of the website's search queries, then it will show you all the torrents that are available. Click on one for example:

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/9453041/T....XviD-BiDA

Just click on the 'GET THIS TORRENT' link. Then it will queue up in your utorrent app, press ok, then it will start downloading. Once it is done, then you can just open it with your VLC player and watch it at your leisure.

Also, there are things called 'seeds.' Seeds are basically how many people have the torrent in their bit client and are sharing it. The more seeds a torrent has, the faster it will download. This is fairly important as when you search for a torrent and have multiple files to choose from, you can sort them by how many seeds they have and download the one with the most seeds. There are also things called "peers" which are people who have downloaded/or currently downloading the torrent but are not sharing it. These make the download go slower. So sometimes its not necessarily about the most seeds but rather the best ratio of seeds to peers.

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The internet is full of virtually unlimited content for free. The ability to learn certain tricks and harness that potential means you can basically read, watch, listen to anything you ever want to for free.