Hi! This is a weird question, but I was in the notes on the VPN thing you rebloghed recently and saw you do a lot of torrenting. I used to, but didn’t have anything I needed to torrent for long enough that the current state of torrenting passed me by and I’m not sure how people torrent these days. So, if you wouldn’t mind: what’s your methodology? What do you use, sites, vpns, etc? I have utorrent, is that still the thing to use?
Basically my kid needs Land Before Time (all of it) please help
Hello! Not a weird question at all :) I'm far from an expert, but I've helped a few friends get their own setup going; I'd be happy to help! For any newbies who want to get into torrenting, check out this tutorial. It's what I used to start, and it explains a lot of the terminology and how torrenting works.
I'll put a tl;dr if you prefer to skip extra info and explanations:
Sites: https://knaben.info/
Playback: VLC Media Player
Step 1 is gonna be a VPN (hence why I was in the notes in that post). This will cost a bit of money, but its actually really affordable. There's a really great comprehensive ranking in r/VPNtorrents, but if you wanna skip the deep dive I use AirVPN and it gets the job done. It's on the reddit recommended list, is pretty cheap, and would be good for your situation if you just want to get Land Before Time and then drop out of torrenting again, since you can pay by the day, week, month, etc. It starts at 3 days for 2 euro, or 2.17 USD at current exchange rates. They take bitcoin or cash in the mail if you're really security-minded, as well. Whatever VPN you use make sure it has a kill switch so your ISP won't see you torrenting. Nobody wants a cease and desist in the mail.
As for clients, there's like a bajillion out there, basically all you need to do is NOT use uTorrent unless you still have a super old version and DO NOT update if you do. It's got all kinds of nasty shit baked in now and will fuck with your computer. We're talking adware, crypto mining, forcing your default search engine to yahoo for some reason, the works. Some people still use 2.2.1 but almost everybody who's made the switch prefers what the newer clients have going for them. I use qBittorrent, haven't had any issues. If qBittorrent gives you trouble, I've heard good things about Transmission.
Once you have a VPN and torrenting client, this website is an absolute lifesaver. Knaben tracks a bunch of proxies for 13 different major torrenting sites so you can see what's up and what latency looks like and all that fun stuff. It also will tell you which sites are good for what media types. IDK how easy LBT will be to find, you might need to search a couple places. Also people generally recommend against using the Pirate Bay these days because its so mainstream that it has a lot of eyes on it. I like 1337x, but that's just because I got used to its layout first.
As far as actually using your files once you have them, VLC Media Player is amazing if you don't already have it. You can even add subtitles if your videos don't come with them and you can find them online.