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Recently I’ve been playing a lot with BitTorrent, downloading US TV series, burning them to CD, and watching them with my DVD player. Some of the new series have been rather good, and it could be years before they ever reach the UK - if at all. We’re only just reached Season 3 of The Practice, which is being shown inconsistently on BBC3, whereas this way I can watch Season 8 (Of course I’d really like to see all the seasons inbetween, but I haven’t found a source for those yet). Thanks to a recommendation by Aaron Swartz I started watching Wonderfalls, which has now been cancelled after 4 episodes, so I doubt it’ll ever reach UK TV. Century City has similarly been cancelled, so the only new show I’m left with is the DA. (Update: It seems that they only made 4 episodes of The DA, and they won’t be asking for more, so that’s 0 out of 3 remaining…)

It’s been an interesting experience learning the ins and outs of this subculture. BitTorrent itself is very simple (and very clever), but fairly basic. There are an increasing number of add-ons with better interfaces. I used burst for a while, but as you could only limit the bandwidth per file being shared (to a minimum to 10k/sec each) I couldn’t really continue to share files I’d downloaded for very long without all my bandwidth being sucked up. So I’ve switched to bitcomet, which is much more impressive all round, and which lets me set a global upload/download rate, so I can continue to share files when I’m done downloading (and has a much nicer interface).

Actually dealing with the downloaded files has required even more searching, learning, and experimentation. Ever since I playing with downloading music videos off Gnutella, I knew that there were different codecs, but didn’t really know very much about it, or how to deal with formats that Winamp or Windows Media Player couldn’t handle.

GSpot was a great find for this. You simply drag a file to it and it analyses it and tells you whether you have the right combination of Video and Audio codecs to play it. The only thing it’s missing is some way of telling you how to get any codec you’re missing. I had another piece of software that would do that, but I can’t find it now (and it gave me a bum steer on one codec - when I installed it all my others stopped working. Thankfully GSpot was able to identify that and tell me what to remove).

Assuming I can play the file, then the next stage is burning it to CD. Nero seems to be the clear winner in these stakes. It’s a simple matter of dropping the files on, customising the menu, and hitting Go. If the video is .mpeg already then it’ll start burning right away, and be done in a couple of minutes. If it’s .avi then it’ll convert it (it’s taking something pretty close to real time to convert for me at the minute), and then burn that.

Yesterday I had my biggest challenge to date: an OGM file. This played fine on my desktop, as Winamp has OGG support built in. But Nero choked on it. GSpot unhelpfully reported that I didn’t have the audio codec, but still claimed to be able to render it fine. I did a few searches, and tried some other software: Video Edit Magic, Boilsoft, WinMPG Video Convert and the like, but nothing liked the file, or could even really tell me why not.

Eventually I discovered VDubMod. It opened the OGM file and let me write out the audio stream as WAV, which I could then convert to MP3 with dBpowerAMP. Then I layered that back on the OGM with VDubMod, and disabled the original OGG audio track. Then I could write the file out as .avi, and burn it to CD. VDubMod also lets you split .avi files, which means that I should now be able to watch the Pilot of the US version of Touching Evil, which was too long for a single VCD.

My only remaining challenge (for the minute) is to work out what’s going on with the episodes of Sports Night that I’m getting from torrentz.com. I couldn’t get them to work at all on my PC, and when I burned one I got a picture but no sound. Installing the ac3 audio codec seems to have done the trick as far as GSpot is concerned, but playing them on my PC now gives me sound, but no picture. I’m assuming it’s something to do with the “Stream Type” which is listed as: ‘AVI, “rec list” style’, which I’ve never seen before. As I got a picture last time I burned them, hopefully I’ll still get it again - only this time with sound, but I’d still prefer being able to get it working on my PC first.

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