Kevin's Watch

Does using Torrent increase your chances of getting viruses and stuff?

Stonemaybe wrote:Does using Torrent increase your chances of getting viruses and stuff?

Maybe Syl knows more than I do...but because your IP address is freely available when you seed or leech creating viruses for people to download wouldn't be a sound long term strategy. It's sort of an online community-type thing and people that screw about get excluded pretty quick. I don't know of anyone who has had any problems so far.

Increasing activity of any kind on the net increases your chance of getting a virus, but beyond that... I'd say the chances are less than p2p sharing. The files should all be listed under the torrent info, so just check to make sure you're getting what you want (you can also x out individual files in your download options, so if there's something you don't want, you don't have to dl it; this also helps to save you time). Since you're usually dealing with large files, sometimes they're compressed. Be careful with what you unzip (scan it first, naturally). And it never hurts to run a firewall and update your antivirus software.

Help!

Have downloaded utorrent and then downloaded a couple of films. I think I'm missing something very basic here - I cannot play the films! WMP says 'error downloading codec' and proceeds to play film without picture, only sound. if I try and open them with utorrent it tells me they are not torrents!??? What do I have to do?

Download this software www.headbands.com/gspot/(I have GSpot v2.21).

Once it's been downloaded open the software and go to file and open and double click on the file your trying to watch. GSpot will then tell you which codec you need.

Look on www.wmplugins.com/ or www.xvidmovies.com/codec/ for it. If you can't find it just do a google search for it. Once you find it just dowload and you should be good to go.

You are a STAR Marvin. Thank you!

Get VLC media player. It runs almost every format and codec you'll ever need.

And how do i go about that?

And will it mean I can play games that I've downloaded that won't work either?????

www.videolan.org/vlc/

It's just a media player, but it can play a lot of files that you'd need to download codecs for on another player. Very basic, but useful. Whenever I've downloaded a movie that wouldn't play in Winamp or WMP, it's worked in VideoLAN.

Essential software

phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

PeerGuardian 2

PeerGuardian 2 is Phoenix Labs’ premier IP blocker for Windows. PeerGuardian 2 integrates support for multiple lists, list editing, automatic updates, and blocking all of IPv4 (TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc), making it the safest and easiest way to protect your privacy on P2P.

That codec stuff had me stuffed for a while.

VLC rocks almost as hard as torrents themselves do.