A man allegedly seen ‘camming’ the latest Batman movie has been arrested by police. Following guidelines, theater employees called the police after suspicions were aroused. According to the MPAA, many other movies have been recorded at this theater.

It was always going to be a big, big movie and it certainly didn’t disappoint, going to set a one-day box office record of $66.4 million on opening day, according to Warner’s head of distribution, Dan Fellman. No one, not even pirates are allowed to ruin this party.

Hindering piracy of the movie was always high on the list for Warner and it handed out night vision goggles in Australia in an attempt to thwart ‘cammers’ - people who record movies in theaters. In Australia ‘cammers’ are asked to leave if they are caught by theater staff, in the United States things are a little different.

According to reports, on Friday morning Eastglen 16 Theater employees grew suspicious that a man was recording, or ‘camming’ the “Dark Knight” movie. Following movie industry guidelines they called police at around 9:40pm, who arrived shortly after.

Lee’s Summit police confirmed that they found evidence that the 40-year-old man from Grandview, Mo. had recorded the movie so they arrested him. A few hours later the police went to the man’s house and conducted a search where they say they found pirate movies on DVD.

According to the MPAA, several other movies have been recorded at the Eastglen 16 theater, but at this stage it is not known if the man is affiliated with any particular group or was acting alone. Police have not released the name of the suspect.

Inevitably, and despite the best efforts of Warner, Rlslog reports that a copy of the movie has been leaked onto the Internet by a release group called “TradingStandards” who apparently ’stole’ it from a P2P group called ‘DEViSE’ who actually ’stole’ it from 2Bros - quite confusing. But anyway, by most accounts the quality is pretty poor and not worth bothering with at all, so Warner will be happy.

Considering the popularity of the movie, maybe this time it just has to be the big screen.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Police Arrest Man Camming ‘The Dark Knight’

During the last three years, not many new BitTorrent clients have surfaced. Together, the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet have a 90% market share, with uTorrent being the most popular client. For a new client it is nearly impossible to catch up with these giants, but Halite might just stand a chance.

Still a relatively unknown BitTorrent client at the moment, Halite is named after a mineral - rock salt in plain English.

The open source application is developed by Irishman Eóin O’Callaghan, who started the project in 2006, and has been adding features and improvements ever since. We’ve been following Halite’s development for quite a while now and over the past few months it has become a fully-featured, yet lightweight BitTorrent client.

One of the greatest strengths of Halite is that it uses minimal system resources. The latest release uses less than 10,000k of memory, half of what uTorrent uses on average and only a fraction of the consumption of Vuze or BitComet.

Halite started to develop a steady user base after uTorrent, the most widely used BitTorrent client, was sold to BitTorrent Inc. At the time, many uTorrent users were afraid that their favorite BitTorrent client would be ruined by the company, and some abandoned the application. Although these worries turned out to be unfounded, Halite has certainly become one of uTorrent’s main competitors.

Halite supports all of the basic features the average downloader requires including encryption, selective downloading, a torrent creator and more. So far there is no support for disk caching, seeding preferences and torrent queuing, but these and other features are on the to do list, and will be implemented in the future.

The download speeds of Halite are pretty much comparable to clients like Vuze and uTorrent. Some people report that it is significantly faster than uTorrent, but in the TorrentFreak test lab we were not able to replicate these results. The most important thing is to configure your torrent client correctly.

Overall I would say that Halite is a great BitTorrent client for those people who are looking for a client that uses minimal system resources and has all the basic features. Worth a try.

Halite screenshots

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Halite, a Fast and Lightweight BitTorrent Client

The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” tops the chart this week, again.

We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of July 21, 2008…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Most Downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk29)

BitTorrent is without a doubt the best way to share large files, as long as you follow some basic rules, that is. We asked one of the leading BitTorrent client developers for some tips and tricks so you can speed up your BitTorrent downloads.

There are several ways to optimize your BitTorrent download speeds. One of the easiest ways is to join a private torrent tracker, but there are others.

Since there’s always a lot of debate about what works and what doesn’t, we decided to ask an expert to share his thoughts with us. Olivier Chalouhi, developer and CTO of Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) was kind enough to give us some of his own tips and tricks. Since Olivier was the person who initiated the Azureus Open Source project in 2003, which went on to create one of the most popular BitTorrent clients ever, if anyone knows how to get the best out of your torrent client, he does.

Here are some of Olivier’s tips for optimizing your torrent download speeds. There tips work with every BitTorrent client, except for the last one.

1. Seed.

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be connectable.

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed.

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.

TF note: Want an easy life? Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right torrents.

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be realistic.

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

6. Get a Friend Boost.

I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed :). When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously, ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Speed Up Your Torrents, Tips from a BitTorrent Developer