The kids' guide to piracy

The kids' guide to piracy

24 Jul 2026<br>Hey kids! Have you heard of piracy but don’t know how to do it cos you grew up while streaming worked okay? Well this is the guide for you!

DISCLAIMER: It is only my intent that the advice offered here be used to download media that is in the public domain. While it’s true that the advice here could be employed to download recent movies and TV shows that are under copyright, and that that is its primary application, it’s cerrrtainnnly not my intention that you use it for such purposes. You wouldn’t want to deprive a media megacorp CEO of his second yacht would you?!?!

ALSO KIND OF A DISCLAIMER I GUESS: I’ll be describing how to do this on a personal computer of some sort (that includes laptops (that includes your macintosh-books and so on)). You can probably do it on the portable telephones you all seem to love so much, but I have no idea how because I am old.

What is torrenting?

Torrenting is how we used to get movies and TV shows and games back before streaming and Steam were things and before we realised the error of our ways and bucked our ideas up.

I’m going to be nutshelling this pretty hard, describing things very broadly, so don’t come “Well actually…”ing me about details, I don’t care. And if you’re not interested in how it all works, just skip down to the numbered instructions.

Movies and TV shows, in digital form, are just files. And you want to download those files to your computer where you can do what you like with them. Watch them whenever you want, copy them to other devices, back them up, take clips and edit them together to some horrible pop music and upload that to TikTok. Whatever you like.

Torrenting lets you do that. The downloading part. A torrent is a description of how to download those files from other people who have them. When you are torrenting something, you are simultaneously downloading it from other people who have it and uploading it to other people who want it. The uploading and downloading stop when you close the client or remove that particular torrent from the client.

Popular things, which lots of people are sharing, will download more quickly (often as fast as your internet can go) than niche things. But pretty much anything should download eventually if you just leave the torrent client running.

You generally have to download something completely before you can watch it, this isn’t streaming. If it’s a TV show, though, you can choose to only download particular episodes, or prioritise particular episodes so they download first and you can watch them while the next one downloads.

Your internet service provider (ISP) may be able to tell when you’re torrenting, and may care . The worst that’s likely to happen in this instance is that they’ll send you a letter telling you to stop. If this is a concern for you, only torrent while using a VPN, this will mask your torrenting from your ISP.

1. Get a torrent client

A torrent client is a program (‘app’) that lets you download torrents. You’ll need one of those. There are many many torrent clients and, once you’re up and running, feel free to try other ones out. For now I’ll just recommend basic ones that work well.

If you’re on Windows, download qBittorrent.

If you’re on MacOS or Linux, download Transmission.

Install the one you downloaded.

Pop it open and have a look at the interface if you like. Now we need to get a torrent file.

2. Choose a tracker

Trackers are websites that list and allow you to search for torrents. There are many of these. Some are member-only, some are public, some are specialised to a particular kind of media, some are general. We’ll start with a general, public one.

Go to https://1337x.to/ and search for the movie, TV show or whatever you want to download.

You’ll probably see multiple options. If it’s a TV show or movie you’re searching for, the filename on the left will contain information such as the resolution (720, 1080, 4k and so on), the video encoder used such as ‘x264’, ‘x265’ and others, don’t worry about that for now. Audio format and encoder used and, again, don’t worry about that for now. And finally file format such as ‘mkv’, ‘mp4’ and so on, and again, don’t worry. You’ll probably mostly care about resolution - the larger the resolution, the larger the file size (and so the longer it’ll take to download, generally speaking).

Choose something appropriate - probably something 720 or 1080 for now. Then have a look at the other columns.

se is the number of seeders - that is people actively uploading the file(s).

le is the number of leechers - that is people downloading the file(s).

date is when the torrent was created.

size is how big the files are to download.

uploader is the username of the person who uploaded the torrent to this tracker.

Generally you’ll want to choose something with a lot of seeders, i.e. where the se number is higher. More seeders means faster downloads.

Some tips:

If you’re...