The problem is that there’s no way that I know to look up if something is licensed here. The places that I go to get my fix, respond very promptly to cease and desist requests. When one of those happens it is a pretty blunt clue.

There’s lots of old stuff in the public domain. But how does a guy find out if, for instance, a particular old and non-famous James Cagney gangster movie is still protected? I wish someone ran a database where you could just simply look it up.

Oh, one more thing, for a great player/codec combo, you might try the CCCP package. It is open-source and has a great community of developers and supporters. They keep up with all the latest tweaks that people invent to improve media files. They publish one or two updates per year. So if you start to have trouble playing some files, you need to check if there’s a new release out (they need to, ahem, include a feature to auto-check for updates). They use Media Player Classic for the player.

The various buttons are links to software downloads that may or may not be useful, but in all cases it is not necessary. As you go through the download process for the software you don’t need, you are forced to decline fine print attempts to install 5-6 adware gadgets, toolbars, etc. The actual download is usually a movie viewer or media utility

The UTorrent program is almost as bad. It offered several infernal bells and whistles and in spite of turning down everything, it still managed to install a damned toolbar (thankfully it was not hard to remove). The Utorrent program works great once installed. It finally hit me that I had once tried to use the older program and for whatever reason I could never get it to work right.

Now that I have UTorrent, I find the torrent that I want on some halfway reputable site, click get torrent and after the download, access the media with whatever media programs you have available. I did have to download updated codecs from MS, which also required declining some trash.

It is pretty neat once you understand it. You can get current TV programs for free that other sites like Amazon charges up to 2 buck an episode. There is also a lot of opensource stuff that is distributed via torrent

It is my understanding that it is completely legal for any show that has been aired previously, even if it was aired the previous night. I’ll bet if you get greedy and try to get big time flicks that are still in the theaters, you will run into the virus problems.

I know you already know all this Alcaray. I am posting for anyone else interested

Yes, there’s a crazy mix of people trying to make money from your mouse clicks, like everywhere else on the net. So, if you have av that scans for internet content, it will object to a lot of the stuff you come across.

1) The absolute best way to use it (and it may not be available to you depending) is to find an interest group that caters to the kind of thing that you want to download. An interest group with their own website that lists their own files/trackers for the kind of thing you want.

If for instance you liked anime, one of the cool places you might go is bakabt. They let members (no cost for registration) download (from other memembers, really, since that’s how torrents work) anime at really high speeds. The downside is that they keep track of the ratio between your download and upload and they have rules in place to ensure that everyone pulls their weight. It’s pretty tricky for me to keep them happy because my connection permits a max upload at about 60kbps while my download is over 1mbps. I have to leave stuff up long after I am done with it, to balance things out.

2) There are also interest groups that don’t require membership (and who don’t impose upload/download ratio rules) to get to their tracker. Again in the anime genre, nyaa would be a good example of this.

3) Less exclusive than that is a type of interest group that does not have its own tracker. But it publishes links to them as a service. An example of that would be animetake.

4) Last is probably what you’ve been doing: Format a DuckDuckGo search with the title of what you seek, followed by the word torrent. It is a bit tricky to find what you want that way, sometimes. There are a lot of sites that see you are looking for a torrent and will show up on your search, but they do not have what you seek.

The better way to do this is to remember what site you’ve had good luck with (like piratebay, for instance) and use their internal search to find what you want.