ScL Tracker Shut Down & TDC Open Signups + Sci-Fi Month

A quick update from the realm of private torrent trackers – and this time around we have both good news and bad news. Good news is that The DVD Club (TDC), an untouched DVD and Blu Ray torrent tracker, will be open for public signups in the next couple of days. Additionally, their ‘Sci-Fi month’ theme will kick start today with all science fiction movies indexed on the tracker set on free leech throughout the month. You can also expect a lot more movies of this genre to be uploaded, thanks to a number of upload competitions that are currently ongoing. Bad news is about ScL – this elusive private tracker which suffered from extended downtime in the past couple of months has decided to finally call it quits. The site has officially shut down and a lengthy news post on homepage explains the story in detail.

TDC Open Signup
  
Site Name: TheDVDClub (http://thedvdclub.org)
Signup URL: http://thedvdclub.org/signup.php
Stats: 10300+ users and 2500+ torrents
Description: Please refer to the full review linked to below for detailed information about this tracker, it’s content and screenshots.
Full Review: [Click Here]

ScL Shut Down
 
As you might already know, ScL tracker has been having a rough ride in the past couple of months. At one point, the site was completely offline for a few weeks. It later returned but that was with the core function of the of the site missing – torrent index was reset and resurrected version tracked 0 torrents. Although the site has been up since then, no new torrents were uploaded to the tracker. Today, an official announcement from tracker staff seals the fate of ScL – it will be shut down and it will not return. Full announcement is quoted below:

[BEGIN QUOTE]

ScL forever in our hearts - 2010-03-31

Dear ScL Members,
As you know things haven't been going well lately and we apologize for that. But we would like to say that there is an explanation for everything that has happened in the past months.

In the past 7 months – ScL’s owner and coder SScript has been really inactive. He has been even less active than he was before, which basically means he has been spending approximately an hour a week on the site. He has also been leaving for many weeks without letting any other staffers know, leaving the site on its own and constantly forgetting to pay the server costs (which I'm sure you all noticed since the site constantly went down at the start of each month). SScript was never a good owner. Coding issues that were supposed to be dealt with almost 11 months ago are still not done, and yet he was too arrogant to give direct access to other coders so they could help us out.

In the past year the site has basically been ran by it's mods and admins paying the server costs from their own pocket. And if it wasn't for staff members like pedrowsky, MSO, HL, aquirre, ViperMM, scrappen and winnie - the site would have died a long time ago.

Around 4 months ago ScL went down for a long period because the owner SScript had issues paying for the server. He claims that he had paypal problems. The other staffers – supportive as always wanted to help him to get ScL back up and perhaps ask you guys to donate a little extra so he can keep running the site. But SScript didn’t have a recent copy of ScLs code and DB (His last copy was 8 months old!). Yes we know – The owner and coder of ScL doesn’t have a copy of his own site? As crazy as it sounds – It’s the truth, so now you can understand why we call him a bad owner. After this we really understood how little he cared about the site – so we decided not to support him anymore.

Anyway after weeks of hard work – MSO managed to find a 2 month old copy of the ScL and then host it on aquirres server. This copy – as everyone noticed didn’t have the torrents backed up, so therefore ScL came back up with 0 torrents.

We have been trying for months to find a way to get our torrents back and trust us – if there was a way to do it, it would have been done a long time ago. This is one of the main reasons why we didn’t give out any info to our members – We simply hoped that we could get our torrents back and that everything could go back to normal. Other reasons for us giving you guys information about the sites status this late was that SScript removed the domain since he realized that we are against him now. And as mentioned earlier, we were really far behind on the coding front – so we simply didn’t have a function to mass email our users. However – thanks to mrstonedone (who is actually not a site coder, but an IRC coder) we managed to make a function like this to finally inform you guys about what’s going on.

So what happens now? As tragic and sad as it may be – It’s time for ScL to shut down. We were blessed with the finest community the BT world has ever known and there is no doubt that our members will forever be in our hearts. There is no other tracker and there never will be a tracker with a community as strong and warm as the one ScL had.

But there is still some hope left: ScL will never come back, no. But – The ScL Crew is working on a new promising project and would like to welcome our active and loyal members to join us. This tracker is going to be a magnificent tracker – including a reckless design, a magnificent community, and the one thing ScL always missed – LOTS OF TORRENTS. We’ve got sponsors for this project and we got a really nice budget to work our way around. More info about this project will be given later.

Last but not least – We would like to say that our time as staffers on this tracker has been great and we’ve had a lot of fun serving this community. Even though we’ve had our ups and downs, it has been a pleasure to be staffers of a community this amazing. We will surely miss our fine members and we would like to wish you the best of luck in life.

And PS: The forums will be up until further notice.
Take care,

[END QUOTE]

It would be interesting to see what the new project Ex-ScL staff is supposedly working on. Either way ScL had a good community of members and it’s loyal fans will definitely miss the site. As stated above the forums would continue to stay up. The site however may not be accessible through its usual domain. It will work if you directly type in the IP in the browser address bar (all existing ScL members should have received an E-mail with the current site’s IP).

Assassin's Creed 2 Crack – Have They Really Done It?

When game developer UBISoft first announced their new Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for future PC titles, it triggered the start of many debates (Is it right to ask gamers to be online even when playing single player portion of a game?) .Despite heavy criticism, UBI went on and implemented the new DRM on two of their titles; Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed 2. Much to the dismay of pirates, both these titles remain uncracked to date (that’s not counting the partially working cracks which have bugs). While pirates look desperately for a scene group to break this protection, a group calling themselves ‘IPAKI ASIAN Division’ claims to have already done so. What’s really interesting about this group is that they’ve been updating the public on their progress via microblogging service Twitter.

Since the 28th of March, Twitter account http://twitter.com/IPAKIGroup has been Tweeting messages about AC2 cracking progress. The first Tweet is directed at UBISoft itself, which claims that IPAKIGroup has broken the DRM and will be publishing a crack sin a few days. Full list of Tweets is quoted below:

@UBISOFT We have cracked Assassin's creed II successfully , We are releasing it to public after 3 days because we are sill testing it .

We are debugging assassin's creed II please wait , still many problems we face to get it 100% finished . Viva TokYO !

Missions fixed with our new crack ~ but game is stuck at 13 FPS ~ we are still fixing it

~~Settlers 7 ~~ crack will be available to public after 5 days .

~SH5 ~ too many bugs , has not been fixed yet .

~ACII~ crack will be published after 24 hours , Tokyo's time . everything is fixed and game works fine now .

~Settlers 7 ~ crack delayed , we are facing lots of bugs . We apologize for that .

~ACII~ crack will be published at 7 a.m Tokyo's time . we are putting our final touches on it , keep tuned

If what they say is true, we should see an AC 2 crack out in several hours. However, one should keep in mind that this could very well be a deliberate hoax (and it most likely is). Fake cracks and scams have always been a great way of malware distribution and this could be another such attempt, only more organized.

EDIT: Definitely looks like BS:

Oh my god dammit ! we are very sorry and that was one of our members after he had a fight with us .. we will give you the valid crack today.

Assassin's creed II crack isn't published by us yet . we apologize for that . wait some hours remaining . about 3 hours ago via web

Again we are very sorry for what had happened . we will publish it today , don't be pissed off . about 3 hours ago via web

Regardless of the fact that their DRM gets cracked or not, UBISoft has already won the battle when it comes to Assassin’s Creed 2. The new DRM (despite heavy criticism), has held pirates at bay ever since the game’s release. In a world where every game usually gets cracked before release, this is a huge achievement. However that’s not to say this DRM is unbreakable. Starforce remained uncracked for 422 days until RELOADED publicly released a set of reverse engineering tools that ripped the protection apart. No matter how advanced the protection is, someone, somewhere always finds a way.

euTorrents – European Movie Torrent Tracker From AvistaZ Crew

By now, probably all of our regular readers might have read about AvistaZ (AZ). For those of you don’t know wtf that is, it’s a specialized movie torrent tracker that focuses on films from countries in the Asian region. With a huge user base and a rich content library, AZ has become one of the most successful trackers in the BT community. Good news for movie fans is that the experienced crew behind AvistaZ recently rolled out euTorrents, their sister site which is also a movie private tracker. euTorrents focuses on flicks from the European region and it’s already showing signs of making it to the ‘must have’ trackers list of every movie collector.

Within just a few days after launch, euTorrent statistics are looking pretty good. The site currently has 1700+ users and 350+ torrents (as of 3/31/2010). Expect these statistics rise sharply as news about the tracker spreads. Additionally, it’s user base would definitely get a boost from existing members at AvistaZ who’d no doubt want to check this site out too.

Just like AvistaZ, euTorrent’s main strength is the unique content it tracks. It’s not just another movie tracker – the site indexes movies that are not readily available on regular trackers or even in other dedicated movie trackers. Among the movies you can find on this site are Dannish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swiss and Turkish flicks. Expect a lot more rare gems from these countries to be uploaded in the future. And it’s not just old movies that will get indexed at euTorrent – new titles (even those released on 2009/2010) will also be uploaded. A screenshot of euT’s torrent index may be seen below:

Just like most new private trackers, euTorent seems to be using the help of social media services to expand and to communicate with it’s members. They maintain their own release blog through which detailed information about new movie uploads are given and a Twitter account that automatically Tweets about new additions to the index.

Signups for euTorrent are currently open. Registration is free and is mandatory if you are to download torrents from the tracker. If you are on the lookout for movies from European countries, go ahead and check this site out.

Site Name: euTorrents (http://bt.eutorrents.com)

Signup URL: http://bt.eutorrents.com/index.php?page=signup

Blog URL: http://www.eutorrents.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/eutorrents

In the meantime, euTorrents’s sister site AvistaZ is currently open for registration as well. You can read all about it here and sign up through the URL given at the end of that post.

Miro 3.0 – Video Player With BitTorrent RSS Support

Just a quick update to notify our readers that Miro has been upgraded to version 3.0. Miro (formerly known as Democracy player) is an internet video player that supports a wide range of video file types (HD formats included), streaming media, podcasts, a built in TV guide, web based video search and many other useful features. Additionally, Miro has strong RSS support and it has the ability to handle RSS feeds from BitTorrent trackers and download the .torrent files using its own built in BitTorrent engine – if used correctly, this feature can completely automate your TV torrent downloading. Miro is completely free, open source software and is available for multiple operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Miro 3.0 is a major upgrade over existing v2.5 installations. Some of the new features include a built in video converter and support for subtitles. It appears that v3.0 is better optimized and has better resource handling that it’s predecessor – the new version consumed less RAM and seemingly operated faster than v2.5 when we tested it.

Miro 3.0 retains the popular RSS downloading support which the application has become famous for. Thanks to the built in BitTorrent engine, TV torrent fanatics can program the app to automatically download select TV episodes. This way, new episodes of your preferred shows will automatically  be downloaded to your PC as they are released. You can find several free services that provide TV BitTorrent RSS feeds from this post.

Download

As mentioned earlier this is free and open source software. It’s available for multiple platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

[Click Here] to download Miro 3.0 from official download page.

Related Articles

• 3 services to find RSS feeds for new TV episode torrents

MUSiK.AM – Direct Download MP3 Music Albums

It’s been a while since we featured a music download site on this blog so here’s one for music fans all over the world. Musik.am is a regularly updated site that indexes scene released MP3 albums. For those who are wondering, this is not a BitTorrent tracker. It’s a direct download link repository similar to 0DayMusic and musiCORE. Although the site has German origins, almost all major US/UK music album releases and promos that leak online get indexed on Musik.am. The site not only acts as a release log and an NFO index but also provides download links for each and every release that gets added. Registration is not required to download files from Musik.am – the site is open to all.

About 100 new music albums get added to Musik.am every day – this is a decent amount of new content for a specialized music DDL forum. The main index (homepage) lists latest releases sorted by date and then by music genre. If you want to search for older uploads, you can either use the built in search functionality or browse by any one of the categories specified in the left sidebar (there are over 30 categories and subcategories including Rock, Metal, Club, Pop, DJ and so on). Searching by alphabetical order is also possible – use the A-Z section on the right pane. For those who want to get notified about new releases via RSS, separate feeds are available, one for each music genre.

Like most other sites of this category, Musik.am does not host any files. Actual music albums are hosted on one click hosting sites – all Musik.am does is to provide verified download links that points to these external files. Speaking of one click hosters, I haven’t seen any RapidShare, Megaupload, etc download links on this site so far. All new releases seem to point to files hosted on FreakShare (a legit service – not a scam).

Clicking on a music album will take you to its download page. At the bottom of this page you’ll see the NFO for that particular release.There will be several other sections in German language on the download page but all you need to look for is the captcha. Fill it in an click on the ‘Zum Download’ button and you should be good to go.

Musik.am does not require registration nor does it require users to be logged in to start a download. It’s open to the public and anyone is able to download.

[Click Here] to visit Musik.am homepage

Related Articles

• 0DayMusic – Direct Download Music Albums
• musiCORE – A New Zero Day Music Album Direct Download Service

HDME Signups Open – Download HD Movie and TV Torrents

After a few months of closed registrations, doors of the excellent HD torrent tracker HDME have again opened to the public. For those of you who are hearing about this site for the first time, HDME is not a new entrant to the BT scene. It’s almost a year old and is a pretty well established tracker. A great user interface, tons of HD torrent packs and an active community makes HDME one of the more successful specialized high definition torrent trackers in the BitTorrent community. Although HDME was open to the public several months after their launch, this is the first time registrations are being opened after the site went invite only sometime back in October 2009. If you are looking for a place to download high quality video content, you should check this site out.

For the 12 or so months it’s been online, HDME has improved in more than one way. They’ve managed to build a strong user base consisting of over 12500 members. More importantly, they’ve been successful in building an active community around the HD content downloads which is the site’s main attraction. In the meantime HDME’s torrent index has continuously expanded- as of 28/3/2010 there were ~3500 active torrents indexed.

At a glance, the 3500 torrent count may not look like a lot, especially for an HD tracker. However, there is a lot more content indexed on this site than it meets the eye – out of the 3500 torrents listed, roughly 10% of them are either season packs or full series torrents. Yes, HDME indexes over 300 packs (and these are usually on free leech). Speaking of the content found on this site, lots of English movies and TV shows in HD formats (720p/1080p Blu Ray, etc) as well as some lossless music in FLAC format are available for download.

Image: Few of the many torrent packs indexed on HDME 

Maintaining a healthy ratio on HDME is relatively easier than other HD trackers. There are a lot of free leech torrents (including packs) and a seed bonus system is also present. Bonus system allows you trade earned points for upload credit, site invites and additional free leech slots.

As mentioned in the title of this post, HDME signups are open. Open registrations will continue until the site hits 17500 members or until the 31st of March (whichever comes first). There are plenty of spots remaining so go ahead and check it out. New members get 1 free invite and 5GB free upload credit upon signup.

Site Name: HDME (http://hdme.eu)

Signup URL: http://hdme.eu/signup.php

RaceThe.Net – HDME’s Sister Site

While all of this has been happening, HDME crew has had the time for another project - a brand new torrent tracker. Although not known by many, RaceThe.Net (RTN) is HDME’s sister site. RTN is a General/0Day tracker and is currently open for signups. You can read our full review located here for screenshots and signup URLs.

SquakeNet – One Of The Best Sites To Download Old DOS Games & Adandonware

I’m a huge fan of PC gaming and have been at it for over 15 years. The classic games that were released in the early 1990’s/late 1980s (such as Dangerous Dave and Prince of Persia 1) still fascinate me. Needless to say the games are so old and most of these titles are now considered obsolete (aka abandonware). However, there are a ton of sites out there which offer free downloads of these classic gems. SquakeNet is one such site that maintains one of the largest download link repositories for old DOS based games and other abandonware. If you are looking to revisit the past or willing to play popular titles of a bygone era, SquakeNet can be a useful resource to have.

At Squakenet, each game has it’s own detailed descriptions page. This page usually contains a summarized description of the title, user reviews, links to extras (walkthroughs, cheats, manuals), YouTube videos of gameplay, screenshots and of course, download links. Speaking of download links, SquakeNet itself does not host any of the game files. Instead, it fetches download links from external sites (such as Dos Games Archive) and indexes them in a separate section of each game’s page. These links are reliable and are almost always working apart from the odd 404 not found.

A single indexed game usually has several different download links from different external sites that host it – Squakenet is linked to some of the largest abandoned games hosting sites on the net such as Home of the Underdogs Revival and C:Dos. If you are having trouble finding where the links are indexed, click on the floppy disk icon which is usually located beneath screenshots in a game’s detailed description page.

Note that SquakeNet does not link to cracked games. Indexed downloads are either totally free (Ex- Prince of Persia) or shareware (examples would be Doom and Doom 2). It lists some of the newer games such as Half Life 2 but these do not have download links. Overall this is an excellent resource for DOS gamers and abandonware collectors.

[Click Here] to visit SquakeNet homepage

How to play DOS Games on Windows Vista, Windows 7, etc

Modern operating systems such as Windows XP/Vista/7 do not come with native DOS support. This almost always causes problems with older DOS based games. Thankfully, you can easily solve such problems with the use of a MS-DOS emulator such as DOSBox.

[Click Here] to read our step by step tutorial on how to play DOS Games on modern OS using DOSBox

The Roman Empire – Tracker For Classic Movies, Film Noir, Old Music Videos & More

It’s a well known fact that Romania is home to a large number of private torrent trackers. However, almost every new Romanian tracker launched nowadays seem to be a General/0-day tracker – in other words most of these sites have more or less the same content with little variety. The Roman Empire (TRE) is a site that tries to change this trend – it’s a Romanian tracker but it’s not another zero day site. TRE specializes in classic content which includes retro movies, foreign movies, films made in Hollywood’s classic film noir period and even music videos that date back more than a few years. TRE is not exactly a brand new tracker and has been online for a few months – signups are open for those who are interested in becoming members.

The Roman Empire is not a huge torrent site. However, it’s not a tiny, unknown ghost town either. Currently there are 2500+ registered members and the torrent index is decently sized (for a niche tracker) with around 1450 torrents. There is however a little concern when it comes to the addition of new daily torrents – there haven’t been many added in the past couple of weeks. Let’s hope this is only a temporary gripe.

As mentioned earlier, The Roman Empire focuses more on classic content. A variety of movies may be found here, ranging from those produced in the 1930s to the mid 2000s. A mix of English and non English (French, German etc) movies are available. The ~1000 movie torrents are categorized into nearly 50 different categories. Apart from movies, TRE indexes music videos, documentaries as well as some music.

TRE comes with the usual set of features of a private tracker such as a seed bonus system, a requests section, forums and more. There is a link to an internal image hosting service as well but this does not appear to be functional as of now.

Signups for TRE are currently open. If you are looking for a classic or foreign content tracker check this out – TRE may not be the best in this niche but still a decent site.

Site Name: The Roman Empire (http://www.the-romanempire.com)

Signup URL: http://www.the-romanempire.com/signup.php

RapidLeech From tpsBB – Direct Download From RapidShare Without Premium Accounts

Several months ago we featured the direct download forum tpsBB here on FILEnetworks Blog. For those who missed it, tpsBB is a DDL forum with some very exclusive high definition movie releases. They are home to P2P encoder group NHANC3 and index a lot of HD encodes by groups such as CCnSS, AQUA, PRODJi, WHIZZ and of course NHANC3 themselves. This post however is not about tpsBB’s DDL section – it’s about their latest project, RapidLeeech. Simply put, RapidLeech lets users who do not have paid accounts on one click hosting sites (RapidShare, Megaupload, etc) enjoy premium features such as high speed downloads, support for download managers, no wait times/word verification (captcha), etc all for free. How are they doing it? Well, it’s an interesting method.

Here’s a summary of how RapidLeech works. Let us assume for a moment you need to download a file from RapidShare.

1. Obtain the download link.
2. Visit tpsBB’s RapidLeech section and paste the download link in the ‘Link to Transload’ field.
3. Press the ‘Transload File’ button. The file will now be downloaded to tpsBB’s server. In some of the test cases we tried, the download speed (from RapidShare to tpsBB server) was hovering around 9000 KB/s which was in fact pretty good.
4. Once loading is complete, you will be given a direct download link to the file (now hosted on tpsBB’s own servers).
5. You can use this link to download the file. Unlike regular RapidShare links, tpsBB hosted files do not have wait times enabled, there are no speed restrictions and even download managers are supported.

To download files from one click hosts to their server, it seems tpsBB uses their own premium accounts for each particular service. If what’s posted on their forum is correct, they have 5 Rapidshare,1 Megaupload,1 Hotfile,1 Filefactory,1 Netload and1 Uploading.com premium accounts. But those are not the only services RapidLeech supports – it works with 72 different hosting services ( but dealing with above mentioned services might be faster and easier than others due to the availability of premium accounts).

As an added bonus, you are able to manipulate the downloaded file stored on tpsBB server. You can view the file online, RAR or UNRAR it, add a password, rename file, split file into pieces, E-mail the file or even re-upload it to 64 different file hosting services.

As good as it sounds, there are some restrictions on this service. Files downloaded into tpsBB’s own server automatically get deleted within 2.5 hours. Additionally, their current hard drive capacity is around 900GB (of which around 30% was used at time of this post) and this could easily get filled as the site grows and more members are recruited. Anyways for now it' just works and is completely free – let’s hope it remains that way :).

RapidLeech service is password protected. However, you do not need invitations nor do you need to go through interviews to obtain a password. Here’s how you can get one:

1. Register for a free account on tpsBB
2. Log in, read this forum thread (point no. 2) for RapidLeech username and password
3. Use the credentials obtained in step 2 to log into RapidLeech.

Note that this password might change after a certain number of hours. When/if this happens, the new password will be obtainable from the DDL forum, for all registered members.

RapidLeech Login URL: http://www.tpsbb.com/RL/

tpsBB Registration Link: http://tpsbb.com/register.php

tpsBB (DDL Forum) Review: [Click Here]

P.S. – As mentioned in the first paragraph, don’t forget to check out direct downloads sections maintained by NHANC3 and other groups at tpsBB forums. While RapidLeech is exciting, tpsBB remains to be a great DDL source for p2p HD encodes.

Special thanks to Tejas for the heads up.

Related Articles

• tpsBB – HD Direct Download Forum For NhaNc3 & Other P2P Group Releases

GBvNET Open For A Short Time - General Tracker

It’s not everyday we feature general trackers here on FILEnetworks but we hope most of you will find this tracker useful. GBvNET is a long standing General/0Day torrent site that indexes movies, music, games, E-books, television shows and more. It’s a site with Romanian origins but almost all the releases are English. Unlike most other 0Day trackers that are full of the same scene and p2p releases found elsewhere, GBvNEt has torrent packs and unique releases that are uploaded exclusively to the tracker. This site is not usually open for signup but a note on homepage says the doors will be open for a short time – if you are looking for a new 0day tracker, check this one out.

First thing you’ll notice about GBV is the site interface. It’s not built on a common tracker script such as Gazelle but still retains a sleek look and a unique layout not found on most other private trackers. Note that the RSS feeds, image upload, bookmarks and other personalized features can be accessed through the ‘Panel’ button on top toolbar while profile editing features can be accessed from the sidebar to the left.

Operating for several years, GBvNET is a not a small tracker. There are around 7500 registered members and ~4400 active torrents indexed on this site. And for a general tracker, it sure has a lot of exclusive torrents. If you search the index with keyword ‘GBvNET’ you’ll find most of the unique uploads (which spans across over 600 torrents). Some of these releases are shown in the screenshot below:

Speaking of other features, a seed bonus system exists on GBV. There is also the ‘My Rank’ feature which ranks all tracker members based on performance – from what I could understand, the better your stats (including ratio) are, the more you move up the ranks.

Signups for GBVNet is currently open. We do not know for how long the door will remain open – the site only says’ signups opened for a short time’.

Site Name: GBvNET (http://share.gbvnet.ro)

Signup URL: http://share.gbvnet.ro/signup.php

Fix Just Cause 2 Crash, Freeze & Install Issues

If you still haven’t tried Just Cause 2, I suggest you go and try it now. It’s a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously but of course you’ll have a lot of fun playing it (unless you hate action video games with a passion). Just Cause 2 was released to the public yesterday (23rd of March) and so far, it’s been well received by gamers. The game appears to be well polished and thankfully it’s not filled with bugs and glitches unlike some other titles released earlier this year. However, some of our readers do seem to have run into some problems with Just Cause 2. This is an attempt to help resolve common issues people seem to be having with this game. Note that the article is a work in progress and more content will be added later, as issues and fixes are discovered.

Can’t run the game in Windows XP

Unfortunately, this is a problem that cannot be solved. Just Cause 2 is a DX10/11 game and only supports Windows Vista and Windows 7. There is currently no way you can get the game to run under Windows XP (which only has DirectX 9). There are various hacks posted online but they simply do not work – do not waste your time on this if you have XP.

Cant find XINPUT1_3.dll  Error

This error and most other similar missing DLL errors are usually triggered due to a non updated version of DirectX. Please download and install the latest version of DirectX and the error would most likely be gone :)

Installer issues, crashes, freezes or hang at launch

Some of the most common issues people seem to be experiencing with this game seems to include the Just Cause 2 not launching after the main executable is clicked. Black, blank screens at launch or crashes to desktop have also been reported. One possible reason for such problems is a corrupted or incomplete installation. If you are experiencing such problems, we suggest you reinstall the game, this time running the installer as Administrator (Right click and choose ‘Run as administrator’).

On Windows Vista and Windows 7, when a non-admin privileged user tries to install something into Program Files, sometimes the OS directs the install location to the user’s VirtualHost folder. This is a safety feature but might cause issues with games such as Just Cause 2. Reinstalling and running the setup as administrator should fix this problem.

You can also try installing the game to a less restrictive folder than Program Files. If you are intending to play using a non administrator account, make sure to give the account full permission to the game’s install folder (Right click install dir -> Properties -> Security -> Edit -> Add -> Advanced -> Find now –> Choose your user account and press OK to all open windows to save and close). Additionally, right lick JustCause2.exe and choose ‘'Run as Admin’ when launching the game as well.

Disappearing civilians and vehicles

Some people have reported that all civilian vehicles and civilians disappear after you play several hours into the game. This seems to be an actual bug and has been acknowledged on Just Cause 2 support forums. If this happens, all you need to do this to start a race – this should reload all civilians and vehicles in the area.

Xtremetv – TV Tracker With New/Classic Television Shows & Retro Movies

We’ve seen the birth of several new TV torrent trackers in the last couple of months. Sites such as STR, BzT and BTN got a lot of popularity from BitTorrent blogs and forums and as a result managed to grow at a rapid pace (which is a good thing). However, there are new TV trackers that received relatively less hype but still managed to put on a good show both in terms of member recruitment as well as content gathering. Xtremetv is one such site – this relatively new TV tracker has emerged out of nowhere and has established itself a solid foundation in the BitTorrent community. XTV tracks US/UK/Canadian television shows that are popular today and at the same time they index a lot of classic, retro TV series & movies, offering its users plenty of variety in content.

In terms of visual appearance, XTV does not look anything special. It runs on a TS Special Edition tracker script and IMO has a cluttered UI and a bad color scheme (especially the top toolbar). However, looks are not this tracker’s strength – it makes up for the dated UI with a content rich torrent index and a strong user base; as of 21/3/2010 XTV tracks 1700+ torrents and has close to 7500 registered members. These statistics are pretty good compared to other new (and some old) TV trackers that are around.

Speaking of content, XTV tracks both new, modern releases as well as classic, retro stuff. This is something we don’t often see from TV trackers and it’s definitely useful from the user’s perspective. XTV has dual browse pages to support this content division – the regular ‘Browse Torrents’ button in the top toolbar will take you to the site’s main torrent index while the two menu options available under the ‘Special Browse’ button will take you to either the ‘Classic movies’ section or the ‘Classic TV’ section. That being  said, this is by no means a retro movies/TV tracker; majority of indexed content comprise of new series that are currently being aired or have just finished airing.  XTV tracks individual episodes, full season packs and complete series torrents (some pretty huge sized torrents too).

Image: XTV’s torrent index showcasing some of its classic TV content

Some of the torrents in XTV’s index have special properties. These can be any one or all of the following

• Free Torrent – The torrent is free leech. Only upload data is added to site statistics, giving  your ratio a boost.
• x2 Torrent – This torrent has double upload enabled.
• Fast Speed – This torrent has at least one webseeder. Except higher than average download speeds from these torrents.

A bonus points system exists on XTV – you can spend your bonus points to buy upload credits, get invites, remove warnings, fix torrent ratios or to get a custom title in forums. Each new users gets 100 free points and 5GB upload credit upon signup.

Signups for Xtremetv is currently open. If you are looking for a TV tracker that has a mix of old and new content, give this site a go.

Site Name: Xtremetv (http://xtremetv.org)

Signup URL: http://xtremetv.org/signup.php

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BitMeTV Birthday Celebrations – New Features & Rewards For Existing Members

Five years of being online is a milestone for any website on the internet. However, it’s even a bigger achievement when the said site is a private BitTorrent tracker. These sites have to endure a lot of hardship including legal pressure, server maintenance costs (since they are funded entirely by donations) and various other obstacles. BitMeTV successfully overcame these hurdles and celebrated their 5th birthday earlier this month. Back then, birthday celebrations were limited to a news post on site – it promised ‘surprises’ that were said to be ‘coming soon’. Now, several weeks later, these promises seem to have finally been upheld. BMTV has not only added some new features to the site but they've even rewarded existing members with a host of benefits including free upload credit (which almost never happens on this tracker).

Below is a summary of recent changes and enhancements at BMTV. Main source of this information was a news post on site homepage.

Enhanced user class privileges

• Each Class has had their Max Torrent Slots Increased.
• User Class increased by 5 additional slots
• Power User increased to 55 slots
• VIP Users have been increased to 125 slots
• Elite members now have 555 slots

Upgrades to elite user class

• Elite Users can now check when their status will expire by viewing their User Details page.
• Grandfathered Elite users will show as an infinite sign.
• Grandfathered users are those that got Elite Status before we had set time frames. 

Torrent Description Generator

• There is now a Torrent Description Generator in the left side Menu and a link to it is also on the Upload Page. This is a very useful feature especially if you are an uploader. The tool automatically generates an episode summary complete with show image, episode summary and show summary (extracted from TVRage). All you have to do is to choose the show from the drop down menu, enter the season number and then enter the episode number.

Free upload credit

Believe it or not free upload credit has finally been given to almost every good member on BMTV. According to a news post, over 51 TB of free credit have been given out to 20,000+ members.

Members have been awarded Upload Credits in the following amounts

• Became a member from Mar 04, 2005 - Sept 30, 2005 and receive 5 GB
• Became a member from Oct 01, 2005 - Sept 30, 2006 and receive 4 GB
• Became a member from Oct 01, 2006 - Sept 30, 2007 and receive 3 GB
• Became a member from Oct 01, 2007 - Sept 30, 2008 and receive 2 GB
• Became a member from Oct 01, 2008 - Sept 30, 2009 and receive 1 GB
  To receive the credit that you'd be eligible for you would have to have been using your account and have downloaded at least the same amount of upload Credit you will be receiving and a current ratio above .65.

The maximum credits amount awarded (5GB) is not a lot but I doubt any BitMeTV member would say no to it. It’s not very easy to seed on this tracker and even the smallest addition to your upload stats can help immensely when it comes to maintaining the global ratio. Anyways it’s nice to see BMTV rewarding it’s members who actually were the main reason why this tracker succeeded. If what’s posted on the homepage is correct, more gifts are on the way.

About BitMeTV

BitMeTV is one of the world’s largest private trackers for TV series. It currently tracks close to 25000 active torrents and has a registered user base close to 22000 members. Getting into BMTV is not so easy – invites are not readily available (and do not request for them here), there is no IRC recruitment and the site almost never opens signups. TVTorrents.Com, Freshon.TV, ScienceHD (for documentaries), BTN, TV-Vault (for older series) and STR can be named as viable alternatives for this tracker.

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10 Great Resources For Scene Releases, Pre Times, NFOs and BitTorrent

By now you should be familiar with our collective private tracker & DDL Forum open signup updates. This post is something similar but you won’t find any BitTorrent sites or direct download link repositories here. This is a summarized list of utility sites (related to BitTorrent and scene) we’ve come to blog about in the past couple of months. The article features a varied collection of sites and services ranging from search engines, BitTorrent RSS feeds, tracer channels, tracer services to scene news portals that might be useful additions to a pirate’s toolbox. While these sites are not essential when it comes to downloading stuff from the internet, knowing about them can definitely come in handy and will expand your knowledge about BitTorrent, the warez scene, etc.

As usual, we have included a link with each item that will take you to a detailed article about a particular service. If you need more information, it’s highly recommended that you read the detailed article first.

Tottler
    
Homepage URL: http://tottler.org/
Type: Web based tracer, search engine
Description: Tottler is a web based release indexer which monitors over 30 private trackers. It also records top pre time stats for each indexed release. For detailed information on how this site operates, please refer to the detailed review below.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

NukeNet
  
Homepage URL: http://rules.nukenet.info
Type: Scene information portal
Description: rules.nukenet is a site that contains an up to date list of scene rules (for a number of different release types) as well as some well documented articles on nukes and nuke reasons.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

TRAC3.ME
 
Homepage URL: http://www.trac3.me/
Type: Web based tracer, pre database, scene releases index
Description: Trac3 is a multi role site that acts both as a scene releases index and a web based torrent racer. Provides private tracker rankings based on best pre times. Refer to detailed article for more info.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

SCENENOTiCE
 
Homepage URL: http://scenenotice.org/
Type: Scene information portal
Description: This site indexes internal scene notices sent among groups in the warez scene. If you want to read a lot of flaming, e-drama and the occasional useful information, you should check this out :)
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

NFOOGLE
 
Homepage URL: http://www.nfoogle.com/
Type: Search engine
Description: NFOOGLE is a search engine for NFO files. Make sure you select the correct category from drop down menu before you do a search.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

ezRSS
 
Homepage URL: http://ezrss.it/
Type: Torrent RSS feed
Description: ezRSS is a service that provides custom RSS feeds for all EZTV released TV shows (which are available on eztv.it) along with torrent download links. In other words, you’ll find individual RSS feeds for almost any US/Canadian TV show on this site.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

TRACERS
 
IRC Channel Links: irc://irc.p2p-net.eu/tracers, irc://irc.p2p-net.eu/tr.chat
Type: IRC Tracer Channel
Description: #Tracers on p2p.net.eu is one of the popular public tracer channels available. For a detailed explanation on how this channel functions and a list supported commands, refer to the detailed article below.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

VCDQUALiTY
 
Homepage URL: http://www.vcdq.com/index.php
Type: Movie releases index
Description: VCD Quality is a site which indexes latest movie leases both by scene and p2p groups. Not only does it index the latest releases but also includes the release .NFO, screen captures from the release, any nuke information, user comments and ratings.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

Uptime Checkers
 
Homepage URL: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, http://isthatsitedown.com/
Type: Misc
Description: Uptime checks help you determine if a site is actually down – these will help you verify that a site is not inaccessible due to a problem at your end.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

DVDRFiXES
 
Homepage URL: http://www.dvdrfixes.com/
Type: DDL
Description: DVDFiXES is a site that contains patches and fixes for scene DVDR releases that have problems. You can download fixes for issues such as out of sync audio, missing menus, missing or out of sync subtitles, etc.
Detailed Article: [Click Here]

Bonus - Defacto2
 
Homepage URL: http://www.defacto2.net/
Type: Scene information portal.
Description: According to the site’s own description “Defacto2 is a web site that is dedicated to the preservation of the computer underground counterculture, with a focus on the PC cracking scene.”. This is one of the best places to download cracktros, TGSC magazine, and overall a good source of history related to the warez scene.
Detailed Article: N/A

If you know more similar sites, feel free to post them in the comments section or E-mail us on filenetworks[at]gmail[dot]com. We might be able to do detailed postings on your suggestions, if and when time permits.

ScienceHD Is Opening Up – Invite Applications Online

We bring you hot news from ScienceHD – if you were looking forward to get into this awesome Science Fiction & documentary torrent tracker, this could be your lucky day. SHD have made some changes to their policy on new member recruitment and have opened up to the public. That’s not to say the site is open for registration – but interested members are now able to apply for a free invite through an online forum which has been made available by SciHD staff. Good news here is that the invite apps do not seem to be designed to screw members who are new to torrenting. If you have a genuine interest in sciences, science fiction or documentaries and plan to be an active member of this community (not just a collector), you actually have a pretty good chance of getting in.

A lengthy new post on the site homepage explains the recent changes:

Good news, everyone!

After lengthy discussions, we've decided to reverse ourselves on the position that we recently established, regarding how hard it's going to be to get into ScienceHD. We initially decided to go into lockdown in large part due two reasons: the abuses of many of our users, and security risks. Our ultimate goal is the sharing of knowledge, though, so this was a very hard choice to make, and we're very glad to be able to open up again. We've been hard at work behind the scenes, implementing new security features and reorganized things, and these new changes have alleviated many of our previous concerns regarding security and bad users, among other things.

Now, ScienceHD won't be fully open registration, though. Here is how things will now stand:

• There will be a questionnaire, open to all interested parties, to sign up with. Unlike our Gravmas event, this invite questionnaire will always be open. It will be reviewed manually by staff to decide whether an invitation will be extended.
• All registration and invite-sending will be subject to the Max User limit, although this will be raised and kept at a generally high level. No invites or registration will be allowed if the number of enabled users exceeds this value, with the exception that:
• PhD's and above will be able to send invites at any time.
• However, invites will remain fairly hard to get. They'll be given out for competition rewards, for notable contributions to the site, and possibly available for purchase at a high price in the future.

Now go forth, and multiply!

If you haven’t heard about SHD before, it’s a gazelle based private torrent tracker that specializes in Science Fiction and documentaries. To know additional information about this site including features, screenshots, category details, rules, etc please refer to our previous reviews located here and here.

The invite applications should come in handy as there hasn’t been a open signup for this tracker in the recent past. Last time invite apps were opened was in December 2009, several months ago.

Site Name: ScienceHD (http://sciencehd.info)
Invite Application URL: http://sciencehd.info/applications.php
Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/sciencehd
Statistics: ~1275 users and ~4000 torrents which covers episodes/documentaries from 900+ series

Related Articles

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xVideoServiceThief – One Of The Best Tools To Download Videos From Streaming Sites

The internet is now full of video streaming sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe and countless others. Not only have these sites become hugely popular across all demographics but they have also spawned a number of ‘downloader’ tools that allow you to save streamed videos to hard disk. xVideoServiceThief (a.k.a xVST) is one such video downloader tool which stands out from the rest. It’s a cross platform, free, no-bullsh1t downloader which supports over 75 different streaming services –it’s almost like the VLC of video downloaders. The software comes with a host of additional features such as the ability to pause/resume downloads, simultaneous downloads, video conversion, proxy server support (for sites blocked by ISP - beta), child protection, built in search function plus many other useful options.

xVST has a pretty simple user interface and is operable by even novice computer users. All you need to do in order to download a video file is to enter its URL using the ‘Add video’ button. If you are too lazy to even do that, you can simply drag and drop the video into the xVST window to begin download. Some of the key features of this software is highlighted below:

• Download from Youtube & Co. – Supports over 76 streaming sites including YouTube, DailyMotion, GameTrailers, Metacafe and more. Click to see full list.
• Convert downloaded videos - AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV, MP4, 3GP, MP3.
• HTTP & RTMP support
• Schedule configuration
• Simultaneous downloads
• Pause and resume downloads
• Search videos
• Drag & Drop support
• Proxy server support
• Automatic updates
• Tray Icon feature
• Download's Log
• Session Manager

Note that among the video streaming sites supported by xVST are a bunch of pron sites. If you are worried that your kids may misuse this software, you can block off adult sites with the use of a password through the app’s options menu.

Download

xVST is free software and supports multiple operating systems. It does not come bundled with any toolbars, adware or any other crap.

[Click Here] to download latest version of xVST from the official download page.

XNT

Henteles.Hu – Private Tracker For Horror Movies

There've been quite a few horror movie trackers featured on this blog – this includes smaller sites such as the now defunct ScareThe.Net to leaders in the niche such as The Horror Charnel (THC) - if memory serves correct, we even did several invite giveaways for THC sometime back. If the previously mentioned trackers were not enough to fill your thirst for horror movies, here’s another one -  the site we’re going to talk about today, Henteles, is another private tracker specializing in horror movies, TV shows and even games with violent content (yay!). It’s a relatively new entrant to this niche but is well worth trying out if you are into Horror, cult and sleaze genres. With its roots in Hungary, Henteles tracks both Hungarian and English content.

Launched not too long ago, this site has already attracted a reasonable number of registered users – currently there are close to 3500 members which is a pretty good statistic for a niche tracker. Their torrent index too has grown during the first few weeks since launch and currently Henteles tracks close to 1000 active torrents.

As mentioned above, all indexed torrents on Henteles relate to the Horror genre. This includes TV shows, movies and horror themed games. Note that some of the available releases are dubbed in Hungarian – however, you can easily identify English and Hungarian torrents separately by filtering using the categories (press the ‘Kategoriak’ button on browse page to view list of categories). A screenshot of some of the English releases found on Henteles is given below:

Henteles is based on the TBDEV tracker script but it’s customized to give the site a darker look and feel. Some of you might find the customizations fitting to a horror tracker but some might find the interface to be cluttered and less organized. Additionally, interface language defaults to Hungarian and there is no way to change is to English – while non Hungarian users will still manage to navigate the site just fine, it’d have been nice to have an English language option as well.

Henteles is currently open for registrations. Assuming they are to remain open till the current max user limit is reached, there are around 4000 free slots remaining. If you are looking for a new Horror tracker, check this site out.

Site Name: Henteles (http://henteles.hu)

Signup URL: http://henteles.hu/signup.php (tick checkbox at end of page to open signup form)

Dedicated TV – Download Latest TV Episodes From RapidShare, Megaupload, HotFile & More

Several days ago we posted an article about Ev0.in, a site that provides direct download links to TV scene releases. Apparently, the site was a hit among our readership and we got several emails requesting us to post more similar sites. Dedicated TV is another direct download link index which’s function is very similar to that of Ev0.in. It indexes links to download latest TV episode releases. Majority of the indexed content seem to be scene releases. DTV has been around for some time and seemingly has a pretty large reader base (according to Alexa). The site is not short of content either – on an average, around 100 new releases seem to be getting added to the index every day.

In terms of content, beating Dedicated TV is not going to be easy for any other site. It currently indexes episodes from over 1000 shows. Even with such a high number of shows, searching for a specific episode is relatively easy. The site maintains an alphabetically sorted list of shows and it comes with a pretty good search feature as well. The new episodes index is also customizable with options to highlight HD content, show/hide release group details, favorites view, etc. Download links, as mentioned earlier, point to one click hosting sites such as FileFactory, RapidShare, MegaUpload, HotFile and more. All links seem to be verified and the site is seemingly free of fakes and links that point to scam sites/downloads.

Best part of Dedicated TV is that it’s not another lifeless automated DDL site which’s sole purpose is to gather download links. While links do play and important role, DTV comes complete with community and social media options such as a discussion forum, a FaceBook page, a blog and even a Twitter account. The exact size of DTV’s user base is unknown but with an Alexa rank close to 16000, it should be somewhere around 20000 daily visitors.

Unlike private torrent trackers and some DDL forums, registration is not required to download from Dedicated TV. Just visit the site, choose the episode you want to download and that’s it.

[Click Here] to visit Dedicated TV Homepage

iTN Tracker Set To Return

Some of you might remember iTN. iTN, or InspireThe.Net (not to be confused with the BitTorrent invite forum InviteThe.Net) was a ratio free private torrent tracker that launched back in mid 2009. The tracker became reasonably popular within several weeks since launch but ongoing financial problems and conflicts between high ranking members (as we were told) prompted it to shut down a few months later in August 2009. iTN which was known for it’s innovative bonus system (with cool upgrades such as permanent upload multipliers), nice looking user interface and the ratioless system was definitely missed by a large portion of it’s loyal members. Good news is that now, back in 2010, iTN is showing signs of revival. We first Twittered this unconfirmed piece of news several days back but now we’ve got confirmation from iTN’s new owners that the site indeed will be retuning.

The resurrected site will be named iTN v2.0 and will sport a brand new look. Everything from the logo (you can see the new logo above – larger version can be found here) to the layout will be changed from the old version but it’s likely that the core features that made iTN a hit will remain in-tact (a theme that resembles the old look and feel might also be available). A list of changes that will be implemented in the resurrected version of the tracker is given below – this was sent to us by the site’s new ownership:

• Old account will not be restored, but old good and active users will get back their accounts with old stats + some bonus
• There will be no more credits - only total traffic
• New kick-ass bonus system
• New layouts (+ old layout)
• Tracker will be translated full in English
• New iTN will allow: scene, non-scene and homemade torrents

iTN is likely to retain it’s old URL http://inspirethe.net/. There is no specific launch date set as of now and it appears that the site is currently being tested internally - http://inspirethe.net/login.html page is live but the old logins do not work, as mentioned above.

Anyways it’s great to see defunct sites returning and we at FILEnetworks would like to wish all the best for iTN. Once the site goes live, await an updated post with details on their modes of recruitment (aka how to get in). Till then you can read more about iTN and see how it looked in the past via our previous review of the site.

Special thanks to iTN owners for the heads up.

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