So, how do 8000+ torrent seeds appear in just an hour or two?

[Occulus]

Here's the scenario: a popular television show's penultimate episode of the season airs, and in just a few hours, there are over eight thousand seeders for the torrent of that show. Now, given there are myriad ways to encode the audio and video, not to speak of the time necessary to actually do that encoding, well, how the heck does it happen?

I cannot accept that those thousands of people are all encoding the video in the exact same way, nor can I accept that some message went out on a listserv or some such instructing everyone to encode it thus.

I'm curious. Does anyone know the answer? How do thousands of people end up seeding the exact same file in such a short period of time? Are they ripping it off their DVRs or what?

[canetoad]

1. Not surprising figures

All of those 8,000 wouldn't have encoded the video.

Say only 50 people recorded and started off original torrents. A tv show - what? About an hour? 400mb? That takes no time with a good connection and the leechers will get their download quickly and turn into seeders.

[charlie]

2. Decoys?

Lotta fakes uploaded by the studio to bollix things up?

Or maybe they get a big propagation boost from places like Korea, where a movie can be downloaded in minutes?

[RoyGBiv]

3. Two answers ...

First, these things do not originate as torrents. The capture and encoding is initially done by teams of people who do this, and they exchange it via other methods. Those who leach this stuff then acquire it and set up torrents. This is why it takes "just a few hours." For popular shows, you can usually find the file at its original source within an hour in both standard and 720p formats.

Second, there are a lot of fake seeds, as charlie said.

Also, that initial, good capture will usually show up within an hour after its appearance as either a fake, password protected rar archive that encourages the downloader to go to a website to acquire the password or a file rar archive that includes another password protected rar or zip and an executable that supposedly gives you the password. Both the latter are attempts by RIAA/MPAA operatives to acquire IP addresses of individuals they then harass.