Any video clips of TdF 2007 Stage 14?

TheDrunkMonk

I'm trying to find some footage of the Contador/Rasmussen 2007 Stage 14 to show a friend. I've trawled through youtube, but I can only find foreign commentary footage. Does anyone know if it's posted anywhere in English?

I'm obviously fluent in all languages in the known world, but alas my mate can only speak The Anglaise.

Anonymous

http://cyclingtorrents.nl/details.php?id=255

El Imbatido

NapoleonD wrote:

http://cyclingtorrents.nl/details.php?id=255

Thanks for the plugging my torrent NapD Yes it was an awesome stage, all the favourites had to come out to play and two pure climbers battling it out for the win whilst trying to distance Evans the time trialist.

TheDrunkMonk

Cheers guys. The site looks awesome. I'm just going to tech myself up and work out how to use torrents.

Ashamedly, I've worked in IT for 14 years (when I'm not in the temple), and relatively recently have found I don't know anything about computers. I'm sure it's not important.

dougzz

DrunkMonk, just go to http://www.bittorrent.com/ and do the free download. It'll install a torrent app on your computer. Then when you click a link in the cyclingtorrent site the torrent app is the default and it's all pretty intuitive from there on.

I downloaded it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to El Imbatido.

Interesting to see how already AC s regarded as the best climber but you felt watching the 07 stage the 'Mexican' really had his measure.

TheDrunkMonk

Thanks all. I'm downloading the Shizzel as I type. I've never seen such a feast of cycling stuff.

I don't have a TV anymore, and feeling under the weather, so this will keep me amused for a while. My mate's going to love that TdF stage as well.

As soon as feeling spritely again, I'm off to buy myself a bigger hard disk!! Wah-Hoo!!

Arkibal

dougzz wrote:

DrunkMonk, just go to http://www.bittorrent.com/ and do the free download. It'll install a torrent app on your computer. Then when you click a link in the cyclingtorrent site the torrent app is the default and it's all pretty intuitive from there on.

I downloaded it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to El Imbatido.

Interesting to see how already AC s regarded as the best climber but you felt watching the 07 stage the 'Mexican' really had his measure.

I downloaded bittorrent, how do continue from there? I can't open any links in the cyclingtorrent site?

afx237vi

Arkibal wrote:

dougzz wrote:

DrunkMonk, just go to http://www.bittorrent.com/ and do the free download. It'll install a torrent app on your computer. Then when you click a link in the cyclingtorrent site the torrent app is the default and it's all pretty intuitive from there on.

I downloaded it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to El Imbatido.

Interesting to see how already AC s regarded as the best climber but you felt watching the 07 stage the 'Mexican' really had his measure.

I downloaded bittorrent, how do continue from there? I can't open any links in the cyclingtorrent site?

Try saving the torrent on your computer, then use the Bittorrent client to open it.

Arkibal

afx237vi wrote:

Arkibal wrote:

dougzz wrote:

DrunkMonk, just go to http://www.bittorrent.com/ and do the free download. It'll install a torrent app on your computer. Then when you click a link in the cyclingtorrent site the torrent app is the default and it's all pretty intuitive from there on.

I downloaded it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to El Imbatido.

Interesting to see how already AC s regarded as the best climber but you felt watching the 07 stage the 'Mexican' really had his measure.

I downloaded bittorrent, how do continue from there? I can't open any links in the cyclingtorrent site?

Try saving the torrent on your computer, then use the Bittorrent client to open it.

Sorry for this stupid question, but how do I save the torrent on my computer?
I've never used torrents before, l'm clueless what to do

afx237vi

Go to the cyclingtorrents website, select a race you want to download, then right-click on the torrent link (ie "ruta del sol stage 5.mpg.torrent") and select Save Link As...

Save it somewhere obvious, like your desktop, then open the Bittorrent client and add it that way.

Arkibal

sorry to bugger you with this, but I did like you said and bittorrent gave me this:
Unable to find 'ruta del sol stage 5.mpg.torrent'.

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks a lot for your help!

afx237vi

Hmm, that's strange. I think I am at the limit of my expertise as well with this one. Anyone else?

Gav888

OMG how good is that website, so many to watch!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:

Anonymous

Just make sure you share please!!

phreak

I'll second support for this fantastic site. It's made turbo training quite enjoyable this winter having some good footage to watch at the same time.

El Imbatido

Ok, guys i will give you a run-down on how torrenting (also called P2P) works:

Cyclingtorrents recommends that you use either Utorrent or Azerus as your bittorrent client. There are many different brands, versions, copies of torrent clients out there but the staff at cyclingtorrents have experience with Utorrent and they will be able to help you out alot easier if you are using Utorrent.

Torrents work because basically a file is split into lots and lots of smaller pieces. When you download you get some pieces off the original seeder (the person who posted the torrent) and other seeders (people who have finished downloading and have left the torrent on). To speed the process up of downloading a torrent, your client allows you to give out pieces that you have completed to others. It doesn't matter that you have not completed the whole torrent. You will continue to give out pieces you have completed. This is uploading. And is also why you have an upload speed as well as a download speed.

Leechers are people who download as much as they can and then leave once it is completed (and therfor not help others by seeding/giving out pieces) or download as much as they can and turn uploading down as much as possible or to very little so they basically give out nothing. It is good to remember though that turning your upload up too high will slow your downloads to a chronically slow speed, so the idea is to find a happy medium. (Utorrent has what is called a speed guide where you input your connection speed and it sets upload and download speeds to it's maximium/most efficient setting). It is fine to set your upload speed a bit low whilst you download but only if you are gonna seed/upload at a half decent speed once you finish downloading.

Uploading. Is giving back some of the pieces of the video file you have. Cyclingtorrents like people to give back half as much as you download. If you look on the homepage you will have a ratio. It is the ratio of how much you have uploaded to how much you have downloaded expressed as a number. They like people to keep at a certain percentage (0.5 in this case is the lowest they like you to get) so to promote sharing and keeping the torrents alive for others to get. If you go below 0.3 you get a warning and will have 2 weeks to get back to 0.5 or you will be banned. (so far only a couple of people have been banned) It probably won't be a problem to start with because as a new member you get 10gig worth of upload credit, so that will inflate your ratio. Just think of it like: If everyone only gave back 30% of what they took, the videos would die pretty quickly as no one would have it all, and then you can only pass on what you have so, it eventually becomes less and less.

Also with uploading and seeding you do not have to leave your computer on 24/7, but just make sure you seed/upload for decent period of time.

If you want to download big torrents, some of them on the site are bigger than 20gig and alot are dvd rips so they are usually 4.3gig which will cripple your ratio, so please be careful with these and be wary of your ratio. One easy way to get around this is to donate to the site. You can donate anything from 5 euros to 100 euros and you will get upload credit. ie. Will boost you upload total, so then you will be able to download big torrents without the possibility of getting in trouble.

Thanking the uploader is just a nice gesture that Cyclingtorrents likes you to do. All you have to do is leave a thank you comment for the uploader on the torrent page. I don't know of anyone who has got in trouble for not thanking but it is just the curteous thing to do. Some uploaders have put in alot of time and effort to get their stuff on the site from recording it, editing out commercials and other stuff, encoding it to a smaller sized file and uploading it. So they deserve some thanks. There is also a grateful meter on the homepage, which is just a ratio of torrents downloaded to torrents/uploaders thanked.

Another thing just make sure you've got a good internet plan. In Australia some ISP's have caps and some just have excess charges for going over the limit. There have been many cases of people running up bills of thousands and thousands of dollars in Australia basically because they were unaware of what their internet plans details were.

El Imbatido

Ok, here is another explanation of torrenting. It was written by my good friend Dimspace from the Cyclingnews forums:


ok.. i dont know how much you know about p2p sharing, so the basics

files are shared over p2p by people who have the whole file, or part of the file, share segments of that file with you, until you have the entire file..
to get your file there need to be other people online "seeding" the file, (you are leeching or downloading)

for instance...

you are downloading a file..
person a has 100% of that file (you are downloading from them)
person b has 70% of that file (you are downloading from them, but you are also uploading to them parts of the file that you have that they dont)
person c has 0% of the file (you are uploading to them)

for p2p sharing to work, there must be people all the time with complete or partial copies of the file making it available for upload

so in other words, people who just download files, and then stop sharing the file (or stop seeding) are not very popular...

which is where share ratio comes in..

for instance, if i download 1gb of files, but only upload 100mb of files my ratio is .100 which is very low..

if i download 1gb but upload 500mb my share ratio is .500 which is much more reasonable...

my share ratio for instance is 4.69 i have download 6gb but uploaded to other users 30gb, or 4.69x what i have downloaded...

nobody is expecting you to hit 4.69, but members who download regularly, but do not leave the torrents seeding (or uploading) and end up with share ratios in the .100 region will eventually be banned..

imagine it like beer..
if you went out with your freinds, and they bought you beer regularly, but when it came to your round you ******ed off (or turned off you bittorrent client etc) you would quickly become unpopular.. by the same token, nobody would expect you to buy all of the drinks (or hit 4.69 share ratio like i have), somewhere about .50 to 1.0 is perfectly acceptable..


Ok next up, i'll upload some screenshots showing people how it works.

El Imbatido

Ok, Arkibal and AFK and all the others that may find torrenting a bit complicated this guide should help you out. I've included some pictures in it too, so it should help even more.



This picture above is the overview/homepage that each person has for their account. Your ratio has the red underline (i put that in myself) and it is how much you have uploaded divided by how much you have downloaded expressed as a number. Just a bit above that you should be able to see my actual figures that i have uploaded and downloaded. I have uploaded 75.99 gigabytes and downloaded 61.76 gigabytes and that expressed as a number is a ratio of 1.23.

The other red line in this pic is for gratefulness. If you download a torrent. You should leave a thank you on that page (Picture 3 is that page where comments are shown). My gratefulness is 100% because for every torrent i have downloaded i have thanked that person.

In this pic if you click on "Browse" you will see what is shown in Picture 2.



This page is where you can search for the races you are looking for. It is probably easiest to use the search function box and choose which race you are looking for from the drop down menu. It will then show every torrent we have in that catagory.

When you select a torrent you want to download click on it's name and it will take you to what you see in Picture 3.



This page shows you the details of the torrent you want to download ie. How long is it, what format it is in, how big the file is, broadcaster etc etc. Further on down the page (you can't see it in this pic) is all the comments people leave about the torrent.

To actually start a download you must click on the link i have underlined in red in this picture and save it somewhere on your computer. But hang on you ain't done yet!

Now to actually start the actual download you need to open your torrent client. Whether that be Utorrent, Azerus or whatever (as i said there are heaps of different ones: Ktorrent, Mainline, Vuze, rtorrent etc).



Once you open your client you need to go to 'File' and then to 'add torrent'. Then find the thing you just saved to your computer and open it. You will be then asked to specify a place to save again. (This time it is actually asking you where you want to save the video), so choose a folder or a good place to save. Once you have, it will actually start downloading the video for you. All you need to do now is kick back (possible leave your PC on overnight) and wait till it is done. When it is, just open that folder and click on the video to watch it. If you media player can't play it. Download from the net 'VLC Player' it will play just about anything and is way better than windows media player, which is a wasts of space.


A couple of other things you should know. For every video you have in your client you can individually start, stop, pause it and do a heap of other more complicated things to it (that you don't really need to bother with) by right clicking on the torrent.

Down the bottom of the pic above, see the tick in the green circle, left click that and then go to run speed test and that will set utorrent to it's most efficient based on your connection speed. It will set upload and download speed maximums

Also notice in the picture how alot of my torrents have a green arrow box next to them. Well, blue arrow box means you are downloading, green arrow box means you are uploading/seeding , greyish box with a circle in it means the torrent has stopped and red cross mean something is wrong with it.

Now the easiet way to seed (ie. to get your upload amount higher and to stay out of the way of any trouble) is to when the torrent is finished and says '100% done' LEAVE IT ON!! Don't stop it. Leave it on and if anyone is downloading that torrent from the site, you will upload to them. (See how in the pic above one of the green torrents has a number in the 'Up speed' column. This is because i am uploading to a person at that speed. I am also available to help seed to all those other green arrowed torrents, i am just waiting for people to download them.

Sorry for the long winded walkthru, i thought the pics would make it easier (and i hope they did). If you still have any questions, check out all the help guides on the site or PM me on Cyclingtorrents and i'll help you and also add me as one of your friends on the site as well.

Cheers

Arkibal

Cheers El Imbatido, that was very helpful!
Thank you!

Gav888

Very informative, any other guides handy?

El Imbatido

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad &
Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne

Both are already up, Omloop in Dutch and Kuurne in french. Both will download really quickly if you want them now because both have alot of seeders.

The Kennington Kaiser

@El Imbatido - firstly thanks both for the site and for explainign the basics to us techno-halfwits who struggle with turning on the computer, let alone anything more complex.

I do have one question though, I've managed to get the bittorrent up and running on my, ahem, work computer but not my technically retarded box at home. Sadly, I can't get away with ewatching reruns of classic Tour stages while in the office so I wanted to know what is the best way of getting the races that I've completed downloading on my work PC onto a USB or external hard-drive that can be watched on the PC at home? Or do I need to burn onto CD? I am slightly ashamed that I have to be asking this but once the instructions get too complex, then my eyes start glazing over.

Cheers again.

dougzz

The Kennington Kaiser wrote:

@El Imbatido - firstly thanks both for the site and for explainign the basics to us techno-halfwits who struggle with turning on the computer, let alone anything more complex.

I do have one question though, I've managed to get the bittorrent up and running on my, ahem, work computer but not my technically retarded box at home. Sadly, I can't get away with ewatching reruns of classic Tour stages while in the office so I wanted to know what is the best way of getting the races that I've completed downloading on my work PC onto a USB or external hard-drive that can be watched on the PC at home? Or do I need to burn onto CD? I am slightly ashamed that I have to be asking this but once the instructions get too complex, then my eyes start glazing over.

Cheers again.

As an IT Manger I recommend you call your work tech support, explain you're using torrent at work and I'm sure they'll explain it it all very clearly to you

The Kennington Kaiser

You IT geeks, you're such spoilsports.

afx237vi

The Kennington Kaiser wrote:

You IT geeks, you're such spoilsports.

You don't need to mess about with CDs or DVDs - just use a USB flash drive like this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139588 <- Click the "play video" button.

Plug it in to a USB port, and the computer will recognise it automatically as an external drive. Then just drag and drop the file you downloaded.

dougzz

The Kennington Kaiser wrote:

You IT geeks, you're such spoilsports.

You should try running a network with 250 users. To be honest your IT Dept sucks because you shouldn't have been able to install software yourself. Your machine should have been locked down tighter than a Radio Shack 'medicine chest'

The Kennington Kaiser

dougzz / afx - thanks both.
We don't, as such, have an IT dept. All farmed out to external agencies - which, given what you say is probably for the best. So let me get this right, I just save it on to the USB stick (size willing, I think one of the files I downladed was over 4mb) and just take it home and stick in the other PC and it'll play it via RealPlayer or Windows Media player.

Simple questions, I know but I take back anything bad I've ever said about you excellent members of the IT brethren.

El Imbatido

The Kennington Kaiser wrote:

dougzz / afx - thanks both.
We don't, as such, have an IT dept. All farmed out to external agencies - which, given what you say is probably for the best. So let me get this right, I just save it on to the USB stick (size willing, I think one of the files I downladed was over 4mb) and just take it home and stick in the other PC and it'll play it via RealPlayer or Windows Media player.

Simple questions, I know but I take back anything bad I've ever said about you excellent members of the IT brethren.

Hey mate, the other guys are right. Just buy a usb stick or an external hard drive. You may want to buy an external hard drive if you are gonna download more stuff as it will quickly swallow all your PC space if you are storing them on your computer. Most people when they think of an external hard drive think of one that needs it's own power source ie. needs to be plugged into the wall. But you can actually get ones with a lot of space (about 120gig or more) that are powered by the computer, so no need for extra power cords etc.

Also i have a 30gig mp3 player (Creative Zen) and it has a feature on it where you can turn part of it's hard drive into a storage device ie. same as a usb stick and you can choose the size of it. Mine can have one upto 16gig. So something like that may be useful to transfer files between work pc and home pc.

Just one last thing in your above quote you said you downloaded something that was 4mb. I think you meant 4 gig. Big difference as 4gig is equal to 4000mb. Also you should download VLC player off the net http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ as it will play all the files you get from cyclingtorrents.nl In my experience windows media player or realtime player etc they will just end up causing problems for you.

Hope that helps. And enjoy

ketsbaia

Cheers for the link to the torrent site. Very impressive.

I just battled Rasmussen and Contador up the Plateau de Beille on the turbo. They won, naturally.