How to play .torrent BitTorrent Files

Denise writes, “I downloaded movies from BitTorrent and a few other torrent sites. When I go to replay them, none of my media players can play them. How do I change them from .torrent to divX, AVI or another mode that can be recorded or played back?”
The .torrent file you downloaded is really a pointer file with information telling your computer how to find the video you are trying to download. The .torrent contains the necessary information so that your computer could download the actual file using a client application like uTorrent or Vuze. I’ll walk through the process of setting up a BitTorrent client and downloading files.


First you need to download a BitTorrent client application. My current favorite is uTorrent, which is a very lightweight app with a simple interface.
Download uTorrent before proceeding and install uTorrent.
Find a site with a torrent you want to download. For this demo, I’m downloading the movie Elephant’s Dream from LegitTorrents.info.
Depending on your computer’s configuration, clicking on a .torrent link should either prompt you to open it with uTorrent or you’ll need to save the .torrent file somewhere on your computer. After saving the .torrent to your computer, you can add it to uTorrent by clicking the Add Torrent button in the top left corner of the application.

Locate the .torrent file you want to download from on your system and then choose a location to save the video file (like the My Videos folder in My Documents, your Desktop, or anywhere else on your system).

After clicking OK, uTorrent will start looking for sources to download the movie from. You need to leave uTorrent running until the download is complete. The progress is shown next to each torrent you are downloading. When it reaches 100% you can play the file from the location you selected at the time you added the torrent to uTorrent.

You can find out more about configuring BitTorrent clients in my articles on:
How to use Vuze
Automating BitTorrent downloads with RSS