SOFTWARE
The Gist: Where Talk And Fat Downloads Are Plentiful And Cheap
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Despite the name, there's more to Internet Relay Chat than chat - you can also use it to download files. In fact, since major media junkies tap into this old-school, text-based Internet forum, almost anything from any media source can be found here. Every song, every movie, every manga, every episode of every television show probably exists in digital form somewhere in IRC land. And, you're chatting with tens of thousands of real people, so searches for things like "the song Cameron Diaz sang in that Jim Carrey movie" will actually hit pay dirt.
There are several types of client software for IRC, and mIRC is one of the most popular. The shareware's simple interface makes it easy to find channels - the topic areas created by users. When you launch the program and log on to a channel, a chat window comes up. Then, members of the group can trade files peer-to-peer. Informative help menus mean you don't have to be a geek to steer through the more technical bits of this command-heavy application.
Creator Khaled Mardam-Bey is constantly tweaking his baby, releasing several versions a year. Recent upgrades include interactivity with the Web (you can add a link to your site that leads to an IRC channel), and identifiers that allow you to view the properties of MP3s you might want to download.
One drawback to this mystical oasis of digital media is that it's a long hike to the water. First, you have to search for what you want, after which you hop in a queue. There tend to be more takers than givers, so, if you pick a popular, large file, you might wait in line for hours just to download. You have to be there to accept the file when your number is called, and then wait several more hours before it's transferred onto your hard drive.
Video files sometimes appear in the fat MPEG-2 or slimmer MPEG-1 format, but many recent transmissions are encoded in DivX, a hack of Windows Media Player sarcastically named for the defunct DVD standard. DivX files squish a 90-minute DVD-quality film into about 650 Mbytes. That's relatively small, but even on a cable or ADSL connection, a two-hour show in DivX can still take six hours to download.
This doesn't seem to bother mIRC diehards. Recently, while waiting around for a Buffy, the Vampire Slayer episode, I started chatting with other people on the channel. Didn't they mind having to wait so long? "Not really," said one Buffy fan. "We sit at the computer all day anyway, right?"
mIRC: www.mirc.co.uk.
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