Premiership football

Bit late in replying to this, but the best site I’ve found for this over the years is http://www.freefootball.org/

They have a live schedule section of the site where all games are listed with links to streams available when you expand the menu http://www.freefootball.org/upcoming.php. Alternatively you can log onto the football forum and sometimes get a link through some of the topics in there. You need to be signed into the forum to view links as they have to be hidden for legal reasons, and as a result the forums don’t get as much activity as they used to.

Best program for me is Sopcast, and then I use that site to find links to streams. It’s seemed a bit harder this season to find quality streams, but it’s still reasonably good. The program is easy to use, just google sopcast, download and install, and you need a link then to view a channel (you can manually search but there are thousands of channels so you need a site for links). The link will appear like this sop://broker.sopcast.com:3912/116230 and when clicked, or loaded through your browser it’ll open up sopcast and display hopefully the match you want. That link’s for the Edinburgh derby on atm, so if you try this later it may be offline.

You’ll find information on that site about other players, and you’ll find a lot of links to “embedded” players, where the match is displayed on a webpage, normally surrounded by adverts, and where you’re occasionally asked to download a plug in which I suspect will contain a virus. Decent embedded streams tend to get shut down fairly quickly if on a reputable site, and this is why I tend to prefer sopcast. You’ll soon pick up on all this anyway.

Oh and a backup site i’ve used sometimes is http://www.livefootballol.com/streaming/epl/. There seem to be less streams on this one, but it’s actually not failed me the few times I’ve needed it.

Although there are some crappy sites around where you can stream them from, films, tv shows, music, games, etc are all best found on torrents these days. I take it you’re completely new to this so I’ll try and explain how it works to give you a rough understanding.

Torrents are small files which connect you to other people who have bits of the file you’re trying to download. You download this small file from a central site, such as http://isohunt.com (there are many others), and use a bittorrent client to activate the file (best i’ve found is utorrent http://www.utorrent.com/).

For a torrent to work properly there will need to be at least 1 “seed” somewhere along the line, and this is a person who is sharing the complete file. People initially download the file in small “pieces” from this person, and once you have all the pieces, then you have full access to the movie/whatever. As each piece download completes, the pieces can then be shared with other people who are maybe starting from scratch with the download, or who are otherwise waiting on that piece of the overall file. This means that as you’re downloading you’re also sharing what you’ve downloaded so far (at this point you’re known as a “leech”). Anyway, the overall effect is a file is dispersed to hundreds of people who each share parts of the file with you and you start sharing with them more and more as times goes on.

Once you finish a download you can keep the torrent active to continue uploading it for people later using the torrent, and become a “seed” yourself. All bittorrent clients default settings keep you seeding after a file completes as long as the client is open and the file remains active.

You may decide though that there are enough people taking a stand against “the man” and the evil entertainment industry, and chose instead to stop the upload (click on the file in utorrent, and click stop) so as to minimise your exposure to said evil industry’s monitoring. This is generally not something to be too concerned about, but the theory goes that they can’t prosecute or pursue everyone, so the ones they do go for will be the worst offenders – or in other words the ones who seed everything. It also helps to stop uploading and also close the client ahead of any games you may be playing as it’ll generally cause lag.

One final thing to note is that if you are using torrents, make sure to have an antivirus active, though you do often get false positives from the files downloaded so how you deal with this is requires you to understand the risks first. I’ve lost a couple of hardrives to nasty torrent files, and on 2 occasions had to reformat everything from scratch. Now this is over about 10 years, so it’s rare to be caught out (and on the two occasions i knew i was taking a risk), but be careful what you download. There are ways to minimise the risk, as most sites will allow you to rate the torrent after it’s completed, and a quick scan of the + ratings and the comments can give you an idea of what to expect – this will include everything from file quality, ease of installation (if a game for example), but most importantly how safe it is. This is never a guarantee, as obviously you can fake comments, but if you see loads of negatives or red warnings on a rating site, don’t touch it.

So anyway, if I’ve not scared you away from it yet, pop on over to http://www.isohunt.com type into the search field what it is you want to download, look for one with a positive rating and lots of seeds (under the “S” column), then click on the row to take you to the torrent page. At this point you can review the comments under the comments tab but once you’re ready to download the torrent, be careful with your selection and make sure to only click “download .torrent“. As on a lot of sites, be careful of big download buttons dotted all over the page as these will direct you to download something belonging to a sponsor, and likely install some crap like a toolbar, or worse. As long as you have a bittorrent client installed, when you click on “download .torrent” you can just open it, and it’ll bring you straight into utorrent (or whatever client you chose). From there, if it’s not self explanatory, feel free to ask.