UPDATE (18-09-2014):- This post is very old, around 3 years now. Please do understand that I haven’t tried these on my iPhone for over 2 years. My phone is not Jailbroken since the past two years. That said the logic to download the torrent on an iPhone or iPad remains the same. The steps are as follows.
1. Jailbreak your iphone/iPad (Google should be handy with finding the right tutorial for you).
2. Download the torrent downloader app like iTransmission/ safari torrent download Plugin.
3.Use the Vlc app/ or your favorite move player to watch video the file.
I gave up on Jailbreaking because the iPhone is designed to work awesome within the Apple ecosystem and hampering that creates too much of a hassle, some time some basic functions like Phone/celluar network fails, which is not my cup of tree. I prefer to keep my phone working rather than worrying if it was the Jailbreak that caused the restart of the phone or the battery drain. You are better off using an app like dropbox or Bittorent Sync and syncing an already downloaded movie from your laptop to your phone. That said I learnt a lot of things hacking and jailbreaking the phone, So I won’t stop you from trying to download a torrent directly to your iphone or iPad.
I’ve always been fascinated by how much one can actually do on the mobile phone, after getting my iPhone last year. This time as well, I tried some thing as much that blew me away and that’s what am here to write about. Yes I downloaded a movie from a torrent, watched an .avi file on the iPhone all with out using a computer. It took almost 3 hours figuring out how to get it done. Not many tutorials were really helpful, so I am going to save you those precious 3 hours with which you could watch a movie on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch 😉
Setting up the device to download and watch.
Firstly this tutorial is for those who have their iOS devices jailbroken or are willing to take the efforts to jailbreak. Based on the versions of iOS you are running on your device (you can find yours by navigating >settings> general>about, look next to Version) jailbreak your device first if you haven’t already. (look up for a tutorial on redmondpie to get it done for your version).Make sure you are getting Cydia installed on the device while jailbreaking.
Open up Cydia and search for ” torrent downloader safari plugin”. Get it installed. Next search for the package iFile in Cydia and get it installed.
Open the Installous app to search for Vlc player, yes the impeccable player has an iOS app, sadly it has been pulled out of the App store, hence we are forced to download the player from the alternate app store. If you dont have the installous app, look a tutorial here. Please be reminded that it is illegal to install the app. On the Installous app search for VLC player and install it. Do not install the VLC streamer app, look for the VLC player App and install it.
Downloading torrents.
Now that we are all set to download from torrents and watch movies, Let me go through how to download so that it gets easier and quicker. Just go to a torrent site like Piratebay or Isohunt , Search for the torrent and click the download button. once a torrent file is downloaded the torrent downloader plugin automatically kicks in and prompts that the torrent is loaded, press the start button to download the file/movie. As far as i have tried, it does support pausing and resuming the torrent. It downloads even if the screen gets locked, Quite neat i must say. Once the download is done, open up the iFile app that we downloaded from Cydia. Browse to /var/mobile/Library/ you would find your download file/Movie here. If the file is a pdf or a txt or audio or video or you can directly open with a suitable app, and you can as well archive or compress the file which is nice. If it was a movie in Mp4, you could use the default Quicktime player to watch it.
Watching AVI files with VLC.
What happens if the movie doesn’t play on Quicktime, thankfully we downloaded the VLC player app which supports most codecs. VLC App is done in a such a way that you need iTunes to share a specific video file so that the VLC player can access it, which is a lengthy process and requires a PC/Mac. My whole idea of downloading the movie directly on the iPhone was not to rely on the computer. So here is the workaround for it. Select the movie file from /var/mobile/Library/ (could be where ever you have saved your download) by pressing the edit button in the iFile app. Cut or copy it by pressing the clipboard icon. Now browse back to /var/mobile/Applications/ . You would see a list of folders with jumbled letters and numbers, the trick is to find the VLC player among these. As of now, manually opening each folder is the only option to find out which folder has the VLC app. How you find the VLC app folder is by looking for a folder with a name VLC.app. So once you find out, just remember or make of note of the folder name (Mine was something like A65A27……, Also remember the folder name is randomly generated and might change if you upgrade your iOS ) so that at least the next time its just a tap away. Inside this folder you could find the documents folder open it and tap the edit again, you will see the clipboard icon highlight again, tap to paste the file. Now the file is inside the documents folder of the VLC player app.
Just open the VLC player app and you already have the movie you downloaded to watch. I must mention that VLC does use a lot more battery than QuickTime, that should be acceptable given you are trying to use your iOS device as a replacement computer 🙂
You can use an app like iExplorer from you PC/Mac to back up the movie if you want 🙂
Hope it was easy for you to follow the tutorial. Feel free to let me know if you liked the tutorial, or share your queries in the comments section below.