How do I Upload a Torrent and What File Types AREN'T Supported?

[EpicFishFingers]

Okay, I watched a YouTube tut. I understand MOSTLY how to upload a torrent, but there are two bits I didn't understand:

1) The tut mentioned "Trackers". How do these work? Do I need them to upload a torrent?

2) Are there any file types that aren't supported? For example, I'm trying to upload a film clip (it's LEGAL. It's part of a machinima using the game Halo 3. I've added voice-over to it and am looking to share it with a friend. Halo 3 footage can be recorded legally under MS's Game Content Usage rules. So get off my case). The film clip, as afforementioned, contains a voice-over. I don't want to have to have a .avi and a .wav separately; I would rather have one .mp4 file as they are smaller. But that is my main question: Can torrents be made using the format .mp4?

There's my story. If trackers aren't necessary for upload in my particular case, can you still give me details to their purpose anyway? I plan on uploading more torrents and may need the info for future reference.

Thanks. I love uTorrent!

[DreadWingKnight]

Torrents can be made of ANY file format.

http://www.utorrent.com/documentation/make-a-torrent

Youtube tutorials have a bad history of having a LOT of bad mistakes.

[moogly]

1/ I don't know the quality about Youtube's guide, but read this one.

http://www.utorrent.com/documentation/make-a-torrent

Trackers are websites where you upload your own torrents to publish & share them.

2/ uT doesn't care about the extension, you can share what you want (*.ext). uT opens only .torrent files, the user has to use another program to read the data it has downloaded.

3/ If you just want to share data to 2 or 3 friends, use a public announce like http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and add the "private" flag when you're creating the torrent.

Then send the .torrent to your friends (eg email or what you want) and begin to seed.

[DreadWingKnight]

Trackers are websites where you upload your own torrents to publish & share them.

Wrong Moogly, trackers are entry points.

[moogly]

Sensu stricto, right. But sensu lato, there refer torrents as any search engine.

The best example is TPB.

[DreadWingKnight]

TPB is a combination tracker, torrent index

[Lord Alderaan]

Long answer:

Officially a tracker is a server which peers connect to to find other peers running the same torrent. An indexer is a page/website that lists torrents that are registered with one or more trackers and often either links to the server hosting the .torrent file or hosts the .torrent file itself.

These two are often combined and often they then also add additional features such as statistics and forums which often results in whole communities sprouting around them. These websites and communities are often still simply referred to as trackers even though there is a whole lot more to them.

This can get a bit confusing from time to time. For example when talking about creating a torrent it is probably a good idea to use the correct terms.

So in the announce field you fill in the announce url to the actual BitTorrent tracker. If the BitTorrent Tracker has an Indexer website or is part of a whole Community you can almost surely upload the .torrent file on it's website. In fact Indexers and Communities often have an page with the exact procedure to upload a torrent on their site.

P.S. Due to other techniques (i.e. DHT, PEX, manual peer adding) using trackers might not strictly be necessary however for most cases they are still recommended.