For those wanting to watch the latest Top Gear special in HD but were lacking a powerful enough computer to play the 1080p rip, I have good news — the 720p HD rip is now available for download! It weighs in at 1.43GB, much smaller and easier to download for most than the 1080p’s 7GB rip.

If you need any help with playback, I’ve written a guide.

Nothing makes me happier and more honored than when the people behind the cameras think enough of this site to visit it themselves, especially when it’s Top Gear’s producer, Andy Wilman.

Yet you never really get a sense of whether you’ve pulled it off until you’re at home watching it on the box at the same time as everybody else.

Afterwards I made my usual masochistic trip to the computer and logged on to Final Gear to see what our harshest, fairest, sharpest and most loyal critics had to say. I love the spirit of that gang, and they are superb at spotting where you’ve made a horlicks of things, but they seemed to like this one.

If only they’d known what a bitch it was to make. We came back from the Pole with over 180 hours of rushes to condense into one hour, and after about three weeks in the edit we started to go a bit mental.

Andy, I think I speak for all of us when I say well done, mate. Wednesday’s episode was just staggeringly awesome. Keep up the awesome work.

You can read the rest of Andy’s article at TopGear.com.

Yup, the 1080p HDTV version is out now (link in the comment for the episode). It is 7GB, so please remember that it will take a while to download.

A 720p version will be out later this evening for those with less powerful computers.

Update: Emphasis should be placed on the “powerful computers” part. Unless your computer is new and fast, chances are you won’t be able to play 1080p videos smoothly. They are very hardware intensive. For details and help with video playback, I’ve written a guide. -Viper

A 350MB version of today’s Top Gear Polar Challenge Special is now available thanks to Zen04 of Gen[M]ay. We’ll have other rips including a 700MB (soon) and a HD rip (later). Stay tuned.

Update: For those looking for the 700MB Scene rip, it’s available on Mininova. We won’t be putting out a torrent of our own for that rip, so go ahead and use that one from the VTV torrent group.

Yes, it was recorded. Yes, it was recorded in HD. Yes, it looks friggin’ awesome.

We’ll have a torrent out as soon as we can, both in non-HD (either 425 MB or more likely, 700 MB scene rip size) as well as HD (7 gigabytes of pure 1080p goodness).

First off, I realize that no e-mails have been going out for the past month or two when a new news post is made. I’m not sure what’s up, but I’ve been trying to figure out what’s wrong. Meanwhile, considering using one of our news feeds (they are listed at the bottom of the site).

I also just realized that none of the confirmation links had been working, so I just sent reminder e-mails to everyone who was unconfirmed. Please click the link in the e-mail you will receive if you are on the unconfirmed e-mails list.

No surprise or anything with all the America bashing he does, but it’s still news.

An American version of Top Gear has hit the skids — because Jeremy Clarkson has refused to live in the US.

BBC chiefs were set to sign a multi-million dollar contract with an American channel to make a Stateside show this year.

“[...] because it takes a long time to film the show it meant the crew and presenters would have had to live out there for several months.

“Jeremy didn’t want to do that because his life and family are in Britain, so it’s been shelved.”

More at The Sun Online.

The content of this news post contains spoilers of an upcoming season of Top Gear. Proceed with caution if you do not want to know anything about it.

I understand, please show me the rest of the article »

In Top Gear’s most ambitious and arduous challenge to date Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond attempt to race from Northern Canada to the North Pole, 450 miles away. The terrain in between is some of the toughest on earth - a mix of mountainous land masses and jagged sea ice where temperatures can drop to a mind-numbing minus 65 degrees Celcius (minus 85 degrees Fahrenheit). Jeremy and James will be driving a specially adapted pick up truck whilst Richard will be travelling on something a little less high tech - a sled pulled by a team of ten Canadian Inuit Dogs.

The countdown has begun! Discussion here.

James May has a new TV show called “James May’s 20th Century” currently airing on Tuesdays at 8 PM. Here’s a small preview:

Looks pretty interesting and we’ll hopefully be posting links to torrents in our forums’ video offers area if rips become available. Discussion here.

Via: Jalopnik