BiA’s 550MB rip of Top Gear Australia 01×05 is now available. Expect a 700MB release later this week probably.

EDIT: Or maybe not. No sign of a 700MB release. Sorry.

As promised (but a little late), I’ve torrented up the much better quality 700MB rips of Top Gear Australia episodes three and four.

Hopefully your BitTorrent clients will be smart enough to not automatically download them again just because the URL to the torrent changed in the feed.

Mininova is down at the moment for maintenance, so I’ve hosted the torrent file on The Pirate Bay meanwhile. Mininova is back up and the torrent is now linked to from the episode’s page.

BiA also opted for an even smaller rip this week — 350MB. PiX put out a 700MB rip as well though which I’ll probably release later this week (along with last week’s 700MB rip).

The third episode of Top Gear Australia is now available for download.

EDIT: I just noticed that BiA opted for a 550MB rip. This is more in line with the bitrate of 350MB/42min rips of standard TV shows since Top Gear Australia has commercials. However I may release PiX’s “internal” 700MB release (which just came out moments ago) later this week if I can get my hands on it and if there’s any demand. We’ll see, but for now the 550MB rip will work just fine.

Apparently this second episode was better than the first.

The Scene actually put out a rip of Top Gear Australia while I was sleeping, so that easily solves my problem of which rip to use. You can find a link to the torrent right here. Huge thanks though to all those Aussies that provided us with their own rips though. It was much appreciated!

No sign of Fifth Gear 14×08 yet so we may be using Moto’s rip again. I’m going to push that back for an hour or two though in order to give Top Gear Australia a bit of time to be better seeded.

Opinions of the show are mixed based on the thread on our forums (which has over 200 replies so far), but I think a lot of that is from people comparing it to the very polished and refined UK version. If you judge it as a stand alone show, most people are giving it a decent rating but think it still needs time to get the kinks worked out.

Anyway, no rip quite yet but I know of at least three four different rips that are currently being worked on and uploaded by the rippers. However most people in Australia have horrible Internet connections, so it’ll be a few hours before you can expect to see a rip. Plus with Fifth Gear later today, I may just hit the sack for now (it’s 5 AM here) and then just release both Fifth Gear and Top Gear Australia later today. We’ll see.

UPDATE: Yeah, I’m headed to bed as it’ll be a few hours before most of the rips finish uploading. I’ll go through the half dozen or so different rips later today (around the time Fifth Gear finishes) and figure out which one’s best. Sorry for forcing you to wait, but timezones are murder on my sleep schedule.

Check out this great extended cut of the previous video we posted:

[Source: CarAdvice.com.au]

If you’re wondering what will be in Top Gear Australia’s first episode, check out this thread on our forums.

If all goes well, we’ll be releasing a rip of it for all of you non-Aussies after it airs. Stay tuned.

Here’s two videos that you might be interested in watching.

The first is from the launch party for Top Gear Australia. It can be found on the SBS website.

The second is a television commercial currently airing in Australia promoting the show:

Thanks to everyone who sent in tips and to IMSancho for the commercial rip.