alex.moskalyuk » BitTorrent clients

BitTorrent clients rated by PC Magazine

Alex — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 00:19:54 +0000

PC Magazine runs a review of popular BitTorrent clients. They review uTorrent, an app that “packs an outstanding array of features in 107KB, and doesn’t even create a folder in your Program Files” and give it 4.5 stars. BitTorrent Client from BitTorrent.com, “whose clean interface has three basic elements: a large progress bar for each torrent you’re working on, a slider that controls your maximum upload rate, and a link to the BitTorrent Search engine”, gets 4 stars. BitPump “features an attractive interface that sacrifices a detailed feature set for BitTorrent tweakers in favor of simplicity and ease of use” and gets 4 stars. Finally, Azureus, “a favorite with advanced users, who enjoy its plug-in system and huge range of tweakable settings”, gets 4.5 stars. A gratuitous interview with Bram Cohen from BitTorrent is available as well.

Azureus 2.3.0.6

Alex — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:31:10 +0000

Lifehacker download of the day: Azureus 2.3.0.6

First BitTorrent sentence

Alex — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:25:36 +0000

Hong Kong man got a 3 month prison sentence for sharing copyrighted material.

BitTorrent clients: BitTorrent 4.0 is out

Alex — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:57:35 +0000

The brand new version of BitTorrent 4.0.0 is available for download. BitTorrent is an immensely popular file-sharing protocol created by Bram Cohen and up until recently it came with a client, but the client was so simplistic, it caused a whole new cottage industry of BitTorrent clients to appear. Hence we have Azureus and eXeem. In this new release Cohen managed to keep the simplicity, but also make the BitTorrent client much more functional. In BitTorrent 4.0.0 you get one central GUI window for all the torrents.

Also, many internal tweaks of BitTorrent protocol become available with this new client. Such options were accessible before via Azureus and other clients, but not from the official one. The main GUI window of the client now also remembers what it was doing when you shut it down, so on the restart it picks up where it left. 4.0.0 also features correct Unicode support and better performance.

BitTorrent for Windows download
BitTorrent for Linux download
Other BitTorrent clients

BitTorrent clients: Azureus

Alex — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 07:05:53 +0000

Azureus is a no nonsense that’s both cross-platform and open-source. While the latter might not matter for you, unless you want to dig into some Java code and have the knowledge to do it, the former is pretty important for those using Linux or Macs outside the Windows world. If you’re not a diehard Linux or Mac OS fan, it’s at least convenient to know that the application will be there when you decide to boot into another OS. You might have seen some Java apps before which were slow and a bit ugly, but Azureus has a fast and pretty slick GUI.

The simplistic interface also hides a pretty functional options palette. You can tweak pretty much anything – BitTorrent protocol speeds for upload and download, directories for storing the torrents and directories for storing the downloaded files, tracker timeouts, etc. Azureus has one of the widest international support, as 32 languages are listed on the product’s download page. This BitTorrent client supports Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish localizations.

The only annoyance that I’ve noticed is that it takes a while to load Azureus. Nevertheless, once it’s up and running, it’s pretty fast and convenient. This client is pretty stable and takes about 1.9 megabytes of RAM running under Windows XP.

BitTorrent centralization survey

Alex — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 00:38:20 +0000

Folks from MonkeyMethods.org have researched the BitTorrent world after many popular destinations (SuprNova among others) have been shut down. Since BitTorrent always relied on the presence of trackers and servers hosting them, MonkeyMethods decided to see whether the shutdown impacted the BitTorrent community. So has the shutdown of centralized SuprNova had any impact?

In this case, centralization is a feature, not a necessity. Just look at del.icio.us most popular and you’ll see BitTorrent sites every couple days, as people uncover new places to find the files they’re looking for.

BitTorrent client: eXeem

Alex — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:40:25 +0000

eXeem Public Beta is available for download. Coming from the guys who brought the world SuprNova, eXeem is an attempt to re-organize the BitTorrent protocol into a Kazaa-like network of nodes, where each node is both a publisher and consumer of shared files. BitTorrent protocol by default supports the concept of tracker – a central computer where the information about the file is located, and where the original file is usually shared initially. Bram Cohen’s idea was never to build a Kazaa look-alike, he was aiming for software and music publishers who wanted to distributed their works online, but also wanted to keep track of how many copies have been downloaded. Hence the tracker would initially help with file distribution and at any point provide valid info as far as how many users were downloading.

Naturally, if the content distributed is illegal, it makes it easy for the copyright owner to find out the location of the tracker server and shut it down. Regardless of the number of users actively engaged in download, the file sharing would not resume in the absence of trackers. eXeem’s solution? Make everyone a tracker.

One thing you’d notice after launching eXeem is that it takes a while to connect to the networks. The software shows reasonable speeds, comparable with other BitTorrent clients, including the official one, when you have the torrent file ready, so all that’s needed is to connect to the tracker and start downloading. I used a file from Legal Torrents to try out the default download speeds.

However, if you want to launch searches using eXeem, you’ll have to give it some time, as right away the software does not connect to the peers. The search quality was pretty good, but nothing extraordinary, with most of the popular files fetching 2-3 results. However, the downloads started almost right away, which is definitely an improvement over original SuprNova.

According to FAQ, eXeem works without a problem on Windows XP SP2. It also works on Windows 98, ME, 2000. If it does not want to run on 98/ME or 2000, try installing Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime files from Service Pack 6. There are currently no versions of eXeem™ for Linux or Mac.

Download eXeem beta
Visit eXeem SuprNova site
Read about BitTorrent overtaking eDonkey, Kazaa FastTrack and Gnutella

First BitTorrent arrest in Hong Kong

Alex — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 16:19:50 +0000

Associated Press says a 38-year-old was arrested in Hong Kong for uploading Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality via a BitTorrent client. Hong Kong laws provide for a maximum of 4 years in prison and $6,400 fine for every copy distributed without copyright owner’s permission.