Internet TV Players & BitTorrent
Internet TV players are a great tool to download and watch TV-shows, podcasts, and video blogs. They are easy to use, let you browse for new shows, and add your favorite show. However, they’re not ready for BitTorrent yet.
3 Players
I’ve tested three players on how “BitTorrent friendly” they are.
They all do what they are supposed to. You can download and watch shows fairly easy, but in my opinion only fireant is really BitTorrent compliant.
Why?
Well, it’s pretty easy. When you want to download BitTorrent feeds you must be able to specify your network and connection preferences. I think it’s useless to have BitTorrent support without being able to edit your maximum up- and download speed, port ranges, simultaneous connections, etcetera. Fireant is the only player where you’re able to do this.
When you configure fireant the right way it’s pretty easy to get the same speeds as you do with any other client.
How to use it
Well, I must say that I’m not a big fan of these players myself. I dont see the need, at least not for BitTorrent feeds. In fact, the only advantage is the built in video player, but the preview function doesn’t work because bitorrent downloads random pieces of the file.
It does allow you to subscribe to BitTorrent feeds so you will be notified when the latest torrents are published, but that’s supported in most torrent clients nowadays (rss).
But still, Fireant sounds like the best option, and it’s worth a try.
How to set it up? All you have to do to suscribe to your favorite TV-show is to copy the rss url from tvrss (lost hdtv), burn it with feedburner to create a readable feed, and import it into Fireant.
The good thing is that it all works, the bad thing is that Fireant wont let you play the TV show “fullscreen”. And that’s probably even a bigger problem that not being able to configure your network and connection settings!
Conclusion
Internet TV players are not ready for BitTorrent yet. They all support it, but the problem is that IM and Democracy are not (yet) configurable, and Fireant doesn’t have a fullscreen option.
I know that these players are still BETA, but for now they still can’t compete with the regular clients + a proper media-player.
