The BitTorrent client has added a new feature that integrates Vuze with several media devices. It allows users to automatically convert and transfer downloaded videos to iTunes, and stream the files to the Xbox 360 and PS3.

“With today’s release, we’re unlocking HD content and giving it wings to get from the computer to the other screens in our lives: TV and Mobile,” Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa told TorrentFreak. “We think this is a big deal because a large majority of our users actually have these devices at home. Also, consumers want to control and own their content, an ‘Open Home Theater’, if you will.”

Vuze currently supports Apple devices including the iPhone and the iPod. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are the two gaming consoles that integrate with Vuze as well. More devices may be added in the future but no decisions have yet been made on which ones, TorrentFreak was told. In a recent poll, most Vuze users indicated that iPhone/iPod support was most wanted.

Once device support is turned on in Vuze, users can drag and drop downloaded video onto their device of choice. Vuze will then convert the video into the appropriate format and add it to the device’s library.

For iTunes, Vuze will import the video into your iTunes library so it can be transferred to your iPhone, iPod or Apple TV. For the PS3 and Xbox 360, Vuze will stream the videos from your PC or Mac directly to your game console.

The device support is a great feature for users who want to have an easy all-in-one solution that not only downloads video, but also makes it ready to play on other devices. Although Vuze has been focusing mainly on video lately, the client can still download other content as well.

It is good to see that Vuze is using the feedback from its users to improve their client, although it is impossible to please everyone and some may still prefer a more lightweight client. That said, the Vuze all-in-one solution will especially appeal to novice BitTorrent users, but even for the most die-hard users the new features will make a great addition.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The graph clearly shows that Azureus was the most searched for client until the beginning of 2007, followed by BitComet. From then on, uTorrent took over and it continued to grow while BitComet and Azureus searches slowly decreased. Search statistics are of course only an indirect measure of the popularity of a BitTorrent client, but the graphs seem to follow the same pattern as actual usage statistics which we have reported before.

Worldwide

Another measure that is worth looking into is the geographical distribution of the searches. It is interesting to see how popular BitComet is in Asia. Currently, it is (based on searches) the preferred client in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. However, uTorrent is most often searched for in most countries, especially in Moldova. Azureus, on the other hand, is a popular search term in Greece.

US

If we take a closer look at the US (you can do this for any country), we see that pretty much every BitTorrent client is popular in California. The graph shows that most uTorrent searches (relatively) come from Kentucky and California, Milpitas in particular. Azureus seems to be quite popular in Ohio, specifically in Salt Lake City. BitComet is the least searched for client of the three, but gets most search traffic from New York and California again, Monterey Park on this occasion.

Overall I would say that based on other statistics, the search data is a pretty close match to the actual BitTorrent client preferences. Google’s insights on the regional differences certainly have something to add to what we already know, but keep in mind that they are only search statistics. Most of all, it’s a fun tool to play around with on a Sunday afternoon when there’s not much news to go around.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Things changed in 2006 when Azureus launched the content distribution platform it called ‘Vuze’ (aka Zudeo), backed up by a total of $34 million venture capital. For a while, they kept releasing a no-Vuze version of Azureus (when Vuze/Zudeo was in Beta), but Vuze CEO, Gilles BianRosa told TorrentFreak that this only caused confusion among their users.

“We started to change our name from Azureus to Vuze over a year ago, but we did not make the change in a clear or consistent manner,” Gilles said. “This has caused a great deal of confusion amongst our users. We want to rectify this situation by changing our name to Vuze consistently.”

“Whilst we recognize the strength of the Azureus name and the frog, it is only associated with our original BitTorrent application. As we move towards creating an all-in-one application for finding, playing and sharing great content, that goes beyond the realm of just a BitTorrent client, we wanted to change our name to reflect that, but bring with us the frog who is such a part of our heritage,” Gilles added.

Today, Vuze comes with a brand new release of their client (v3.1), introducing several new features. One of the most drastic changes is the new social layer that has been added to the client. Vuze users are now able to add friends, share torrents with friends, and give friends a speed boost when you are downloading the same torrent.

The new client also includes a meta-search engine that allows you to search across several popular BitTorrent sites, in addition to content from Vuze.com. The search functionality is completely customizable, so you can add you personal favorite if it’s not already included.

Unfortunately, there will not be a Vuze client available without the Vuze platform integrated. Gilles told TorrentFreak: “We are focusing our efforts on delivering against our vision of creating an all-in-one application that enables users to find, download, play and share in one streamlined application.”

“We have started on a path of creating an all-in-one application that enables users to find, play and share torrents. In particular, we believe that by enabling users to share content and bandwidth through the “Friends” feature we are adding a completely new dimension to peer-to-peer – a new social dimension, or what we call ’social P2P’,” Gilles said.

Azureus is no more, the name change is permanent. On the one hand this is a step forward, as the new interface and functionality will appeal to new users. However, it has also caused quite a heated debate among both developers and users who were happy with the classic UI. Although, it’s a bit hidden, the original interface still remains accessible with the UI switcher. Time will tell if it is the right move.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A few months we already reported that uTorrent overtook Azureus’ position as the most installed BitTorrent application, and this trend continues. LimeWire’s popularity on the other hand is declining worldwide. Nonetheless, it is still by far the most installed filesharing application.

LimeWire going down, uTorrent on the rise

From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The most loyal LimeWire users come from Australia, where the install rate is 27%, only a slight decrease compared to the 30.4% in 2006.

The uTorrent user base on the other hand is rapidly growing. uTorrent installs more than doubled in nearly every part of the world in the last 12 months. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe (11.6%), as can be seen from the graph below.

As a result of uTorrent’s growth, other BitTorrent clients such as Azureus and BitComet are going downhill. Azureus and BitComet now have an average install rate of 1.4% and 1.7% respectively.

Regional Differences

The regional differences in popularity of p2p applications are also worth mentioning. The data show that uTorrent is far more popular in Europe (11.6%) than in the United States (5.1%). Limewire on the other hand is well-liked among Aussies (27.0%) and Canadians (27.2%), but has less followers in Latin America.

Emule is still very popular in Latin America, where 16% of the PCs have the application installed compared to only 1% in the United States and 3% in Europe.

Home vs. Business PCs

Unsurprisingly, P2P applications are more frequently installed on home computers versus PCs at the workplace. Nevertheless, almost one out of five PCs at work (18%) have at least one P2P application installed. For home computer this is little over 1 in three (36%)

P2P Market share 2008

We also compiled a pie chart of the market share of the different P2P applications as of January 1st 2008. Please note that the data is a bit skewed since most of the data comes from participants who were based in the United States. LimeWire is without a doubt the winner here.

Finally, we want to make it clear though that install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it.

Based on the amount of traffic that is generated by each P2P application, uTorrent would be the absolute winner.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A few months ago Azureus petitioned the FCC, which led to a FCC hearing in February. One of the complaints from the commission was that there is little data available on the scope of BitTorrent throttling, a gap Azureus now tries to fill by collecting data on the prevalence of TCP-resets among ISPs worldwide.

Last month Azureus published a plugin through which users can help distinguishing the good from the bad ISPs, and today we have a preview of some early findings. A massive 1,000,000 hours of data from over 8000 users has been collected over the past few weeks. The preliminary results again confirm that Comcast continues to use TCP-resets to manage BitTorrent traffic on their network, but they are not alone.

The rest of the Vuze/Azureus report (pdf) includes the median reset rates for hundreds of other ISPs

TCP resets seem to be more common for American ISPs, and Comcast leads the bunch. The Azureus team has sent a letter to Cablevision, Cogeco, BellSouth and AOL, where they request that the companies are open about their BitTorrent throttling practices. Thus far, the ISPs have not responded to the letters.

At the bottom of the list we see the good ISPs, mostly from Europe. There are other ways to throttle BitTorrent traffic, besides using TCP-resets, a list of ISPs who are known to limit BitTorrent traffic is available on the Azureus Wiki.

It has to be noted that the data gathering techniques Vuze uses are far from optimal. The plugin detects all TCP resets on a connection and doesn’t make a distinction between BitTorrent and other traffic, and there is no control group.

The Azureus/Vuze team will continue to collect data, and stated:

“We believe that there is sufficient data to suggest that network management practices that ‘throttle’ Internet traffic are widespread. At a minimum, more investigation is required to determine whether these resets are happening in the ordinary course of business or whether they represent the kind of throttling practices which target specific applications and/or protocols, harming the consumer experience and stifling innovation.”

The preliminary results presented here do indeed indicate that Comcast is not the only ISP that uses TCP resets to slow down BitTorrent traffic. People are encouraged to continue using the plugin so more robust data can be presented in the near future.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“We at Vuze (Azureus) decided there was something important you can do to help elevate the debate,” says Jay Monahan, General Counsel at Azureus. “We created a simple software “plug-in” that works with your Vuze (Azureus) application to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic.”

The main purpose of the plugin is to gather factual data on which ISPs are throttling with BitTorrent, and to what extent. Already there is an ever growing list of bad ISPs available at the Azureus wiki, but the data from the plugin will make their case even stronger.

When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic, Azureus was one of the first BitTorrent clients to introduce a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. However, this was only the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers.

Unfortunately, BitTorrent encryption doesn’t work against the more aggressive, and ever evolving throttling applications. Even though there is a Comcast proof BitTorrent encryption in the making, it is always easier to use political means to stop ISPs from messing with our traffic in the first place. The plugin is listed at Azureus’ Sourceforge page if you want to help out.

For the paranoid BitTorrent users among us, Monahan guarantees that the data will be sent anonymously. “Be assured that sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. We will aggregate the data and may talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed as part of this effort.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

How to speed up transfers is a common question from many BitTorrent users looking to squeeze the last drop of performance from their torrent client. Here at TorrentFreak we like to give people as many tips as possible, such as those in some of our previous posts on how to Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed and Calculate Your Optimal BitTorrent Settings.

Developers at Northwestern University are also working to improve transfer speeds and have developed an Azureus plugin which claims to do just that – but how? From the site:

“The main goal of this plugin is simple — to improve download speeds for your BitTorrent client. For most P2P applications, the decision regarding which peer to download from is generally arbitrary. When most peers offer good download performance, the random solution works well. However, if most peers are in a different part of the world from you, your downloads can really suffer.

The Ono plugin avoids this by proactively finding peers that are close to you (in a networking sense). These peers generally offer better response time, which can lead to significantly improved performance. We identify those peers that are near you by reusing network measurements from content distribution networks (CDNs), i.e. without performing extensive path measurement or probing.”

According to the project, although the Azureus client is already involved in ‘network positioning’ for increasing transfer speeds, it fails to perform due to inaccurate network co-ordinates. They claim that only 10% of the co-ordinates are acceptable, while 60% had up to 100% errors.

As is the case with Azureus, Ono requires Java to run and can be downloaded here. Anyone wishing to read more about the project should visit their homepage.

Although low latency is preferable in any networking environment, it’s up for debate if in the real world, this in itself leads to faster transfers.

‘Ono’ is a Hawaiian word meaning ‘good to eat’ so we would be very interested to hear if TorrentFreak users find this plugin as tasty as the developers claim, so feel free to add your experiences to the comment section.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Slyck posted an article in which they publish statistical data they received from an anonymous source. According to these statistics uTorrent is more than twice as fast as Azureus, something that I find hard to believe.

Here’s what Slyck’s source reports:

Azureus Mac
Max Rate Seen: 297 KB/s
Average Rate: 235 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 155 MB
Average CPU: 20%

µTorrent Mac
Max Rate Seen: 840KB/s
Average Rate: 698 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 14 MB
Average CPU: 6%

Slyck received these stats from an anonymous source. Probably someone working at BitTorrent Inc because these stats are a little subjective to say the least. It is hard to get differences like this without cheating the protocol, something that Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus, agrees with:

“We are not aware of any such stats, and clearly would doubt their validity. BitTorrent is a standard, and clients have, by design, limited ways to optimize transfer speeds. We have implemented features to optimize “around” the protocol, such as PeerExchange, but getting such wide variations without “bastardizing” the protocol beyond recognition (and making it not compliant/compatible in the process) make these numbers look VERY suspicious, if not ridiculous.”

I’ve been in the position to test an Alpha version of the Mac version of BitTorrent and I also tested Azureus’ Mac version and I came up with figures that clearly favor uTorrent, but not as dramatically as the statistics provided by BitTorrent Inc the anonymous source.

I decided to run my own comparison test using the exact same setup for both clients. The results are based on downloading 3 .torrent files that differed in swarm size and file size. Here’s what I found :

Azureus Mac
Max Rate Seen: 1.42 MB/s
Average Rate: 769 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 130 MB
Average CPU: 18%

µTorrent Mac
Max Rate Seen: 1.28 MB/s
Average Rate: 788 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 16 MB
Average CPU: 7%

The results are quite clear. It is hard to conclude that downloads will go faster with Azureus or uTorrent. Perhaps a difference can be found in a scientific and controlled setting, but no significant difference is observed in a real-life setting. One thing is clear though, the huge difference in download speed reported by Slyck’s anonymous source doesn’t make sense.

What we can see from both comparisons is that uTorrent for Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, uses less CPU and RAM. This is definitely a reason for me, and probably a lot of other BitTorrent users with me, to try uTorrent as soon as it’s released.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Let’s start off with some screenshots.

The Installation Disk Image

Main Window with Downloads

Click to enlarge.

Speed
The main reason I like uTorrent so much is because downloads are considerably faster in it than in any other BitTorrent client. This held true when I compared uTorrent Mac to Transmission and Xtorrent. The downloads speeds in both couldn’t match uTorrent’s. Azureus was the only one that came close, just as I had expected.

Application Launch Time
uTorrent Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, is super-light. It launches immediately (not even 1 bounce in the Dock!). This is clearly one piece of well-coded software. Probably part of the reason why BitTorrent Inc decided to buy it.

Interface
uTorrent Mac has a simple, yet appealing interface that is easy to use and navigate. It’s not as stylish as Xtorrent’s, but then again, no one can create interfaces like David Watanabe.

Search
Though it may seem that uTorrent has some sort of built-in search functionality, currently only offered by BitRocket and Xtorrent on the Mac, it does not. Typing something such as “HDTV” into the search box and hitting return will merely open a BitTorrent.com search page in your default browser.

Conclusion
It’s too early to draw conclusions but it’s a great first impression, especially for a pre-release version.

It’s worth mentioning that some Mac users such as myself like uTorrent so much, we even prefer running it under emulation than using one of the available Mac BitTorrent clients. uTorrent is not only the most popular Windows BitTorrent client according to a poll we conducted last year, but also the winner of our BitTorrent clients comparison.

Many of you are probably dying to download uTorrent Mac. Hang in there, it’s coming real soon.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.

Do you know any new BitTorrent sites that are worth a visit? Feel free to leave a comment!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In a response to the BitTorrent protocol encryption that is now supported by many BitTorrent clients, companies like Ipoque that provide bandwidth management hardware, claim that they found a way to detect and block these encrypted (obfuscated) transfers. Ipoque doesn’t provide any details on how they are able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic, and it is doubtful whether they can be sure that the traffic they block is indeed generated by BitTorrent.

In addition to the ability to throttle encrypted BitTorrent transfers, Ipoque’s bandwidth managing devices now also support the use of BitTorrent tracker whitelists. “Desired legal trackers such as tracker.opensuse.org can be registered in a whitelist so that their BitTorrent traffic is accepted. All other BitTorrent traffic can be blocked.”, says Ipoque in a press release.

Lately, more and more companies claim that they have found a way to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic. The fact is however that none of these companies actually provides data on the effectiveness of these systems. Until they open up their methods I seriously doubt the effectiveness of these devices.

Interestingly, a few weeks ago, Canadian ISP Rogers even decided to throttle all encrypted traffic (not only BitTorrent). Apparently Rogers doesn’t need a device that is able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic on their network, they simply throttle everyone who is using encrypted transfers.

The cat-and-mouse game continues.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Rogers realized that the bit-shaping applications they were using to limit the traffic that is generated by BitTorrent weren’t effective anymore, and started to throttle all encrypted transfers as well. As a consequence, people have trouble connecting to encrypted e-mail services, and other applications that rely on encrypted connections.

Rogers is not the only ISP that tries to cut down the BitTorrent traffic. Last year we had a discussion whether traffic shaping is good or bad, and both BitTorrent users and ISPs had some good arguments. However, limiting all encrypted transfers is a completely different story, it affects a wide range of customers, not only the ones using BitTorrent.

What makes it even more ridiculous is that Rogers still advertises with the slogan “for sharing large files and much more”. Last time I checked BitTorrent was still the best way to share large files, but I guess the people at Rogers don’t want their customers to share large files after all.

Rogers’ competitor Shaw is also limiting BitTorrent traffic, but at least they still leave encrypted traffic untouched (for now).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The report is based on data supplied by BigChampagne and PC Pitstop. BigChampagne is a company that tracks online media, it also provides provides Billboard online music charts. PC Pitstop gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of 1.5 million PC’s through these online diagnostic tests performed by PC Pitstop.

The results. The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the P2P applications:

In the report we further read that the once almighty “Kazaa family” is now only installed on 1.3% PCs. Newcomers like FrostWire and Pando are included in the report for the fist time with a 0.2% and 0.3% install rate respectively.

As said before, the usability of these figures are doubtful. Here are a few concerns. First of all, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. They do not make these claims, but the way the data is presented is a bit misleading, to say the least.

For example, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Over 50% of the peers in an average BitTorrent swarm use uTorrent. It could be that uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on.

Another remarkable point is the uTorrent data collection for this report. uTorrent doesn’t install itself, and even the installer doesn’t use the Windows registry. So how did they come up with these statistics on uTorrent then?

It is also funny to see mIRC in the top 10 of most installed filesharing application because it is so much more than this. Most people I know use mIRC for other purposes than sharing files.

The concerns raised here show that “power” is not always in numbers. They might have collected data from millions of users, but is this really valuable if you have no idea if they actually use the application? A survey among 10.000 users where you actually ask if, and how often they use these applications is probably more useful.

And on a final note, people who want to read the report, but don’t want to pay $195 might want to try Google’s backdoor. Doubtful statistics, doubtful security.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Xtorrent, the new BitTorrent client for Mac OS X, just rolled out of the beta phase. In September, we reviewed the first public beta, which initially looked like a promising application. However, issues like the problematic libtransmission library, and the intrusive shareware policy make this client a lot less attractive.

The first major drawback of Xtorrent is that it is not free, which is extremely unusual and awkward for a BitTorrent client. In addition, Xtorrent has a very intrusive shareware policy. If you do not register the application, a floating window that you cannot close gets stuck on your screen, and searches randomly start to fail. To make things even worse, it seems like the application throttles the available bandwidth to 10kbps after an hour of usage.

The second drawback is that Xtorrent’s core is made up of the libtransmission library. This library is known to hammer trackers, and is banned from an increasing number of them, which makes Xtorrent useless for members of Oink, for example.

If you decide to buy Xtorrent you’re mostly paying for the (stunningly) beautiful user-interface, not because its download speeds are the best or because it is the lightest BitTorrent client available for the Mac. Azureus still leads by a wide margin in download speeds, and Transmission is hands down the lightest BitTorrent client for the Mac.

Xtorrent looks good, it integrates well with iTunes, has iPod support and subscribes to RSS feeds. But to be completely honest, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money. Perhaps that’s just because I’m a Windows user. Paying for software just isn’t in my blood.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The maximum upload speed is by far the most important setting. It might sound strange to some, but you should always cap your upload speed to reach the best download speeds. Your connection is (sort of) like a pipeline (or tube if you prefer), if you max out your upload speed the pipe will be fully used, which means there’s not enough space left for the files you are downloading. The calculator recommends to set it at 80% of your maximum, I agree with that. People with high-speed connections might go a bit higher, and set is at 85% or even 90%.

Some people find that when they are seeding, browsing the web becomes sluggish. This is due to a badly configured upload speed in their BitTorrent client. When you have the correct upload speed entered into your client, browsing the web is noticeably quicker and seeding becomes almost transparent.

How to configure your maximum upload speed?

uTorrent: options > preferences > connection
Azureus: tools > options > transfer
Bitcomet: try this ?

Here at TorrentFreak we also wrote some post about optimizing BitTorrent download speeds, might be worth the read if you want to know more.

Read more on optimizing your BitTorrent Speed.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

(Correct at 13:00GMT)

eMule Plus just missed the Top10, sitting where it does at number 11 with 21,018,700 downloads and is backed up by FTP project FileZilla at number 13 with 19,944,891 gets.

The seasoned file-sharer is only too aware of how important the Open Source software movement is to their cause and SourceForge’s stats appear to reinforce that. I wonder how long it will take the fresh-faced BitTorrent client Halite to break the Top 10? It’s currently ranked 8,117 with 8,848 downloads. 2008? 2009? Why not give it a try!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

BitTyrant is selfish because it focuses on the optimal speed for the individual, although it might hurt the overall performance of the entire swarm. The key idea is: selecting peers that give you the best overall download speed. This is done by adding two features to the client.

1. It connects to peers that give you the the most data back. So invest a small amount of upload speed, and get the most back.
2. It connects to peers with the best upload speed.

Selfishness might work for a single person, but if everybody starts to use BitTyrant, performance will decrease. So, as the makers of the client put it: “When all peers behave selfishly, average performance degrades for all peers, even those with high capacity.”

It is clear that BitTyrant will optimize the speed for a single user if only a few use the client, but the makers of the client also found that peers with less bandwidth available will be worse of. In their research paper we read:

“We found that BitTyrant improves performance for all peers that use it. Nevertheless, in practice, BitTyrant will hurt the performance of individual swarms as high capacity peers reach a point of diminishing returns and are incented to either withhold their upload contribution or invest it in other swarms. Low capacity peers do not enjoy such a luxury. As the majority of peers have low capacity, they will see degraded performance compared to BitTorrent today.”

Just like Azureus, BitTyrant is cross-platform due to the nature of Java, the platform independent language it’s coded in. Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows versions of the client can be downloaded from the BitTyrant homepage, but I don’t recommend that you do.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Why would the company open source uTorrent?
There are many reasons for them to do so. One of the many advantages would be to get it quickly and easily ported to other platforms such as OS X and Linux, a task the company has promised to get done. “[uTorrent is] lacking an implementation for Mac and Linux. We will improve uTorrent in these arenas,” said Ludvig Strigeus, the developer of uTorrent in an interview that followed the announcement. Until now he has refused to release non-Windows versions of the client. Also, if uTorrent were made Open Source it would be a lot less likely for its development to stagnate or slow down, there would always be someone ready to maintain and improve upon it.

Reasons not to open source uTorrent
The motivation behind BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition of uTorrent could very well be to have a client that can be customised and morphed to integrate with the upcoming BitTorrent Video Store. If the company were to open source uTorrent, it would not be able to stop users from creating a “clean” version of it, ie. without any Video Store-specific features. This “enhancing” of uTorrent is something users of the client are dreading. A reader of TorrentFreak posted a comment in reaction to the acquisition announcement, “R.I.P. uTorrent!” In a discussion here at TorrentFreak, we came to the conclusion that adding a content store to the client won’t affect most users’ decision to use the program or not. iTunes is a good example of people using a program because of its features, not the openness of its source code. After all, even Azureus will soon have a bundled content store.

By acquiring uTorrent, BitTorrent Inc now has almost 50% of all BitTorrent users in its grasp. They’ve probably paid a hefty price for the client and it’s only fair if they choose not to make it Open Source. The company said in an IRC discussion that followed the announcement that the source code of uTorrent will remain closed for now, but gave no clues as to what their future plans might look like.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Techcrunch reports that Azureus will be partnering with several major TV and Movie studios to offer free content through the new client and website. The main difference with similar video sharing sites like YouTube is that Zudeo will focus on delivering high quality content, and full length programs, and that you have to download the videos before you’re able to watch them.

Azureus said before that it is dedicated to offer DRM free content, but they will probably include paid downloads in the future. The old “getazureus.com” now redirects to Zudeo, where you will be able to check out the latest Beta release.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Thepcspy compared the three most popular BitTorrent clients. And it seems that uTorrent is indeed entitled to be called “the lightweight client”.

The mean boot time of Azureus, Bitcomet and uTorrent were compared on a Windows XP Pro clean install.

However, to put things into perspective, Norton Internet Security 2006 caused a 57.78% slowdown.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.