Dubbed “Share,” the new application is targeted at people who want to share large files with a private group of people, as opposed to uploading them via a public BitTorrent site for all the world to see. With the tagline “No more storage limits. No more fees” it also takes a stab at the increasingly popular cyberlockers.

Although the software uses BitTorrent under the hood, people are not required to create torrent files. Instead, they can select files on their computer, pick a person or group to share them with, and the application takes care of the rest.

According to BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem the new application fits perfectly into a world where media files grow larger and larger by the day.

“With today’s consumer cameras/video recorders producing stunning quality, traditional media sharing requires concessions. With Share, you don’t have to crop photos, reduce resolutions or cut video length to easily share something with your friends, family and colleagues. It’s much faster than traditional ‘cloud’ solutions and easy for anyone,” says Ghanem.

Those with a keen eye for detail may see similarities between “Share” and the “Project Chrysalis” client that was released last year. The new application is an improvement over the Chrysalis client, directly based on input from users.

“After evaluating the user response and feedback, we realized we had the right goal, but users identified challenges with the implementation. Ultimately, we took what we learned and started again from scratch. Share was born,” Ghanem explains.

The Share project is currently in an early Alpha phase, but once it has matured the application will be integrated into the existing uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline clients. Although some might find this useful, there is also a group of uTorrent users who would prefer to keep a lighter client.

In recent years uTorrent has been augmented with quite a few extra bells and whistles, features that some traditional BitTorrent users are not interested in. To address these concerns, we asked whether BitTorrent Inc. would consider releasing a more basic version of the popular client as well.

“We might consider it in the future – it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility,” we were told. “Right now, even with the new features, the client is still very small and efficient on resources. We also review features very frequently, and if they aren’t being used, we are always open to removing them.”

A uTorrent “light” may indeed not be a bad idea to please the angry mob. Those who are less resistant to change are of course invited to give Share a spin.

Source: BitTorrent Releases New “Share” Application

In recent years uTorrent has transformed from a relatively ‘geeky’ and minimal application into a BitTorrent client that should appeal to a mainstream audience.

Another step in this direction has just been taken with the newly released stable build of uTorrent 3.1, now with a built-in media player. This player allows users to watch videos or listen to downloaded music without having to leave uTorrent.

Another new feature, one that was already present in early beta releases, is integration with external devices including the iPhone, iPad, PS3, Xbox 360 and Android hardware. This allows users to quickly sync downloaded content to these devices.

And that’s not all the uTorrent developers have been working on lately.

Aside from the new version of uTorrent ‘free,’ BitTorrent Inc. also released uTorrent Plus, a paid version of the client with additional features. As announced a few weeks ago, this new version of uTorrent costs $24.95 a year.

Plus enables users to convert videos to formats that are compatible with external devices. It also comes with built-in anti-virus, remote file-transfers and a built-in media player.

“Our goal was to enhance uTorrent to be a powerful tool that lets you free your personal content from the PC. Plus adds key features needed to accomplish this, and then adds security to keep you safer,” says uTorrent’s director of product management Jordy Berson.

Users who now visit the uTorrent website will see that they can choose between the free and the plus version of the BitTorrent client. Existing free users will also see an “upgrade to plus” banner in their clients, but this can be disabled. Aside from putting work in the Plus version, the uTorrent team will continue developing the free client in the coming years.

Are you a uTorrent user? Let us know what you think about the new free features and the Plus version in the comments.

Source: uTorrent Adds Media Player, Plus Goes Live…

Thus far all versions of uTorrent have been free of charge, but earlier this year uTorrent’s parent company announced the forthcoming release of ‘Plus’, a paid version of the client with additional features.

Plus will enable users to convert videos and transfer files to external devices. It also comes with built in anti-virus, remote file-transfers and a built in media player. Today BitTorrent Inc. announced that Plus will be released before the holidays and the client has been put on pre-sale for $24.95 a year.

“uTorrent Plus was specially designed to give our users access to often-requested features. If they are seeking a very easy way to convert files to popular formats to watch on other devices, plus a safer torrenting experience with integrated antivirus (and more), it’s a no-brainer,” BitTorrent spokesperson Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.

“The free uTorrent client still offers all the essential functionality and continues to receive significant attention from the development team. uTorrent Plus is exactly what its name implies: everything you love about uTorrent *plus* great new features,” she added.

For the San Francisco company uTorrent Plus is a attempt to add an additional revenue stream aside from the money it makes from toolbar installs. How much is guesswork, but considering the target audience they will probably “suffer” a bit from piracy, although we doubt that they will complain much about that.

uTorrent is not the first mainstream file-sharing application to be launched with a paid version. Before it was shut down LimeWire sold a pro version, and uTorrent’s main competitor Vuze also sells a pro version of their client for $24.99 which enables users to burn DVDs.

Generally these pro-clients are not targeted towards savvy BitTorrent users, but to relative newcomers who are willing to pay a little bit to make their lives easier. That said, paid BitTorrent clients are certainly not the norm, so it will be interesting to see how uTorrent Plus will be received by the public.

Are you a uTorrent user? Let us know what you think about Plus in the comments.

Source: uTorrent Plus Goes on Pre-Sale for $24.95

Despite the success story that it is, the uTorrent development team hasn’t been sitting still in recent years. The user interface is continuously being updated and new features are launched on a frequent basis, such as the BitTorrent App studio.

Today we can add another feature to the list, as BitTorrent quietly rolled out support for external devices in the latest uTorrent alpha release. Aside from the usual bug fixes, the new release allows users to drag and drop downloaded files to Apple and Android devices, as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles.

In addition, the latest alpha also shows the option to convert files into the appropriate formats supported by the various devices. However, TorrentFreak has learned that this tease was put in by mistake and that it will be removed in the next update.

While the device integration will become part of the stable uTorrent release in a few months, conversion will only be available for people who upgrade to the premium uTorrent version, the upcoming uTorrent Plus.

As is the case with all change, not all users are happy with the multitude of developments uTorrent has gone through in recent months. Some complain about bugs, others don’t like the new interface, and there are users who are not charmed by all the new additional features.

The uTorrent developers, however, believe that they are on the right track to making their software appeal to a wider audience. TorrentFreak was informed by BitTorrent Inc. that a lot of users specifically demanded device integration, as well as other changes that were implemented recently.

That there indeed is a demand from BitTorrent users for integration with mobiles and game consoles has been shown by uTorrent’s main competitor, Vuze. A year after Vuze added device integration millions of users had turned on this feature, and together they converted more than 100 million videos. Whether people are as excited when they have to pay for the conversion remains to be seen.

The latest 3.1 alpha is available for download now, for those who are interested in giving it a spin.

Source: uTorrent Adds Android, iOS, PS3 and Xbox Integration

To gain more insight into BitTorrent’s usage we’ve previously looked at the market share of various BitTorrent clients to spot emerging trends, and today we revive this initiative. To see where things stand two years after our last report, TorrentFreak asked the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology to find out which clients are being used in various popular BitTorrent swarms.

Although the new results show some interesting shifts in market shares, uTorrent remains firmly in the lead. Nearly half of the 557,536 unique peers (48%) that were spotted in the sample were using a version of uTorrent. The mainline client, also developed by BitTorrent Inc., came in at third with a market share of 13 percent.

Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, secured second place with 22 percent of the total users. This is an all-time high for the client which had just 14 percent market share in our last report. One of the factors that contributed to this rise is FrostWire’s move to become a BitTorrent-only client based on the Azureus code base. This means that a few percent of the downloaders that identify as using Azureus, are in fact FrostWire users.

Another client that gained popularity is Transmission, which doubled its market share in recent months and is now at 7 percent. A respectable figure, especially because Transmission doesn’t have a native Windows client. BitComet, on the other hand, continued its downward spiral and is now stuck at little over one percent, down from the 6 percent it enjoyed two years ago.

We have to note that the comparisons above are relative. The number of BitTorrent users has grown significantly over the past two years, so in absolute numbers Transmission’s user base may have even quadrupled, or more.

Below is the full list of all clients that have a market share over 1 percent. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up in the unknown ‘category’. As before, the research focuses on popular swarms listed on English language BitTorrent sites, which means that ‘foreign’ clients such as Xunlei are underrepresented.

Source: uTorrent Keeps BitTorrent Lead, BitComet Fades Away

Over the years uTorrent’s target audience has also changed. BitTorrent was still a geek thing in 2005, but today its users include hockey moms, grandparents and many others who are not generally classified as computer experts.

This wider appeal naturally translates into user growth. Today uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. confirmed to TorrentFreak that uTorrent has officially surpassed 100 million active users a month. By comparison, this is more active users than the much-hyped social network Twitter, and almost quadruple the number of users uTorrent had three years ago.

“This is a big milestone for uTorrent and adds to what has been a tremendous year of growth for the client,” Shahi Ghanem, Chief Strategist at BitTorrent told TorrentFreak.

We’re grateful for our users and we want to thank our global community for their amazing support. We take every bit of user feedback to heart when building uT and we remain committed to keeping it the world’s fastest and lightest BitTorrent client,” Ghanem added.

Although the 100 million milestone is already quite an achievement, one of the main challenges in the future is to keep even more newcomers on board. Previously it was reported that hundreds of thousands of people download uTorrent every day, but that a significant percentage of this group don’t become regular users.

To tackle this problem of “bouncing” users, uTorrent has made changes to its client in recent months that aim to keep more novices on board. An example is the “simplified view,” allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. And that’s just one of the many changes the company has made.

Later this year will see another change in course for uTorrent as BitTorrent Inc. launches a paid version of the client. Branded “uTorrent Plus,” this version of uTorrent will come with several added features including the ability to convert videos and transfer files to external devices. More details on this project are expected to come out in the coming weeks.

By reaching 100 million active monthly users the uTorrent brand is stronger than ever before. It is also an indication the BitTorrent’s popularity in general is still growing, despite fierce competition from direct download sites and streaming services. Indeed, BitTorrent is here to stay.

Source: uTorrent Breaks 100 Million Monthly Users

The uTorrent team is currently finalizing a paid version of uTorrent that will extend the functionality of the current application. One of the key features of uTorrent Plus is the ability to convert videos and transfer files to external devices such as iPods and PSPs.

uTorrent Plus will launch as an invite-only beta before it rolls out its public release later this year. Further details on the exact specifications and capabilities of the paid uTorrent client are expected to be announced in the weeks to come.

Jordy Berson, Director of Product Management for uTorrent, told TorrentFreak that no price has been set for uTorrent Plus at this point. However, Berson assured us that the Plus variant will add new features and that no existing functionality will be stripped from the regular uTorrent version.

With uTorrent Plus BitTorrent Inc hopes to cater to the needs of many of its users, while making some extra revenue in the process.

“We think of it more as diversifying revenue sources. Some of the features will involve us paying licensing fees so it’s not like this is a pure profit business for us, although given our scale we’ll be able to negotiate good terms and pass on to customers a great value,” Berson told TorrentFreak.

One of the downsides to paid software, especially that targeted at BitTorrent users, is that it will probably be available to download for free on torrent sites. The uTorrent team is aware of this issue but doesn’t plan to include any extreme anti-piracy measures.

“We will use a pretty standard licensing system to unlock the Plus version,” Berson told TorrentFreak.

On the pre-release page of uTorrent Plus we further read that the client will offer “peace of mind with safer torrenting.” Exact details on this feature will be released at a later stage but TorrentFreak was told that it does not refer to increased anonymity, but to a type of protection that’s offered by anti-virus security suites.

uTorrent is not the first file-sharing application to be launched with a paid version. Before it was shut down LimeWire sold a pro version, and uTorrent’s main competitor Vuze also sells a pro version of their client. Interestingly, Vuze’s free version already supports video conversion and device integration, features that are expected to be added to uTorrent Plus.

Generally these pro-clients are not targeted towards savvy BitTorrent users, but to relative newcomers who are willing to pay a little bit to make their lives easier. That said, paid BitTorrent clients are certainly not the norm, so it will be interesting to see how uTorrent Plus will be received by the public.

Source: uTorrent To Launch a Paid Version

But the MediaGet team wanted more. Earlier this year they translated the BitTorrent client into English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, and not without success.

As of today the BitTorrent client has been downloaded more than 18 million times, and the share of US and Western European users is growing steadily. The MediaGet team estimates that 70% of their current users still come from Russia and Ukraine, but other parts of the world are catching up quickly.

Judging from the features and a few trial runs, it is not hard to imagine that the client could appeal to a wide audience, especially those who prefer an all-in-one download application.

MediaGet is available to both Windows and Mac users and allows users to search, download and play files all from within the application. Although it has nearly all the features one would expect in a BitTorrent client, MediaGet is primarily targeted at novice users.

“Our software is made to be a BitTorrent client for ‘dummies’, who are looking to download movies, music and games. We provide built-in search which searches on various open torrent-trackers, and we have media player to watch movies on demand,” the MediaGet team told TorrentFreak.

One of the most notable features of MediaGet that most other clients lack is a built-in search engine. Aside from searching various public torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, in the future MediaGet plans to add an API so users can add other sites as well.

Whether the torrent sites, whose resources are users to power the search, will be very happy with the current implementation is a question that has to be answered another time.

On the privacy side MediaGet provides easy integration with the Faceless.me VPN service, in addition to regular proxy support for anonymity services like BTGuard. Other features worth mentioning are the uTorrent importer, the media player with streaming support, and the Android remote access interface.

Overall we have to say that MediaGet gives the impression of a mature and stable client that works out of the box. It works as advertised and is certainly a client worth keeping an eye on in the coming years.

Source: MediaGet BitTorrent Client Set To Conquer The West

During the past year many new features have been announced and tested, and nearly all of these are included in today’s first stable release of uTorrent 3.0.

The release introduces a wide range of new features and improvements that have been extensively tested over the past several months. With these additions, uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. hopes that their flagship client will appeal to an even larger audience.

A new feature we already discussed when it was first added to the beta release is the option to rate and comment on torrent files. True to BitTorrent’s nature, this data is not hosted on a central server somewhere, but among downloaders.

All comments and ratings associated with a particular file are shared among members of that swarm. If another peer has a comment that you don’t have already, it will send it to you, and vice versa. The messages are sent through the tracker and don’t rely on DHT, which means they work on private torrent files too.

Together, the comments and star ratings are supposed to give downloaders information on the quality of the various files they’re downloading. And there are more ways to get social with uTorrent 3.0, the new uChat app for example.

With uChat users can create both private and public chat rooms to discuss file-sharing related issues and more. The new app also allows users to add buddies and to share files quickly by generating magnet links. Again, this is all supported by decentralized technology and no data is stored on a central server.

Besides the chatty additions, uTorrent 3.0 also has many other interesting capabilities. The option to stream video before the download finishes is one of the features now added to the core uTorrent functionality. Streaming can be used to preview video files or to watch while downloading.

And then there’s the user interface which has been revamped completely. Among other things a “simplified view” has been added, allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. This should make uTorrent less ‘overwhelming’ to novices, who now often drop out because it looks too complex.

Other new features to keep novices on board are the “getting started” guides that now have a prominent placement in the client. Here, newcomers can find a beginner’s guide, tutorial videos and other tips and tricks to master BitTorrent quickly.

And that’s not all. Thanks to drag and drop sharing, creating and sharing torrents with uTorrent has never been easier.

Users will notice a “drop files to send” area in the bottom left-hand corner where they can drop files into. uTorrent will then automatically create the torrent and start seeding. Users can then get a link to share the torrent with their friends directly. Friends who don’t have uTorrent installed yet get the option to download the torrent bundled with a copy of uTorrent.

For BitTorrent-savvy users the new uTorrent also has plenty of new features in store. Aside from comments and ratings, uTorrent 3.0 also adds remote access to the core functionality. This means that people can securely control their torrents from smartphones and other devices. In addition, uTorrent now has a portable mode so users can carry it conveniently on a USB-stick.

Some users worry that some of these changes will bloat their favorite BitTorrent client, but uTorrent’s makers contest this and say they are dedicated to keeping uTorrent as light as possible.

“µTorrent’s popularity lies in its simplicity and power. As a result, we’re very selective in the features and apps we add, focusing on maintaining the lightness and speed our community expects,” Jordy Berson, uTorrent’s director of product management at BitTorrent Inc. said commenting on the new release.

Of course we’re also interested in the opinion of uTorrent users themselves also. What do you think? What are the best new features? Is there something you don’t like? Feel free to discuss below.

Source: uTorrent Gets Chatty With Milestone 3.0 Release

However, according to a lawsuit filed at a U.S. District Court this week, BitTorrent is also an infringement in its own right.

Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network filed a complaint at the court this week where it alleges that BitTorrent is infringing on a patent originally filed in April 1999. The company claims to have suffered significant losses and wants to be compensated for the ongoing patent infringement.

“By making, operating, using and/or selling [uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline] and or other software, BitTorrent has infringed and continues to infringe, contribute to the infringement, or induce the infringement of at least claim 1 of the ’944 patent,” the complaint reads.

The patent in question is titled “Media file distribution with adaptive transmission protocols” and was granted in November 2007. It describes a file-sharing system consisting of a file database, a transfer client and a distribution server.

“A server/client media file distribution system is provided in which the server system is adapted to receive transmission requests from clients, status information from a network, and protocol information from each client,” company writes in the patent abstract.

“The server, based upon this information, adaptively transmits a given media file stored therein to one or more clients using the optimal transmission speed and/or network protocol based on the network status information and protocol information,” the abstract adds.

The above is certainly not how most people would describe BitTorrent, but its is up to the District Court Judge to assess the validity of the patent infringement claim. Aside from BitTorrent Inc., Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network have also sued Kontiki Inc. on similar grounds.

Kontiki offers a media content delivery technology that is hybrid of central servers and P2P transfers. Unlike BitTorrent Inc, Kontiki’s user base mostly consists of businesses who can use the software to stream and distribute video. According to the complaint, this software also infringes on the aforementioned patent.

Although it’s not easy for an outsider to assess whether the case holds water or whether it’s classic patent trolling, the fall-out could spread far and wide.

Together, the two BitTorrent clients mentioned in the lawsuit have a user-base of more than 100 million users worldwide. If BitTorrent Inc. is suddenly required to pay royalties for each and every download, this will drastically impact the company’s operations. Not to mention the spill-over effect it may have on other BitTorrent software companies.

BitTorrent Inc. was asked for a comment on the lawsuit, but TorrentFreak was told that the company currently has nothing to add.

Source: uTorrent / BitTorrent Sued For Patent Infringement

Interestingly enough, these comments and ratings also work on torrent files that are shared on private trackers. Among some of the more privacy concious BitTorrent users this raised a few questions. Most importantly, where is this data stored and what information is attached to it?

To answer the above we got in touch with the uTorrent engineering team to find out how these comments and ratings are handled by the client.

Right away we were assured that none of the data is stored on a central server, and that the data can never be traced back to its source. Instead, the comments you see appearing in your client are sent as an extra piece of data, similar to how other files are shared with peers.

“µTorrent 3.0 adds an extension message for distributing comments within the swarm. All clients that support this extension message store all comments they have seen, per torrent,” the uTorrent engineering team informed TorrentFreak.

“When peer A joins a swarm, it will send a request for comments to peers that support this message, say peer B. If peer A already has some comments, it passes along a bloom-filter representing the set of all those comments. When peer B responds, it will not send comments that are already present in the bloom filter. This prevents duplicate comments.”

So basically, all comments and ratings associated with a particular file are shared among members of that swarm. If another peer has a comment that you don’t have already, it will send it to you, and vice versa. The messages are sent through the tracker and don’t rely on DHT, this means that they work on private torrent files as well.

The requests for comments are sent every 20 minutes by uTorrent, and this is how they are shared among peers. In the beginning when there is a relatively low percentage of users supporting the extension the comments and ratings will propagate slowly, but when uTorrent 3.0 becomes the stable release these issues will be gone.

The uTorrent engineer team further explained that comments are stored in the resume file for a torrent, which helps keeping comments alive across sessions. But other than on the computers of uTorrent users, the comments are never shared outside the swarm on a central server.

Although it’s good to know that uTorrent’s commenting and rating system is fully decentralized, it also introduces a new feature that may be less welcome. When comments and ratings become a new standard to check the quality of files in the future, there is no doubt that these features will be exploited by spammers to make fake torrents appear more legitimate.

Time will tell whether the ‘costs’ will outfit the benefits, and whether the unmoderated system will be able to handle the potential influx of trolls and spammers. In the meantime it’s a simple affair to paste a hash value into Google – or append it to the URL on sites like Torrentz – in order to double check.

Source: Where Are uTorrent’s Comments and Ratings Stored?

Today, the beta of uTorrent 3.0 was officially released. This version introduces a wide range of new features and improvements that have been extensively tested over the last months. uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. hopes that through these additions their flagship client will appeal to an even larger audience.

One of the most anticipated new features is the option to rate and comment on torrent files added to uTorrent. Many users have asked for a commenting feature in the past making it the 4th most-requested function in the uTorrent “Idea Bank“. Although some fear that it will bloat the application and open the door for spammers, the majority see the addition of comments as a useful feature.

Aside from adding the option to comment on downloaded torrents, users of uTorrent 3.0 can also rate torrent files by awarding them one to five stars. Together, the comments and star ratings are supposed to give downloaders information on the quality of the various files they’re downloading.

Another feature new to uTorrent 3.0 is the option to stream video before the download finishes. A streaming feature was already introduced in some experimental uTorrent releases and will now be added to the core uTorrent functionality. Streaming can be used to preview video files or to watch while downloading.

Aside from the above features uTorrent 3.0 also has an updated look. The user interface has been revamped and a “simplified view” added, allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. This should make uTorrent less ‘overwhelming’ to novices, who now often drop out because it looks too complex.

One of the features implemented to keep novices on board are the “getting started” guides that now have a prominent placement in the client. Here, newcomers can find a beginner’s guide, tutorial videos and other tips and tricks to master BitTorrent quickly.

Creating and sharing torrents has never been easier before with uTorrent either. Users will notice a “drop files to send” area in the bottom left-hand corner where they can drop files into. uTorrent will then automatically create the torrent and start seeding.

Users can then get a link to share the torrent with their friends directly. Friends who don’t have uTorrent installed yet get the option to download the torrent bundled with a copy of uTorrent.

For BitTorrent savvy users the new uTorrent also has plenty of new features in store. Aside from comments and ratings, uTorrent 3.0 also adds remote access to the core functionality. This means that people can securely control their torrents from smartphones and other devices. In addition, uTorrent now has a portable mode so users can carry it conveniently on a USB-stick.

“Our design goal is to simplify the way people interact with uTorrent while continuing to offer and expand features and expert capabilities,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris told TorrentFreak. “This will likely broaden the appeal for many users while maintaining the technical capabilities popular with power users.”

“From a functionality perspective, we’re taking two approaches. First, embed high-demand features like streaming, ratings and remote access that are valuable to many users. Second, creating the ability for people to add-on features via the Apps platform,” Morris added.

In the coming months uTorrent will continue to expand its features and capabilities, TorrentFreak was told.

“We have an active roadmap for uTorrent for 2011, and the company. We see uTorrent as offering an ideal file sharing experience with deep insight into the background data. Ideally, such a client would enable someone to find, get, play, send, and shift large files over the Internet,” he said.

“In particular, major initiatives are underway focused on sending or synching of large files, and introducing support for live streaming,” Morris added.

A full overview of all the new features in uTorrent 3.0 and the latest beta are available on the uTorrent website. Have you tried it? Please let us know what you think below.

Source: uTorrent 3.0 Adds Ratings, Comments and Streaming

There is no doubt that BitTorrent’s user base is impressive, but there is still a lot of untapped potential. Both uTorrent and BitTorrent’s mainline client have a relatively large bounce rate. That is, a large number of new users try the software a few times, but don’t become regular users.

“During 2010 less than a third of new client downloads resulted in a new monthly active user,” BitTorrent’s Simon Morris told TorrentFreak. “Plenty of people download and install the client, but can’t figure out how to use it, and then uninstall it very quickly,” he added.

To change this, BitTorrent Inc. have been working on a new project with the aim of keeping those users on board. Today marks the release of the first Alpha version of this new client – codenamed project Chrysalis.

“The best products out there don’t have any significant educational hurdles – it is just obvious how they work. This is what we’re ultimately aiming for with this new project, although it will take time to get there. The client we’re releasing today is just a starting point,” Morris told us.

Today’s release is a very early Alpha, but it should give a good indication of where BitTorrent Inc. is going with their new client. By default it is filled with several prominently placed ‘apps’, such as those from TED and VODO, which provide access to downloads. This means that users will see content right away when they start the client

One of the main reasons why some users don’t come back to the client is a perceived lack of content. New users sometimes don’t know where to find content so the current version of Chrysalis should address this issue to some degree. In addition, the simplified user interface should be more welcoming to people who are new to BitTorrent.

Overall the Chrysalis client behaves quite intuitively. Downloads are added by a single click and show only basic information. Once a download is finished media files can be launched in a media player directly from the app. Starting, stopping and removing files can be done with a single click as well.

The client is built on the uTorrent v3.0 codebase but in the future new and unique features will be added as well.

“The first project Chrysalis beta is aiming at cleaning up the overall user experience and transforming a technical and data-rich experience into a cleaner more media-rich experience. This in itself will not be sufficient to solve the attrition problem, but we hope it will establish a new platform on which to build,” Morris said.

Another subtle change compared to the BitTorrent Mainline client is the more prominent placement of the search box. Users can type in search terms here and are, interestingly enough, redirected to a Google search for torrents. A surprising move, since Google just banned the words ‘uTorrent’ and ‘BitTorrent’ from some of its services.

Chrysalis is not intended for the more experienced BitTorrent user, but BitTorrent hopes it will appeal to a wider audience than their other clients do now. If all goes well, the dummy-proof client will completely replace the current Mainline client, which currently is a clone of uTorrent.

Time will tell whether this approach will be effective. Luckily, uTorrent users don’t have to panic as TorrentFreak is assured that their favorite client will always be available and developed separately. The Alpha release of Chrysalis is available for download starting today, currently limited to Windows operating systems.

Source: BitTorrent Inc. Releases Dummy Proof Download Client

A few days ago FastCompany reported that BitTorrent Inc. has started work on a new and quite intriguing project. The company has been gathering detailed statistics reported by uTorrent users in order to create an overview of the network speeds of nearly all Internet providers worldwide.

BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris explains it as follows:

“We have download traffic, upload traffic, BitTorrent traffic, and we have HTTP traffic. So we can answer questions like: I live in this city in the world–it could be anywhere, literally anywhere–which ISP should I use? Which is the fastest? Which ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic? Because we have this data, we can see the difference in speeds by time of day.”

For now, the results of this huge dataset are only visible to the BitTorrent team, but in the near future they might decide to open them up to the public. This would then allow people to look for the most BitTorrent-friendly ISPs in their area, and potentially avoid those providers that throttle traffic. A very rough graph is provided below.

Although this kind of data can actually benefit BitTorrent users, the revelation by the BitTorrent team also raised concerns among a sub-group of naturally paranoid file-sharers. Graphing data by ISP and region requires uTorrent to send the IP-addresses of users to the San Francisco headquarters. This, in addition to detailed info on transfer speeds and download times.

Since the announcement a few concerned users asked TorrentFreak what data BitTorrent Inc. actually stores. A good question. The privacy policy posted on uTorrent.com says the following on the data collected via uTorrent.

“We also aggregate some data from our software applications (including µTorrent) regarding total traffic flows and content delivery performance of our Applications as well as other data collected in the use of our products or services in order to understand usability and monitor network conditions and compare the performance of Bittorrent and HTTP protocols on the public internet, it reads.

It further states that end users may opt out of providing this information through a preference setting in uTorrent (“send back detailed info”).

What’s not apparent from reading the privacy policy is what kind of data is sent back to BitTorrent Inc. In an attempt to find out more and address the concerns of some users, we contacted BitTorrent’s Simon Morris, who assured us that they value the privacy of their users.

“We restrict our technical performance monitoring to data which tells us how well our BitTorrent clients are behaving – we have no interest in and do not collect any more private data about what people are doing with their BitTorrent clients,” he said.

We wouldn’t expect to hear anything else, of course, but it still says little about the kind of data that’s collected. Morris said that a fuller technical disclosure may be an option, but that this has to be discussed internally first. He was willing to share 4 broad categories where the collected data falls into.

* Software and system configuration (client version, country code, OS version, etc.).
* Bytes transfer details (how much, how fast, what time of day, etc.).
* Software feature usage stats (transfer cap, scheduler usage, labels usage, etc.).
* Other technical protocol details (TCP connections, closes, resets, UT connections, etc.).

The above also includes the IP-address of the sender, which is used to compare the data across cities, countries and ISPs. To the more paranoid BitTorrent users this might sound worrying, but it is not much different from the type of data most websites on the Internet collect. If BitTorrent decides to post anything in public – which is not certain yet – all data will be aggregated and no individual information will be revealed.

Although we believe that every BitTorrent client should ideally provide a transparent and full disclosure of the data being logged, we are rather excited about the possibilities BitTorrent Inc’s plan offers. At the moment most ISPs are rather secretive about their bandwidth management practices. A speed comparison tool for BitTorrent users can therefore be a great help in choosing an Internet provider.

TorrentFreak will keep an eye on the developments, and provide an update and hopefully a preview of the project when more information becomes available.

Source: Why uTorrent Collects Info From Its Users

BitTorrent Inc. has been slowly adding new apps over the past several months and they just rolled out a new one for uTorrent and the Mainline client. The new app features educational videos from the Khan Academy. With the app, BitTorrent users have easy access to over 2,000 award-winning educational videos, covering a wide variety of topics.

“BitTorrent is a great platform to help us fulfill our mission of providing world-class education to anyone, anywhere,” said Salman Khan, founder and executive director at the Khan Academy. “BitTorrent offers a unique opportunity to video creators and publishers.”

“Their technology allows users to download large video files quickly, plus it requires no costly hosting or infrastructure on our end – an important factor for a non-profit,” Khan added.

BitTorrent Inc. is equally enthusiastic about their new partnership, which allows them to show off a great ‘legal’ use case to its millions of users. The app is the 19th added to the App Studio, which also includes the Torrent Tweet VLC and uCast apps.

“We’re honored to support the Khan Academy’s vision of bringing knowledge and education to the world,” said Shahi Ghanem, chief strategist at BitTorrent. “The Khan Academy App is a perfect example of why we created our App Studio platform: to help content creators connect with our global user base.”

“In this instance we also enjoy the benefit of empowering a partner to provide tens of millions of people with free access to world-class educational content. This is a truly worthy cause. We look forward to continuing our work with the Khan Academy and other socially conscious content creators as we foster new content distribution models.”

For those who are interested in checking out the videos, the Khan Academy app is now available in the App Studio for both uTorrent and the Mainline client.

Source: BitTorrent Partners With Khan Academy to Distribute Education

In the years that followed the original BitTorrent mainline client was gradually transformed into a rebranded version of uTorrent, and today BitTorrent Inc. announced that both clients combined now have more than 100 million active users a month. Users literally come from all over the world, with 20 million active daily users from over 220 countries.

“This is an exciting day for our team. Our vision is to build a complete technology ecosystem comprised of software, content and devices, designed to connect modern content creators with a massive digital audience,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said. “This milestone highlights the size of our user base and the power of our software.”

BitTorrent Inc.’s acquisition of uTorrent is without doubt the best decision the company has ever made. Where other projects such as the “movie store” and CDN-services failed miserably, uTorrent’s popularity kept on growing.

The irony is that the company which founded one of the most innovative technologies on the web in the last ten years, has not managed to build a new business model around it. Perhaps the BitTorrent powered movie store and CDN were ahead of its time, but the fact is that the company now relies on a toolbar to pay the salaries of its employees.

While there is no shame in relying on toolbars to keep million of BitTorrent users satisfied with an entirely free experience, we can only assume that the company had a greater plan in mind when it was founded back in 2004. That said, toolbars do bring in some serious money.

In addition to the millions of daily active users, the BitTorrent Mainline and uTorrent client are downloaded by 400,000 people a day according to BitTorrent Inc. An unknown percentage of these new downloads also choose to install the toolbar, which is good for millions of dollars in revenue a year.

This stable stream of revenue ensures that BitTorrent Inc. can continue the development of uTorrent in the future, and that’s a welcome message to at least 100 million BitTorrent users. TorrentFreak congratulates BitTorrent for reaching this impressible milestone, and we’re eager to see how far this number can increase in the future.

Source: uTorrent & BitTorrent Hit 100 Million Monthly Users

With a few dozen million downloads a year, the added browser toolbar has provided BitTorrent Inc and the uTorrent development team with a healthy and much needed revenue stream. Initially, the Ask toolbar was promoted but recently a switch was made to the Conduit toolbar.

In addition to offering the toolbar to users who do a fresh install of the uTorrent client, the new Conduit toolbar was also promoted to users who upgraded to the latest uTorrent 2.2 release. However, this process didn’t go as smoothly as it should for everyone, and several TorrentFreak readers reported serious issues during the upgrade process.

Instead of getting a popup notification asking the user if they wanted to install the Conduit browser toolbar, it was instead installed on some users’ computers without any notification at all. Another group of users did get the popup, but when they chose not to install the toolbar, the software was installed on their computers nonetheless.

Over the last few days the uTorrent forums have been filling up with several of these confused users, and others wrote blog posts addressing this unexpected behavior and their frustration.

Despite several complaints the issues seem to be relatively isolated. We’ve tried to reproduce the “bug” on several systems but at our end everything went fine. Simon Morris, Vice President of product management at BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak that they have no idea what went wrong either, but that they are aware of isolated issues.

“It has not escaped our notice and it is obviously NOT our intent,” Morris said.

Initially BitTorrent Inc. and uTorrent’s forum moderators denied that there was a problem at all. Instead, they were convinced that users must have selected the wrong checkboxes, which can be perceived as deceptive by some. However, this position became harder to hold as time went by and complaints kept coming in.

“We have seen some isolated suggestions that the toolbar installed even though the checkboxes were unselected. If this is indeed true then we would consider it a very serious bug. If anyone can help us reproduce this type of bug then we will investigate it and fix it immediately. In spite of extensive tests we have been unable to reproduce this particular problem,” he added.

Morris further said that because of this massive rollout to all upgrading users, the level of attention is probably more amplified than usual. Many long time users see the toolbar offer for the first time and might be caught by surprise, or confused by the checkboxes. Although this is partially true, it would be wrong to simply deny that something went wrong during the upgrade process for some people.

The uTorrent team has promised to get to the bottom of the issue, and fix any errors that they come across.

“Both our team and Conduit’s team have been investigating further whether there is any problem with the install, but we have been unable to find any evidence that the toolbar will ever install if you deselect all 3 checkboxes. Conduit has found and is fixing one minor uninstall issue,” Morris said.

“We regret any dissatisfaction, and we welcome inputs on anything that may be going wrong. One thing is very clear – the offer is designed to be purely optional, such that if you deselect the offer checkboxes it will not install,” he added.

All uTorrent users who had the Conduit toolbar installed ‘accidentally’ can easily remove it via the Windows control panel where the software is listed as ‘Conduit’ and ‘uTorrent toolbar.’ Did you have any issues upgrading to the latest version of uTorrent or did it go smoothly? Please let us know and drop a comment.

Source: uTorrent Browser Toolbar Mystery Causes Confusion

“Un’organizzazione con una velata brama di potere,” we read on the uTorrent website.

For those who don’t speak Italian, Google translates this sentence to “An Organization With a Veiled Desire for Power.” Another translation provided by an Italian friend of TorrentFreak is “An Organization With a Slight Craving for Power.” Both translations have pretty much the same meaning, but they also have very little to do with a BitTorrent client.

So what organization is uTorrent actually referring to? Is uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. craving for power? We’re lost here.

The answer to the above question is not very hard to find of course. Those who look at the english uTorrent website will see the tagline “A Powerhouse With a Tiny Appetite,” referring to the client’s minimal use of resources and full set of features.

Somehow, this tagline has been translated into something that has little to do with the intended meaning. We’re not really sure where the mistake was made either, because most of the automatic translations come up with a different result. It’s clear though that the tagline got lost in translation, to say the least.

The error was mentioned last week to the staffers in the uTorrent IRC-channel, but thus far hasn’t been corrected. We just notified BitTorrent Inc. about the unfortunate message on their Italian page and assume that this ‘bug’ will soon be fixed.

Let’s hope they check with a native speaker next time, before putting it out to millions of people.

Source: uTorrent: An Organization With A Slight Craving For Power

The first new app added to the ‘market’ this morning is the VLC player app. VLC is a popular media player among BitTorrent users, and not just because it is free. It also includes a huge number of video codecs so it can play virtually every video file available.

With the VLC app, uTorrent users now have a shortcut to play media files in VLC directly, without having to open folders or even extract archives. Users only have to click on the app and it will display a list of recently downloaded torrents which they can play in VLC with just a single click.

Admittedly this app is not a technological breakthrough but it does save on time and annoyances, especially for those who have never used VLC before. According to BitTorrent Inc. “..it’s a perfect match to the varied file types in the BitTorrent ecosystem,” a description we subscribe to.

The second app that was launched today, named uCast, adds a new and interesting feature to uTorrent. With uCast, uTorrent users have the option to create an RSS feed of the (selected) torrents they are downloading, and share this with friends who are also avid BitTorrent users.

This enables users to easily share a selection of torrents without having to lookup the original torrent download links. The RSS feed, which BitTorrent calls a TorrentCast (example), can be easily imported into uTorrent or any other client that supports RSS downloads.

One of the best features is that new torrents can be added to the uCast feed later, by simply selecting a recently downloaded torrent from within the app. This makes sharing torrents with friends easier and a lot more convenient than it is now. It’s can be compared to a torrent blog, or a living mixtape as BitTorrent Inc. describes it.

“Your TorrentCast is like a living mix tape, because you can add files at any time and your friends will instantly get them. You can also open up your TorrentCast to collaboration, so your friends can also add files to it,” BitTorrent Inc. writes.

In addition to maintaining these TorrentCasts alone, users can also invite others to collaborate on the feeds. By entering a password others have access to the feed, and the option to add or remove torrents. This added social layer and broadcast functionality is by far the most innovative app we’ve seen from BitTorrent Inc. thus far,

It will be interesting to see how the two new apps are received by the public, but they are certainly more useful and promising than some of those previously announced. The TorrentCast app uses the uca.st domain ‘short url service’, and you’re of course free to share yours below.

The VLC and uCast apps are available now in the app market and both require the latest stable version of uTorrent.

Source: uTorrent Adds VLC Media Player and Torrent Broadcast Apps

BitTorrent Apps is a web-based extensions framework to add new functionality without compromising the lightness of the core BitTorrent client. Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, the Javascript-based Apps allow 3rd party developers to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client. They can be added to the client with a single click and are displayed using an embedded browser window.

Initially the Apps were only been available to a relatively small group of uTorrent users who downloaded the experimental ‘Griffin‘ client. In September this test audience was expanded to the users of BitTorrent Inc’s Mainline client, and today the “Apps Studio” is made available to all uTorrent users, 65 million in total. The release of uTorrent 2.2 includes the Apps Studio and comes with a handful of Apps that are approved by BitTorrent, but users can also install unofficial Apps such as the EZTV one we featured previously.

One of the official Apps that are included is that of VODO, a platform where independent filmmakers share their work for free. To celebrate the fact that Apps are now bundled with uTorrent, VODO is releasing two new films today – ‘Four Eyed Monsters’ and ‘Snowblind‘. For the producers of these films, BitTorrent provides an opportunity to have their works seen by millions of people without having to worry about distribution problems.

“The barriers to filmmaking have fallen, but the gates around distribution through traditional TV, theatrical and video-on-demand remain locked,” says Arin Crumley, creator and star of ‘>Four Eyed Monsters’. “With a user base of over 80 million [Mainline included], BitTorrent is exposing our film to an audience larger than many television networks and fostering a direct connection between audiences and filmmakers.”

“The creators who embrace this modern approach will encourage a new culture of audiences who support the production of movies they want to see and help distribute the ones in which they fall in love,” Crumley added.

Aside from the ‘Apps Studio’ and the release of the films through VODO, uTorrent 2.2 has several other features and enhancements in store. The skinning format which allows users to change the look of the client has been renewed, the client is now able to move files if you change the download location of a file, and there is now an add torrent dialog for magnet links.

On the privacy side there are also several much needed and demanded improvements. First of all, there was a huge security leak for the users of some proxy services. uTorrent users broadcasted their real IP-address instead of the secure one when they were connected to an UDP tracker (most proxy operators warned their users about this). This has now been fixed in the latest stable release. In addition, the latest release makes it easier for users of proxies to configure their client so they are indeed anonymous.

Source: uTorrent Apps Arrive, Plus Free Movies and Privacy Features

Thus far there are only a handful of Apps listed in the official store and not all of them are equally usable. To stimulate the development of uTorrent Apps, BitTorrent Inc. started a developers challenge in August, awarding a $1000 prize to the best App to be submitted. Today the winner was announced.

The winning App is called Zulu Music and was developed by Steven Viola. The HTML and Javascript-based App enables users to search for and discover new artists among the 39,229 free albums that are currently available on the music sharing site Jamendo. All albums can be downloaded directly in uTorrent in high quality MP3 and OGG formats.

Zulu Music is a prime example of how free and legal content can be embedded in uTorrent. However, the developer of the App also released another, very similar App that might be of greater use to the average BitTorrent user – Zulu TV.

Zulu TV offers uTorrent users an easy way to find the latest TV-shows, without having to visit a torrent site. The App pulls torrents from EZTV and uses artwork published by TheTVDB and combines them into a nifty TV-torrent guide. With a single click users can subscribe to shows or download individual episodes.

Unlike with Zulu Music, not all copyright holders have given permission to download the content that’s linked to on Zulu TV, and this is most likely the reason why the App has not been given a mention by BitTorrent Inc. People who are interested in trying the App can add it to uTorrent manually by going to the developer’s site.

A third App that came out today is released in collaboration with the organization that hosts the TED conferences. This App enables users to browse through and download high quality copies of all the latest 18-minute TED talks.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with BitTorrent to bring TEDTalks to millions of new viewers,” June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media said. “TED’s mission is to spread ideas, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to TED.”

A representative from EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he was thrilled about Zulu TV as well, but thus far he hasn’t heard anything from BitTorrent Inc. yet.

“EZTV’s mission is to spread TV-shows, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to EZTV,” we were told.

Source: uTorrent Gets an EZTV, TED and Jamendo App

Fast forward another two years and a Linux version was announced. Voted as one of the top suggestions for uTorrent in the client’s ‘Idea Bank‘, the massive demand from users for a Linux client was impossible to ignore. In June of this year BitTorrent Inc. officially stated that it was working on Linux programs, and today the first one was released.

BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris realizes that the company pretty much owed this release to the community that played such a vital role in popularizing the protocol.

“If any group has embraced the possibilities and power of BitTorrent for distribution, it is the Linux community. Virtually every distribution is available via torrent download and many even ship with a BitTorrent client in the default configuration,” he says today.

“This morning, we are announcing a preview release of the first of two new products for Linux users,” Morris added. “uTorrent Server, an alpha version available immediately for download, is intended for users seeking a fast, powerful and lightweight BitTorrent client without the need of the full features and complexity of the native GUI.”

Labeled as an Alpha release, uTorrent Linux Server precedes a client with a full featured UI which is expected to be released in the coming weeks. Today’s release is aimed at more Linux users, who are encouraged to leave feedback so the development team can prepare releases for specific Linux distros in the future. The server can be managed through an HTTP API or the uTorrent Web UI pictured below, which is included in the release.

“Today’s version is only the first step, and we will continue to support the Linux user community with new versions in the near future. If you prefer to stick to more conventional user experience, rest assured we are working hard to build a full-featured client, coming soon,” Morris announced. There is currently no update on whether the company will make the “summer” deadline they set earlier.

With uTorrent Server, BitTorrent Inc’s main brand is now supported on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms in common with its main competitor, Vuze. Whether it will reach the massive marketshare it has on Windows with the two latter platforms has still to be seen though. Considering the late entrance, uTorrent has a lot of ground to make up.

Source: uTorrent Linux Server Released, Client Coming Soon

After the news about the vulnerability became public earlier this week, several pieces of exploit code surfaced, attacks that allow outsiders to take control over the PCs of users who run the affected applications.

Included in the list of vulnerable programs are familiar names such as Firefox, Adobe Photoshop, VLC and also the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent. Upon hearing the news the uTorrent developer team didn’t sit still and yesterday an essential update was released that should fix the DLL vulnerability.

“There is a DLL vulnerability in all versions of Windows affecting a great deal of software applications. Subsequently, attack code targeting the uTorrent client surfaced on a third-party website, and while so far no attacks have been reported to us, we have released uTorrent 2.0.4 to fix this vulnerability,” uTorrent Community Manager ‘Firon‘ explained.

“The new client disables loading of DLLs from the current working directory and prevents this exploit from functioning,” Firon said, adding an ensuring message for uTorrent users. “We take our user’s security very seriously, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”

It is needless to say that all uTorrent users are encouraged to update their clients to the most recent version. With a userbase of more than 50 million monthly users uTorrent is a major target for exploits, so it’s good to see that BitTorrent Inc. takes these security threats seriously.

Source: uTorrent Quickly Patches Windows DLL Vulnerability

Aside from the usual changes and fixes, there was also a new feature listed in the changelog that piqued the interest of several uTorrent users who were looking for increased privacy.

In the last days multiple TorrentFreak readers informed us about this new feature that could, according to their understanding, make BitTorrent transfers completely anonymous. If true, this would be a breakthrough for BitTorrent and render our earlier article useless.

In the changelog the new feature is listed as “added privacy options to BitTorrent settings” and the screenshot below shows three options under the new privacy heading. The first one reads “do not share your IP with peers”, which does indeed suggest some form of anonymity.

Unfortunately the reality is not as exciting as the wording of the new option suggests. After conducting some tests it seems that for regular BitTorrent users this option does very little. When downloading a torrent file, other people in the swarm still get to see the IP-address of users who have this option enabled.

From our testing it seemed that the option was only effective for peer-to-peer communications that go beyond the downloading process, such as DHT and PEX. The new privacy features do not eliminate the need for an anonymizing proxy, on the contrary, they are specifically there for people using proxies.

This was confirmed by BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris, who told TorrentFreak. “This is actually related to not ‘over-communicating’ IP-addresses with other peers – for example when connecting to clients using a proxy, peers might have a habit of forwarding on their IPv6 address.

“This option is intended to simplify privacy settings in some edge cases. Actually I’d agree its not ideally worded right now – we’ll probably clarify the label shortly,” Morris added, noting that the new feature is only implemented in the 3.0 ‘alpha’ client, so it doesn’t affect the largest part of uTorrent’s users.

For those who do use the latest 3.0 version of uTorrent and those who plan to use it in the future, please be aware that “don’t share your IP with peers” doesn’t equal anonymity. For those who already use anonymizing software, the new options prevent their real IP-address from leaking, for all others the new options should be left untouched.

Source: uTorrent’s New Privacy Settings Cause Confusion

In May, BitTorrent Inc. introduced its Idea Bank section, which allows uTorrent users to submit and vote for features, tweaks and ideas they would like to see implemented in their favorite client.

Since its introduction hundreds of suggestions have been submitted to the Idea Bank and these have been voted on by thousands of users. Already nearly 60 proposals have been accepted and implemented by the team and many more are pending. Below is an explanation of the Top 8 most voted-for-and-accepted additions coming to a uTorrent client near you soon.

1. uTorrent for Linux

As reported in June, uTorrent for Linux is finally on the way. With more than 5300 votes, this is the most popular suggestion received thus far.

“We’re making good progress on the Linux client,” reports site admin Firon. “Sit tight and we’ll have a client out soon enough.”

2. More detailed priorities for multiple files in torrent downloads

For torrents that contain multiple files, such as one for a music album with 10 tracks, at the moment it’s possible to force uTorrent to prioritize the download of those tracks, albeit primitively. Currently there are just three settings – low, medium and high.

“We’ll either add up to 16 priorities or have a per-torrent option to auto-prioritize the files in order,” explains Firon. “Though not the pieces, so we’ll still do rarest first.”

3. Send an email when a download completes

With increasing bandwidth and users increasing their set up knowledge, BitTorrent downloads are completing faster than ever before. However, with increased speeds comes an increased appetite for higher quality and therefore larger downloads, xvid versus DVD-size videos for example. Inevitably this means that users will be away from their machines when certain downloads complete. With email notifications, completion will be reported immediately.

“The current plan to implement this is to simply have a generalized, global option to auto-run an app after the torrent completes,” says Firon. “We’ll add a few variables to the existing run after function and make it global, so you can script it to your heart’s content.”

4. Only share files while the computer is idle

While some users will be sharing files all the time, many will want to use their full bandwidth for other duties while they’re sat at their desk. Inevitably full-scale BitTorrent up and downloading will affect performance unless the client is carefully configured. This solution will mean that only when a user is finished his work will file-sharing kick in. Firon reports that the feature will likely include a configurable idle period.

5. Scan for viruses when a download completes

Although there is less chance of picking up a virus when using uTorrent combined with a reputable torrent indexing site than other protocols, no method of file-sharing is immune to these threats. An automatic virus check will ensure that nothing slips through the net.

“The current plan to implement this is to simply have a generalized, global option to auto-run an app after the torrent completes,” says Firon. “We’ll add a few variables to the existing run after function and make it global, so you can script it to your heart’s content.”

6. Password lock uTorrent

Anyone with a shared computer or one within reach of an inquisitive child will be familiar with the fear associated with potential download interference. With the use of a password, torrent transfers can continue unabated and in privacy, no matter who is at the machine.

“This will be integrated with the boss key functionality, so you can use the boss key to ‘lock’ µTorrent,” explains Firon. “When you press it again, it will ask you for a password.”

7. Move torrent files and data with one click

Anyone who has needed to move their downloaded .torrent files and the associated data to a new place on their computer will know what a drawn out manual procedure it can become when lots of files are involved.

“Yes, managing files kinda sucks in µTorrent right now,” admits Firon. “We’ll try to get this done for 2.2 as well to make it easier. Set download location will probably be renamed and will move the content for you, all in one step. Oh, and we’ll make ‘Relocate’ on the Files tab work the same way.”

8. UNRAR and move files support

Anyone downloading large files split into multiple .RARs will be familiar with the associated unpacking, deleting and moving procedures. This new feature will allow those who don’t want this manual distraction to streamline the process.

“The current plan to implement this is to simply have a generalized, global option to auto-run an app after the torrent completes,” says Firon. “We’ll add a few variables to the existing run after function and make it global, so you can script it to your heart’s content.”

9. uTorrent will become Open Source!!

BitTorrent Inc. are certainly listening to their users and the Idea Bank is a great idea in itself, but don’t expect every suggestion to be implemented. Especially this one….

Source: Eight Cool New uTorrent Features Coming Soon

Although some musicians opt for BitTorrent because they sincerely want to get their music out there, the majority make the choice because its their only option to get recognized. Roughly ten years ago label-less bands were stuck in their garages, but today they can reach out to a global audience by submitting their music to torrent sites and music portals.

Despite this new freedom, 99% of these artists only see their album being downloaded by a handful of people. Although quality is probably one of the reasons for this, lack of promotion is probably the number one reason. It’s often said that labels have lost their place in the digital age, but thus far there are few alternatives to the powerful marketing machine they provide.

In the past we’ve seen The Pirate Bay adopting the role of marketeer, as they have promoted several artists on their homepage, resulting in thousands of downloads. Other P2P initiatives such as Frostwire’s Frostclick service and Vodo’s BitTorrent distribution platform have been equally successful in marketing independent productions.

Inspired by the trends-setters, the people at BitTorrent Inc. have now decided to launch a marketing campaign of their own, promoting the mixtape debut of PAZ, titled Young Broke & Fameless. For uTorrent and its parent company BitTorrent Inc. this is the first step in a new direction, that of actively supporting artists who want to distribute their content using BitTorrent.

“We want to continue to build on the successes that we have already seen with Pioneer One and the Yes Men. In both cases, their creations were wildly downloaded and consumers showed their enthusiasm by opening their wallets and donating to these creators so that they can continue to make future content,” BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson Jenna Broughton told TorrentFreak.

In the cases of The Yes Men and Pioneer One, uTorrent participated in a campaign that was set up by Vodo, but now they have branched out to music, running their own campaign. For artists, getting promoted by uTorrent is as good as it gets. It guarantees massive exposure, as the client is downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people each month. BitTorrent Inc. on the other hand, is happy to help, and show how musicians can benefit from BitTorrent.

“There is a group of creators out there who are interested in using new distribution methods to reach a very large and engaged audience online. So, we are excited to continue working with creators who want to develop business models that work in today’s digital age and leverage the power of the BitTorrent platform,” Broughton said.

PAZ will be the first artist to pluck the fruits of uTorrent’s promotion service. His unique sound – a cocktail of rock, hip-hop and dance – has not gone unnoticed by music insiders, including LA super-promoter Tommy Alastra who labeled him the “Hottest new act right now, bar none.”

Is he really? You can find out for free by downloading a copy of uTorrent, via PAZ’s website, or just grab one of the many torrents out there.

Source: uTorrent Backs Artist, Bundles Album With New Downloads

BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris announced the App earlier today and hopes that it will centralize discussions about torrents that are currently scattered across hundreds of torrent sites.

“In this case we are relying on the fact that torrents are indexed not by file name but by infohash, a digital fingerprint of a file. While you might find the same torrent on dozens of different torrent sites, and get pieces of the associated file from thousands of different peers, ultimately, you can be sure that you’re going to get the torrent you want, not something that shares the same file name,” he says.

“The infohash is a key foundation of BitTorrent – referring to content by digital fingerprint rather than just a file name is a powerful way of referring to something,” says Morris. “Its like referring to a person by referencing their fingerprints rather than just their name. There are many people in the world called ‘Simon Morris’, but my fingerprints are unique.”

“We hope that torrent sites will adopt our convention of referring to torrents using a shortened hashtag prefixed with “#bt” and enhance comments systems that already exist on torrent sites so that discussions can be accessed and propagated there and everywhere that Twitter is available,” Morris adds.

TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of KickassTorrents, who told us that he will shortly implement the torrent referral system as proposed by BitTorrent Inc. If the idea catches on, it’s only a matter of time before other torrent sites will follow.

Although it’s certainly a good idea to have a central place where people can read what other people are saying about specific torrents, we’re not sure that Twitter is the ideal form of communication. In most cases, BitTorrent users would prefer a more anonymous platform. That aside, not every BitTorrent user has or wants a Twitter account.

Although Torrent Tweet is an interesting addition to uTorrent’s App directory, a central place where all comments from hundreds of torrent sites are aggregated might be an even better idea. Perhaps that’s something for BitTorrent Inc. to think about?

For those who want to give Torrent Tweet a spin, it is available in the App directory and can be installed in the latest Griffin release of uTorrent.

Source: uTorrent Wants Torrent Sites to Adopt Torrent Tweet

Both projects add several new features to uTorrent. The Griffin branch of uTorrent adds Apps for uTorrent support, allowing users to easily install extensions and add custom features. The Falcon project enables users to stream torrent video files and access their client remotely through a secure web-interface.

With uTorrent ‘Web’, users can access torrents running on their PC from anywhere in the world, on any computer they have access to. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.

Initially, uTorrent ‘Web’ was only available on standard PC browsers, but last month iPhone support was added. Now, after many requests from uTorrent users, the remote control feature is now compatible with the iPad and Android devices.

“Since launching µTorrent Web for iPhone, users have been clamoring for something similar on other devices,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris announced. “So, today we are very excited to announce support for the iPad and Android platform – including the Nexus One and Google Ion devices. Now you can control torrents via your web browser on a PC, iPhone, iPad and Android.”

The response from users of the remote control feature has been quite positive thus far, but there’s also a group of people who are reluctant to try the service because of privacy concerns. The ‘agreement’ between the MPAA and BitTorrent Inc. is still not forgotten by everyone, even though that only applied to BitTorrent Inc’s now defunct search engine. Morris, however, ensures that users’ privacy is in good hands with BitTorrent Inc.

“Just like with µTorrent Web for iPhone, we continue to take users’ privacy very seriously – all your private data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your browser right to the client on the other end. So, as before, users can rest assured that the private details of their µTorrent usage are never exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties,” he says.

In order to use the web interface, users will first have to download and install the latest Falcon release or uTorrent 3.0 alpha. In the client users can set a username and password that they can use to access their torrents remotely. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the mobile compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.

Source: uTorrent Web Now Available on iPad and Android

Although not always 100% accurate, IP-addresses can be linked to the physical location of users, or at least to the city they’re in. Quite a few BitTorrent users are probably already aware of this since most BitTorrent clients list the countries fellow downloaders come from.

One of the latest additions to uTorrent’s App directory takes location awareness a step further. Named uMap, the application displays all your peers on a Google Map, with the option to zoom into the street level. With uMap you can literally check where your peers live.

The App has several ways to display the data. File-sharers can be viewed by the BitTorrent client they use, the country they come from or the swarm they’re currently participating in. uMap was added to the App directory and can now be installed in the latest Griffin release of uTorrent.

We’ve tried the App, and although it’s not really that useful, it is interesting to see the huge differences between various torrents and the sites one downloads from. On most public torrents uTorrent and Vuze were the dominant clients, but on a private tracker quite a few seedboxes showed up, some packed together near a big datacenter.

For some novice users uMap might be an eye-opener, since it shows that BitTorrent transfers are far from anonymous. Those who want to hide their real location from other BitTorrent users might want to consider renting a seedbox or signing up for an account at specialized privacy services such as BTGuard (review) and TorrentPrivacy.

Source: uMap: Show Your uTorrent Peers in Google Maps

uTorrent App files have a .btapp suffix and consist entirely of HTML and Javascript. The Apps can be added to the client with a single click and are displayed using an embedded browser window.

Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, uTorrent Apps will allow 3rd party developers to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client.

Initially only a handful of Apps were included with the experimental ‘Griffin‘ client. This project merged with the latest uTorrent 3.0 alpha release last week and today BitTorrent Inc. made an SDK available that developers can use to code their own Apps.

“Apps for uTorrent is something that we are really passionate about. For us, it is a natural and important evolution of uTorrent,” says Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “It is a way for users to create a personalized experience by adding Apps that offer new features and services that are important to them – without compromising the lightness that they have come to love with uTorrent.”

“Another important component of Apps for uTorrent is the developer community. Apps that inspire new and innovative uses of uTorrent – built by developers – are an important part of our vision.”

To stimulate the development of uTorrent Apps, BitTorrent Inc. is also starting a developers challenge, awarding a $1000 prize to the best App to be submitted during the coming month. With the challenge they hope to encourage developers worldwide to create Apps that will highlight new use cases and redefine how uTorrent is being used.

The Apps bundled with the latest release of uTorrent 3.0 are far from groundbreaking, so it will be interesting to see what creative implementations other developers come up with.

Entries to the Apps developer challenge will be judged based on originality and innovation, quality of product, product or service appeal and technical expertise. The contest closes on Friday, August 13, 2010.

Source: uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

The Griffin branch of uTorrent adds Apps for uTorrent support, allowing users to easily install extensions and add custom features. The Falcon project enables users to stream torrent video files and access their client remotely through a secure web-interface.

After having tested the two projects in the wild for a few months, the uTorrent team has now decided to integrate both projects into the alpha release of uTorrent 3.0. With this latest release uTorrent literally takes a giant leap from version 2.1 to 3.0, marking the significance of the fuller featured client.

Aside from merging the two experimental projects, the latest alpha of uTorrent has patched a major security flaw through which VPN users could have their real IP-address exposed. By default, uTorrent has disabled IPv6 which causes this vulnerability, while adding an option in the advanced settings to enable it for those who don’t use a VPN.

Together with the new 3.0 alpha, uTorrent has released several new Apps including µBrowse. “As before, all Apps are completely optional, so you can choose to add only the ones you like in order to keep your client as lightweight as possible,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management commented.

The uTorrent Apps specification is expected to be opened up to the public soon, so third party developers can create their own Apps for the client. Among other things this will allow torrent site operators to embed their website’s search functionality in uTorrent.

Although the new features in uTorrent 3.0 are for Windows users only, progress has been steady on the Mac side as well. After several years of development, a stable version of the Mac client finally came out two weeks ago. The Linux version of uTorrent is still a work in progress and will be released later this summer.

Source: uTorrent Takes a Leap to Version 3.0

“In our ever-connected world, users want the ability to control their torrents on the go anytime, anywhere. So, in a continued effort to make our products more accessible we are introducing µTorrent Web for iPhone,” says Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management.

“While µTorrent Web is currently only available as part of our experimental Project Falcon software, we continue to fill out the feature set prior to a large-scale rollout,”
Morris added in a recent blog post. Although we haven’t been able to confirm it, we assume that uTorrent web is supported on the iPad as well.

The Falcon release of uTorrent is key component of the client’s future. It is very similar to the standard uTorrent application but has several added features including support for the web interface and video streaming. Together with Griffin and Pheon, the Falcon project is part of the recently announced uTorrent Labs which give users early access to beta projects.

In order to use the web interface at web.utorrent.com users will have to download and install the latest Falcon release. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the iPhone compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.

For those wondering why there are no BitTorrent-related apps in the App Store, it is because Apple notoriously bans all applications that have anything to do with BitTorrent. “Because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” is Apple’s official explanation.

Despite its desire to control every aspect of its business, Apple is not censoring the websites that people access on their phones just yet, so the uTorrent web-interface can be reached through the Safari browser. Fingers crossed.

Source: uTorrent Launches Remote Control for iPhone

Ever since uTorrent was released, Mac and Linux users have begged the developers to release a version of the client designed to work on their computers. In 2006, when uTorrent was sold to BitTorrent Inc., the company announced that a Mac version was coming. In 2008, nearly two years after the announcement, it was finally released to the public.

With the the release of the Mac version, Linux users were the only ones left out in the cold, but this is about to change. The uTorrent development team has just announced that they are working on a Linux version of the client. Further details on the time line and an eventual release date are not available at the moment.

The Linux version is the most backed idea on uTorrent’s recently introduced Idea Bank. The Idea Bank is prominently featured on uTorrent’s website and allows users to submit and vote for ideas they want to see implemented. In just a few weeks the idea of a Linux version has been supported by 3254 people. This huge demand from users is one of the main reasons why the Linux version is now in progress.

“Since launching our Idea Bank on uTorrent.com there has been significant demand for a native client for Linux,” BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson Jenna Broughton told TorrentFreak. “We obviously want to do our best to deliver whenever we see a good fit between our goals and capabilities and what our users say they want.”

“We are committed to bringing a lightweight uTorrent client that embraces the usability and features of our Windows and Mac clients to Linux users,” Broughton said. The exact feature-set of the Linux client will remain a secret for now, but in common with other versions of uTorrent it wont be Open Source.

The release date for the client is unknown at this point but unlike the Mac version it should come out relatively quickly. “While the exact specs as well as the timing are still being developed, we expect uTorrent for Linux to be available for download later this summer,” we were informed.

Whether or not the uTorrent Linux release will ever reach the massive market share it has on Windows remains to be seen. The Mac version has been well received but it is by no means the most used BitTorrent client on the platform. Whatever happens, it’s definitely good to see that uTorrent will soon be available on all three major platforms.

Source: uTorrent For Linux Is Coming, Finally

Together with Griffin and Pheon, the Falcon project is part of the recently announced uTorrent Labs. With Labs the development team is giving users early access to their latest projects, hoping to get useful feedback from the community.

The Falcon release is one of the main pillars for uTorrent’s future. Among other things, it allows users to access their downloads from anywhere through a secure web interface. Another new feature is that it allows users to stream videos so they can start watching before the download has fully finished,

The web interface of the Falcon project has been invite only since the start of the year, but today BitTorrent Inc. decided that the time was right to open it up to the public. Users can create an account and try it out, privacy and security guaranteed by BitTorrent Inc.

Aside from the features that are currently implemented, uTorrent has other big plans still in the pipeline for the new client and the web interface. Among other things, the Falcon release is expected to make it easier for users to find torrents.

The uTorrent team didn’t want to comment on how such torrent search capabilities will be integrated, but Simon Morris has stated that they are working on “better ability for torrent sites to promote content or search within the client.”

When we asked if this means that uTorrent will come with a built-in torrent search engine, Morris said that they are more interested in “APIs rather than bloating the uTorrent user experience.” We’ll see what this means in the months to come.

Source: uTorrent ‘Web’ Opens Up to the Public

On the development side the uTorrent team at BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t been sitting still either. Today they launch “uTorrent Apps”, an exciting new project that could be considered another milestone. With apps, users can easily install extensions and add custom features to uTorrent.

“Apps for µTorrent is a brand new web-based extensions framework that makes it easy for users to get more and do more with µTorrent without compromising the client’s renowned lightness and speed,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management says.

Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, uTorrent apps will allow 3rd party developers to develop applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client. At launch there are already four free apps available, developed in cooperation with uTorrent.

Among the apps that are currently available are a free virus scanner for BitTorrent downloads and the µGadget which allows users to monitor and control torrent downloads more easily from a browser. VODO, the BitTorrent powered distribution platform for filmmakers that is supported by all the major torrent sites, also has an app already.

For developers who want to code uTorrent apps there will soon be an SDK available. “Apps are a new type of file with a .btapp suffix that consists entirely of HTML and Javascript and can be added to the client and displayed using an embedded browser window, so very little extra code is needed,” Morris explains.

The apps can be added to uTorrent from within the client and take just a click to install. We expect that most torrent sites will soon release their own apps to complement uTorrent. That’s just the start though, the possibilities are endless.

The uTorrent Griffin release is part of the new uTorrent labs section where the development team is giving users early access to their latest projects. Besides Griffin, the remote access project Falcon and the live streaming project Pheon are also listed.

We have already covered Falcon in the past. Besides secure remote access, this client also enables users to stream torrent video files files. Pheon is BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s pet project and is expected to be released later this year.

Source: uTorrent Expands, Launches Apps and Labs

Over the years, uTorrent’s developers have received thousands of suggestions from users on how the client can be further improved. To streamline this process and to find out what the most wanted features and improvements are, the uTorrent team has launched an Idea Bank.

The Idea Bank is prominently featured on uTorrent’s website and allows users to submit and vote for ideas they want to see implemented. Users can vote for a maximum of 10 ideas, but are free to change their vote if a better suggestion comes along. Once an idea is completed, users will regain the vote they allocated to that suggestion.

With the Idea Bank uTorrent hopes to tap into the wisdom of the crowd (or swarm), which will hopefully lead to an even better product for the end user.

“We’ve actually wanted to do it for a while now and we’ve finally found resources to get it done,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak. “The point is to have a more structured way for users to contribute feature ideas and then vote on them – it is an attempt to engage the wisdom of crowds more directly.”

uTorrent has always had a forum section with feature requests, but that was less visible for the average user and the progress of the requests was difficult to track. With the new Idea Bank users can see at a glance what features are being worked on and what has already been implemented.

“Although the Forums are popular, they tend to select a much more advanced community of enthusiasts. We felt it was important to put something as critical as feature requests closer to the mass of mainstream users,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

Those who have a feature suggestion or want to vote on one can go to the Idea Bank and participate. At the time of writing the bank holds 55 ideas, one of these is being worked on and three ideas have been implemented already. A Linux version of uTorrent is the top idea at the moment, followed by an email notification for completed downloads.

Source: uTorrent Idea Bank Taps Into the Wisdom of the Swarm

In an attempt to determine which of the two get the best download speeds, University of California researcher Marios Iliofotou together with colleagues from Telefonica Research inspected the download speeds of more than 10 million BitTorrent downloaders last August. The results have been collated in a short paper (pdf) and it turns out that there are some big differences between the two BitTorrent clients.

As an initial sample the 600 most popular torrents on the Pirate Bay were used. The torrents were tracked for a month and a representative sample of one week was used for the final analysis. For each torrent an equal number or uTorrent and Vuze users were selected and these were also matched by ISP, so the type of torrent or ISP could not influence the results.

The research revealed a remarkable speed difference with uTorrent users getting 16% higher download speeds than Vuze users. On average uTorrent users reached a 176 Kbps download speed while Vuze users were stuck at 151 Kbps on the same torrents and with the same ISPs.

More detailed analysis revealed that uTorrent users get faster downloads on all of the 30 most used ISPs, except Verizon where there was virtually no difference. On 10% of these ISPs, uTorrent users were downloading 30% faster than Vuze users.

To find out what might be responsible for these speed differences the researchers reverse engineered both BitTorrent clients. They speculate that the distribution of upload capacity to peers is one of the underlying reasons. On average, uTorrent shares data with more peers than Vuze.

Differences in how the clients handles connections to ‘neighbors’, how they discover new peers and when they decide to close connections are also mentioned as factors that may have led to the observed speed differences.

The scope of the report is limited to Vuze and uTorrent but in future work the researchers hope to include other clients too. In addition they plan to confirm these results in a lab environment, to try and find out what constitutes the fastest BitTorrent client.

“This work does not aim to design the best BitTorrent client, but to bring to the attention of BitTorrent implementors and users that some design choices have a significant effect in practice. Even though in our study uTorrent appears to achieve faster speeds than Vuze, we do not claim that uTorrent is the way to go,” the researchers write.

“We hope that our preliminary findings will open the door for new research efforts to better understand the impact of design choices in the performance of real-world BitTorrent implementations. Ultimately, we see such research efforts leading to the design of better P2P systems,” the researchers conclude.

Source: uTorrent Download Speeds Beat Vuze By 16%

With uTP, uTorrent has become more network aware as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. The uTorrent teams hopes this improvement will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while its users should see less interference with other local applications.

The effectiveness of uTP is still being debated, but some people in the BitTorrent community have noticed another issue. According to some owners of private BitTorrent trackers, uTorrent is no longer playing fair. Since uTorrent users are the only ones using the new protocol, uTorrent favors its own kind over other clients.

This means that when connecting to other clients, uTorrent users will give preference to other uTorrent users, behavior that some have characterized as unfair. As a result, several private BitTorrent trackers have refused to put the newer uTorrent releases on their whitelists, effectively banning the client and forcing their users to stick with the older versions.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management admits that the tracker owners have a point, but says that it is very hard to innovate without having to face such technical downsides. “This is part of the challenge of innovation… but hopefully a challenge we’ll overcome,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

“We’re well aware of these discussions and have been very receptive to the feedback we have received. uTP is being constantly tuned and like any advanced technology on the internet there are edge cases where there’s room for improvement,” Morris adds.

BitTorrent Inc. has opened up the specifications of the uTP protocol and hosted a conference in their San Fransisco offices a few weeks ago to discuss uTP in detail with developers of some of the most popular Bittorrent clients. According to Morris, other popular client developers have shown interest in implementing uTP into their own applications.

Widespread support for the new protocol would of course be the easiest way to get rid of the unfairness allegations, but uTorrent’s major competitor Vuze has no plans to support uTP in the short term. On the other hand, Vuze doesn’t believe the unfairness will result in a noticeable disadvantage for its users.

“In terms of speed, we do not buy-in to the ‘threat’ cited by some, claiming that uTP can result in slower downloads for non-uTP clients due to uTP clients favoring each other during the torrent cold start phase,” Olivier Chalouhi, CTO told TorrentFreak.

Vuze is keeping a close eye on how uTP evolves and will consider adding it to their own client as the technology matures. For now Vuze will continue to work on their own congestion solutions and speed improvements. They have already added UDP transfer support, but not as the primary protocol.

“Vuze added support for UDP transport a few years ago, as a fallback for when TCP connection attempts fail. To date, Vuze chose not to implement UDP as a first-class protocol, as we consciously wanted to avoid claims of a Vuze-specific protocol bias, which we do not believe serves the BitTorrent community at large,” Chalouhi said.

Whether uTorrent’s choice to push uTP forward results in any significant disadvantages for users of other clients is still open for debate. BitTorrent Inc. is, however, committed to play fair and will make the necessary adjustments where needed.

Thus far, only a few private trackers have decided to ban uTorrent and there are currently no signs that it will spread out to more.

Source: uTorrent Accused of Unfairness, Banned by Trackers

Today, uTorrent version 2.0 was officially released. This new release is built to be more network friendly thanks to the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) which aims to mitigate network congestion caused by poorly configured BitTorrent clients.

uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network friendly than its predecessor. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications. This is one of the main reasons why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management is quite proud of the end result, and told TorrentFreak that most ISPs have also responded positively to the implementation of the uTP protocol.

“In general the ISPs who we have explained the technology to have been quite pleasantly surprised. There are occasional noisy skeptics who think its something evil, but they are generally poor confused souls who are more interested in selling a centralized vision of the internet rather than the distributed egalitarian system we have today,” Morris said.

“I’m excited about uTP finally arriving at a full scale deployment on the internet and I really hope that ISPs take the time to understand the potential benefits to them before they take decisions about how to manage this new class of traffic on their networks,” he added.

Aside from being gentle to the ISP’s networks, uTorrent 2.0 might also have a beneficial effect on the download speeds of individual users. Since there is less congestion, uTorrent users will experience no slowdowns in web-browsing.

Less congestion and a more efficient use of the network may eventually result in faster download speeds, which means that it will be a win-win situation for both ISPs and uTorrent users.

Source: uTorrent Reaches Milestone With 2.0 Release

Most of the upcoming features of the Falcon project are still being developed, but those who download the latest Alpha release have the option to take a peak at what to expect from the future. Below we sum up some of the key features.

Access Anywhere

Allowing users to access their BitTorrent downloads from anywhere through a simple web-interface is one of the main goals of the Falcon project. Without having to configure uTorrent and home networks so that they can be accessed remotely, users can simply head over to the Falcon page and connect to their client instantly.

The easy to use web interface is as secure as it gets, a major improvement over the Web UI currently available. When logged in, it gives users all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.

Those who want to try the remote access features require an invite for now. Invites are sent out regularly and those who leave their email address behind should receive one within a few days.

Download Anywhere

Aside from the added security and easy setup, accessing your torrents via the Falcon web-interface offers another advantage – remote downloading. Once a file has finished downloading you can transfer a copy of the file to a remote computer via the web-interface.

This feature is not enabled in the current version of the Falcon web-interface. However, it has been publicly announced in the uTorrent forums so we expect that it will return soon.

Streaming

Another new feature of the Falcon project is the added option to stream video files while downloading. Instead of having to wait until a file has finished downloading, users can already start watching video provided that the download speed is sufficient.

“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak, commenting on the new feature.

Easy Sharing

Also new in the Falcon release is the “Send Torrent” feature. This feature is particularly useful when you want to share torrents with people who do not have a BitTorrent client installed yet.

Right clicking a torrent in uTorrent shows a “Send Torrent” option which then brings up a URL similar to this one. This is a direct link to a download of the uTorrent client with the torrent file included.

Finding Torrents

The Falcon release is expected to make it easier for users to find torrents. The uTorrent team didn’t want to comment on how this will be integrated, but Simon Morris has stated that they are working on “better ability for torrent sites to promote content or search within the client.”

When we asked if this means that uTorrent will come with a built in torrent search engine, Morris said that they are more interested in “APIs rather than bloating the uTorrent user experience.” We’ll see what this means in the months to come.

Further Improvements

The features listed above are just a few of many that will be added to the new uTorrent clients. The latest Alpha release also had a ‘minify interface’ option, for example, and the development team is also working on speed improvements, UI improvements and optional file security features.

Exciting times ahead for uTorrent users.

Source: uTorrent Spreads Its Wings With Falcon

The misleading reports all based their conclusions on data supplied by a network-management firm, which showed that of all Internet traffic, the percentage consumed by P2P has slowly declined. However, those who take a closer look at the data will find that in absolute traffic, P2P continued to grow, with bandwidth used by streaming just growing a little bit faster.

BitTorrent is by no means dying, nor is there a decline. Quite the opposite. All the major BitTorrent sites saw a significant increase in visitor numbers over the past months. TorrentFreak asked Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management, if this growth is also reflected in the usage stats of uTorrent.

“Probably the emergence of things like Hulu and continued growth of Youtube make it seem like Bittorrent is not the only thing driving demand for consumer bandwidth. But we see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

Around this time last year uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and by November 2009 this figure had almost doubled to 52 million monthly users. And things have been going equally well for uTorrent’s little brother, BitTorrent Mainline.

“In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” Morris said. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million.”

These statistics show that despite the legal setbacks The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt have faced in court, the number of people who are using BitTorrent has continued to grow significantly. There is no indication that this growth will slow, let alone stop, in 2010.

The uTorrent development team also has some major improvements in the pipeline. Last week streaming support was added to the client, and in the coming year it will add file security features and the option for torrent site owners to promote their content within the client.

Source: uTorrent Users Double to 52 Million in a Year

Now, at the end of the decade where BitTorrent has become a synonym for file-sharing, hundreds of millions of people have high speed broadband connections at their homes. Downloading a popular movie or TV-series often takes less than an hour nowadays, but for the demanding web users of today this delay can still prove quite annoying.

Spoiled by the many streaming video sites that have surged in popularity since YouTube’s launch in 2005, many people simply want to start watching instantly. To satiate this demand the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has now added streaming support to the latest uTorrent beta release, which allows users to play video files while they are downloading.

“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management said in a comment.

Although several other BitTorrent clients have already implemented similar streaming capabilities, uTorrent will finally make BitTorrent streaming possible for the majority of BitTorrent users.

In our tests the new feature worked flawlessly on well-seeded torrents. Users simply have to click on the play button next to the download, and after a few seconds or minutes it will turn green, ready to be streamed.

By default the latest uTorrent release is configured to use the DivX web player to stream video. This works well for most files but for us it caused problems with some video formats. Changing it to VLC or any other media player is relatively easy though, by nominating a different streaming player in uTorrent’s preferences.

Aside from streaming regular downloads, uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. is also working on BitTorrent-powered live streams. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen himself aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date no-one has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told TorrentFreak earlier this year.

For now, uTorrent users will have to settle for on-demand streaming. Those who do not intend to use the feature can be assured that the streaming implementation used by uTorrent is designed on the principles of tit-for tat sharing, meaning that it does not slow down regular downloads.

Source: uTorrent Adds Video Streaming Support

What is new to many is that contrary to most other parts of the world, people from China also prefer to use a local BitTorrent client to manage their downloads. This new insight comes from data collected from three of the largest BitTorrent trackers adding up to a sample of 357 million unique peer IDs.

With the help of other tracker operators, EZTV’s NovaKing has gathered statistics from the OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and Denis Stalker trackers. Spanning over a week, the overall statistics show that it’s not uTorrent but actually the Chinese BitTorrent client Thunder (also known as Xunlei) that has the largest market share.

We have to admit that this data came as a complete surprise to us and that we initially doubted its validity, but TorrentFreak is assured that these statistics are indeed correct. Previously we have reported on the market share of the various BitTorrent clients, but Thunder never made it into the list of most used clients. In this list below, however, Thunder/Xunlei actually beats uTorrent.

The logical explanation for this surprising result is that the previous statistics were gathered from a sample of torrents that did not include many Chinese downloaders. Apparently the Chinese prefer to use a local client (and local content) that’s available in Chinese, instead of uTorrent or Vuze which have a dominant market share in the rest of the world.

When we go through the rest of the stats we see that uTorrent has a small lead over Vuze (formerly Azureus). However, the difference is much smaller than our previous market share reports have suggested. This is another indication that the sample used for our previous reports was not as representative as it should have been, despite the large sample size.

Transmission and BitComet have a market share of 3.3 and 4 percent respectively, which is in line with previous reports. In ninth place we find another Chinese client, Tuotu, which is listed as Unknown in the list above.

The new data sheds a new light on the market share of BitTorrent clients. More than anything it reveals that there are quite a few regional differences when it comes to BitTorrent habits. By itself this is nothing new, but that a BitTorrent client used by tens of millions of people can fly under the radar for so long outside China has certainly surprised us.

Source: Thunder Blasts uTorrent’s Market Share Away

In early 2007, when network neutrality was still a non-issue for most people, BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen told us that ISPs should find a way to cope with BitTorrent.

“ISPs have to invest in making their networks better and faster rather than stifling applications which consumers use and love,” he said, while encouraging users to switch to non throttling ISPs if possible, or complain to their ISP’s customer services.

A lot of things have changed in the years that followed. Comcast started to prevent its users from seeding content on BitTorrent, and many other ISPs took similar actions to throttle BitTorrent traffic. As a direct result, network neutrality was placed on the political agenda in many countries. It also inspired BitTorrent Inc. to look for solutions that would eliminate the need for throttling entirely, solving the problem at its root.

This is where uTP comes in. uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications, which is the main reason why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.

With uTP, uTorrent (and the Mainline client) will become network aware by throttling itself if congestion in the network is detected. This will have a huge impact on ISP networks according to Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “If uTP is successful it should result in a multi-billion dollar windfall in terms of savings for ISPs,” Morris told TorrentFreak

This means that the new uTorrent will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic in their networks. Of course, uTorrent users will also be affected by the new protocol. When needed, uTorrent will decrease the upload or download speed to avoid congestion.

According to Morris it’s mainly the upload speed that will be affected. “The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does,” he explained.

“uTP measures the time a packet takes to get sent from peer A to peer B, so in theory uTP will detect congestion anywhere on that path, although in practice the congestion most often happens somewhere on the first-mile uplink connection.”

So does this mean that the new uTorrent will result in slower download times? Not necessarily. Since there is less congestion, uTorrent users will experience no slowdowns in web-browsing, and ideally less congestion and a more efficient use of the network may result in faster download speeds. uTP is currently being tested in uTorrent v2.0 beta and thus far none of the testers have reported any significant problems.

“There are already a couple of hundred thousand people using our v2.0 beta client, and things seem to be progressing very nicely. Our v2.0 client will initiate outgoing uTP connections by default whenever it can. Previous versions of our clients will accept incoming uTP connections – they just won’t initiate them,” Morris said.

“We’re excited that this creates a better experience for millions of consumers, and it also potentially has a massive impact on ISPs – greatly reducing (even eliminating) any justification to manage or shape BitTorrent traffic and allowing ISP networks to handle more BitTorrent traffic, without resulting congestion forcing capital network upgrades ahead of schedule or the ‘need’ to invest in DPI or other traffic shaping gear.”

It is hard to tell if uTP really is BitTorrent’s savior (some highly doubt it), but if it lives up to the expectations it will be beneficial to both users and ISPs. The specs for uTP will eventually be open so other clients will have the opportunity to implement it too. However, since uTorrent and the Mainline client together are used by two thirds of all BitTorrent users, the effects should be immediately noticeable to both those users and ISPs.

Source: uTorrent 2.0 To Eliminate The Need For ISP Throttling

Today’s report is based on data from over 17,221 unique users in a few dozen public BitTorrent swarms, collected by the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology.

The results in the table below show the market share for each individual client. In common with our previous reports, only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 14 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up in the unknown ‘category’.

The changes in market share compared to our September report are also included, and these show some interesting trends. First of all, uTorrent extended its user base and now has a massive 60 percent market share. Vuze, BitComet and BitTorrent’s Mainline client all lost market share.

Transmission, on the other hand, keeps on growing. Its market share increased 23 percent and might take over BitComet’s fourth place soon. More on this in our December report.

Source: uTorrent Userbase Grows, Vuze takes a Dive

Today we present our second report based on data from over 165,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology.

The results in the table below show the market share for each individual client. In common with the June report, only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 20 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

The changes in market share compared to our June report are also included, and these show some interesting trends. First of all, uTorrent kept its dominant lead and even extended its market share to 56.81 percent. BitComet – ranked fourth again – is this month’s loser with a drop of 38 percent, falling from 6.50 to 4.71 percent market share.

On the winning side we see gains for Transmission and Vuze. Transmission’s market share increased to 44 percent and may move up a few spots if it maintains this growth rate. More on this in our October report.

Source: uTorrent Still on Top, BitComet’s Market Share Plummets

Needless to say, all significant changes to uTorrent affect millions of users and the entire BitTorrent infrastructure. With the release of its 2.0 Beta the client introduces breakthrough changes that offer a helping hand to its users, ISPs and most of all – tracker owners.

In comparison to HTTP trackers, UDP trackers use less resources and put less strain on their servers. Since almost all public trackers now have a UDP variant, it can save tracker owners a lot of hardware and thus money.

Using UDP is generally a good idea to bring down load on popular trackers,” said uTorrent developer Arvid Norberg when commenting on the implementation of the newly added feature. “We want uTorrent to be a good citizen and not hammer trackers.”

“Hopefully client support will be wide spread enough at some point, so that trackers that currently spend 99% of their capacity on misbehaving clients flooding it with HTTP requests can turn that off,” Norberg added.

Although Norberg’s comments suggest that uTorrent is one of the first to implement UDP tracker support, they are in fact quite late to the party. Vuze, BitComet, Deluge, KTorrent and rTorrent are just a few of the clients that have implemented this feature already.

However, with its massive market share uTorrent is the one that really makes a difference, and this new feature will be welcomed by all major BitTorrent tracker operators. The benefits of UDP trackers will not go unnoticed by users either since they do not interfere with HTTP traffic, meaning that associated web-browsing slowdowns will be a thing of the past.

Aside from smoother web-browsing, users will notice a few other changes in uTorrent 2.0. For starters the new speed guide is a welcome addition. By using Google’s measurement lab servers, uTorrent users can now test their connection speed and let the client automatically pick the best settings based on the results.

Unfortunately Google’s lab servers are all located in the US, which makes the results less accurate for uTorrent users in other parts of the world. The uTorrent team hopes that they can provide optimal results for these users at a later stage. “We anticipate that the server coverage will improve and cover other continents better in the future,” Norberg commented.

With the 2.0 Beta, uTorrent also enjoys several improvements to its uTP support, which makes the client more network aware hoping to decrease the load for ISPs as well. uTP support can be enabled or disabled at the user’s request.

The new Beta has something in store for everyone, and although users are free to play around with it, we should note that this is not a stable release and that bugs and unexpected crashes are possible. The latest release as well as a feedback thread can be found at the uTorrent forums.

Source: uTorrent’s 2.0 Beta Finally a Good Citizen

Today we present a more robust report based on data from over 150,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology. The research team will continue to supply TorrentFreak with bi-monthly updates so we can discover new trends and shifts in the usage of the different clients.

The results in the table below give the market share for each individual client. Only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 19 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

Both uTorrent and the third placed mainline client are developed by BitTorrent Inc, meaning that the company holds an impressive two thirds of the market. The only main contender at the moment is Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, with nearly 17 percent. BitComet, which used to be a major contender, is in fourth place with just 6.5 percent.

The data also gives us more insight into the size of the BitTorrent ‘network’. In December we reported that uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and based on this figure that might have grown even higher in the recent months. It is safe to say that there are roughly 50 million active BitTorrent users on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see how the market share of the clients changes over the coming months. Will uTorrent be able to keep its dominant lead? What will happen to Transmission’s market share when they release their Windows version? Will there be any new clients to compete with the top three? Lots of questions that we hope to answer in the future.

Stay tuned!

Source: uTorrent Dominates BitTorrent Client Market Share

We’ve restricted the results to a few of the most used clients plus ‘seedbox’ for the hardcore torrenters. If you’re not using one of these, please let us know what your preferred BitTorrent client is in the comments.

Source: What is the Best BitTorrent Client?

On the one hand this offers newcomers to BitTorrent a familiar interface to find all sorts of torrent files directly from the uTorrent homepage. The search engine uses Google’s search algorithms to find .torrent files on sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. BitTorrent Inc. profits from this through search based ads that Google adds to the search results.

This seems to be a win-win situation for everyone but for reasons unknown, Google no longer allows uTorrent to use the custom search program. When entering a keyword into the search box on the website the following error is returned (see picture). BitTorrent Inc. has now removed the search box but they have no clue why they have this problem with Google.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that there is indeed a problem but that they yet have to find out the details. At this stage we can only guess at the reasoning behind the lack of functionality. Most BitTorrent sites are not allowed to serve Google ads because they link to copyrighted content, but since uTorrent was only linking to these sites indirectly through Google’s own search engine, this seems less likely.

Yet there are more BitTorrent oriented sites that have faced similar problems. The Pirate Google, another website that uses Google’s custom search had similar problems recently.

uTorrent’s search has been down for around 5 days now, so one could expect a technical issue to be resolved by now, but until we hear back from Google the actual cause is open to speculation. The net effect is the same though – uTorrent’s revenue from this source isn’t rising as planned.

Update: We heard from “The Pirate Google” admin that Google did indeed block inbound queries from his site. He found a temporary workaround but this proves that Google is actively blocking (these) torrent related sites. Don’t be evil?

Source: Google Custom Search Cuts uTorrent Off