Torrent Droid: Scan Barcodes, Get Torrents
You are standing in a store looking for a new DVD to buy. Rather than buying it, you photograph the barcode with your phone and press a couple of buttons. By the time you make it home, the movie is waiting for you in your torrent client. You can with Torrent Droid.
Around a month ago, Android-orientated website Androidandme launched ‘Android Bounty’, a new initiative which has led to the creation of nice little torrent app. To find out more, we spoke to Taylor Wimberly from the site.
“Android Bounty is a new kind of developers challenge we started for creating applications on Google Android,” he told TorrentFreak. “Users submit ideas which can be voted up by others who pledge money to the bounty. The first developer who delivers a working application is rewarded with the bounty.” Taylor explained the idea is similar to how users promote stories on Digg, except people vote with cash.
To start things rolling, a few days later Androidandme set a challenge to its readers – create an Android-compatible BitTorrent application to scan UPC barcodes and find related torrents on the larger BitTorrent search engines. Users would be able to find and start torrents remotely, and the music album or movie would be fully downloaded by the time they got home.
There were some terms and conditions to the challenge. The software would use the G1 cellphone’s inbuilt camera to scan a retail DVD UPC barcode, and use the capture to identify the official details of the product from a database.
Once the product is positively identified, the software should be able to send the results directly to a BitTorrent search engine, such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova. After the search results appear, the user could then choose which torrent to start.
Once selected, the .torrent file would be downloaded and sent to the webUI of uTorrent and the download would begin, hopefully ready for when the user reaches his or her home machine. No typing input would be required for the above.
Just a few weeks later, Alec Holmes of Zerofate had stepped up to the challenge, created the app and collected the modest bounty of $90.00.
“This version of Torrent Droid is a work in progress but the video shows the core features work,” said Alec.
The full version of Torrent Droid will be released within a month but in the meantime, here is a video of it in action.
