Bittorrent clients

How to stream my Torrents

One of the big downsides of BitTorrent is that you have to be patient. Streams from Hulu start after a few seconds of buffering. Download a file from a torrent site, on the other hand, and you’ll often have to wait hours before you can start watching. “It’s a painful experience for users,” admitted BitTorrent Inc. VP Simon Morris in a recent interview with NewTeeVee, adding that BitTorrent has been pretty much “point-click-wait”  instead of the “point-click-watch” experience people now expect from web video.

BitTorrent Inc. is now trying to tackle this issue with a new streaming feature in its flagship uTorrent client. Of course, this isn’t the first attempt to make BitTorrent a little more of an instantaneous experience. In fact, there are a number of ways you can stream your torrents. We tested a number of them and compiled a quick list of five ways to get your streams on.

First a word for the wary: BitTorrent streaming isn’t quite like YouTube yet. A number of client makers have tried different approaches, and some of them actually work fairly well if all the stars align correctly. Still, there’s a good chance you’ll run into some hiccups. For example, streaming really depends on availability, so you can pretty much forget about it if there aren’t enough peers available to download from. It’s a good thing you can always watch the complete file once its on your hard drive.

Here are our top five contenders:

uTorrent, BitTorrent Inc.’s flagship client,  introduced streaming functionality with last week’s release of version 2.1 alpha. Users just have to click on a stream button to start play-back of a file while it’s still downloading. At least that’s the theory. uTorrent uses the DivX web player as its default streaming application, so streaming only works with files supported by that player. The client offers its users an option to change to VLC or other players, but I still couldn’t get an .m4v file to play.

Littleshoot is a BitTorrent plug-in for your browser that works on Firefox, Safari and IE under OS X and Windows. You can use it to search Isohunt.com or browse any other torrent site and then automatically download any torrents right within your browser. Common video formats can be streamed once enough data is buffered. Littleshoot hands the video to whichever plug-in your browser uses to play back the video format in question, which is why Mac users should install something like Perian to get QuickTime to play back DivX and XviD. Streaming with Littleshoot is admittedly a little bit of a gamble. In one instance, it only played a few seconds of a file even after I had downloaded more than 60 percent, and torrents with multiple files can’t be streamed at all.

Bitlet is a Java applet that makes it possible to stream videos via BitTorrent in your browser. The latest version uses HTML 5, so the video playback works with most modern browsers. However, you won’t be able to use this for just any torrent file. Bitlet uses Ogg Theora as its video format of choice, so many videos from The Pirate Bay likely won’t work. Still, Bitlet remains a viable alternative for video publishers interested in streaming without breaking the bank.

Tribler is a BitTorrent client developed by some of the same researchers that are also involved with the EU-funded P2P Next project. Tribler has always been a sort of experimental playground, and the latest version is no exception. It lacks any option to load torrent files, but instead relies on an internal search that seems to work well for popular content. Tribler also includes an integrated video player and the option to start viewing files while the download continues. Unfortunately, Tribler is almost painfully slow when compared to other BitTorrent clients, which makes streaming a little bit of a “point-click-come-back-tomorrow” experience. Tribler’s developers have been doing a lot of work on P2P streaming, so it’s nevertheless worth keeping an eye on this one.

Put.io is proof that BitTorrent streaming can work flawlessly — as long as you throw a server in the mix. It’s essentially a cloud-based file sharing service that allows users to add their torrent links to its website, download media files to Put.io’s servers and then stream them directly in any browser. It’s also possible to add Rapidshare links and stream those files as well, and the site can even handle RSS feeds from torrent sites to automatically add new episodes of regularly updated shows to your media library. Put.io users can also share files amongst themselves and stream any video any of their contacts are sharing. The site is currently in private beta, but following its Twitter feed might be a good strategy to get an invite.

One additional way to stream torrents or any other media is by using  an old x-box.  The old black and green boxes (pre-xbox360).  You have to chip them….meaning hack them.  This can be done by opening up the box and getting to the chip.  Their are websites that will give you step by step instructions.  Email for more info.  You can then upload a new OS onto your hacked box.  It is a small linux kernal.  I place this on my network and with a couple small tweeks(slayer) I can then copy all of my movies onto my hard drive.   I share this folder out and turn on my xbox.  I can then stream the movies to my tv.  It saves space and is amazingly fast.  It does not work with hd and probably never will.  

Good luck

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Torrent Magnifier: A desktop BitTorrent search tool

Torrent Magnifier is a BitTorrent search engine that searches multiple BitTorrent trackers including btunkie, Mininova, and Fenopy. Of course, there’s nothing new about a web page that lets you search for torrents from different trackers. You can also do that at Torrentz, SumoTorrent, Torrentfly, and any number of other sites.

But here’s what makes Torrent Magnifier different: There’s a desktop client. Just enter a query and hit the search button, and Torrent Magnifier will search for torrents. No web browser necessary. Well, at least not until it’s time to actually download a torrent. At that point, you hit the Go button and the torrent download page will open in your default web browser.

Is there any real advantage to using the Torrent Magnifier desktop client over a web-based version? I can’t think of one. But it’s certainly something that sets Torrent Magnifier apart from the crowd. There’s also a Windows Gadget version of the search tool as well as an Internet Explorer 8 accelerator.

download here  http://torrentmagnifier.vangos.eu/Downloads/

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What Happened to the Old Torrentspy Community?

We have all heard of Digg, Reddit, and Twitter. Recently, however, Freakbits has discovered a different type of social news website. And this one is ran by pirates for pirates.

Thisaintnews.com, a social bookmark site with a pirate theme, has been up and running for over a year now. In that year, the Digg-like site with the pirate ship theme (temporarily replaced by a Christmas look) has grown slowly but surely, with a strong community and fresh news posted daily.

The difference between this site and others is the owners willingness to post links to torrents. This is no sirprise, because the community is what is left over of the old Torrentspy commenters, a rough bunch who pull very few punches when telling you that your content sucks. The connection to piracy is strong and well-pronounced on every part of the site.

When FreakBits asked the owner, a British fellow who goes only by the name ‘Mrbig4545″, for a quote on the rampant piracy going on, he said this: “Just make something up about freedom. Then post a pic of Mel Gibson from South Park rubbing sh*t on the walls.”

As far as spam goes, the site is surprisingly free of such things. Articles posted there are not exclusive to piracy, but more of a mixture of strange news and funny pictures. More than one user, however, regularly post links to uploaded torrents on a daily basis.

For those of us who used to frequent the old Torrentspy news section, TAN is like that reborn. Same guys shooting the breeze, different look. It seems the old community from Torrentspy never died, just loaded on a ship and headed to a different location.

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HttpTorrents: Download Torrents Without BitTorrent

KickassTorrents is without doubt one of the most innovative torrent sites around. It is the only torrent search engine we know of that corrects spelling mistakes and also allows users to fully customize the look of the site’s homepage.

Those who take a few minutes to browse through the site will discover all kinds of other neat features. One of the latest additions to the site is the option to download files directly, through partner site httpTorrents.

The integration with httpTorrents gives users the option to download the files directly without having to use a BitTorrent client. Music tracks can also be streamed directly from the site itself. The service works in a similar way to most other files hosting services such as Rapidshare, but only works with torrents and doesn’t allow users to upload files themselves.

The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that direct http downloads may be useful to users who have restricted access to BitTorrent, such as those whose ISP or firewall blocks or slows down transfers. There are currently 4000 files available as a direct download, but this number is growing rapidly.

KickassTorrents’ users can submit a request for files that are not yet available as direct downloads. “If someone clicks on the http download button at KickassTorrents and the file is not available yet, it places it in the request queue at httpTorrents. Only popular torrents are downloaded during the beta stage,” TorrentFreak was told by the site’s owner.

“KickassTorrents and httpTorrents are not directly connected. However we use their API to get hashes of the torrents available for the direct download,” the owner said, adding that if the beta tests are successful this API will also be available to other torrent sites.

Everyone can use httpTorrents, but in the future the download speed and number of simultaneous downloads will be limited for free users. Those who want to use it more than occasionally will have the option to sign up for a premium account without restrictions.

Since the service is actually hosting files (on an external CDN) it might run into complaints from copyright holders. The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that he’s not too worried about the legal implications, and hopes that a takedown policy will prevent the site from running into trouble.

It will be interesting to see how the service develops in the future, and we will definitely be keeping a close eye on it. Although direct downloads may be preferred in some cases, for those looking for (free) high speed downloads, BitTorrent probably remains the best solution.

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Mininova Gutted — and Another Chance to Monetize BitTorrent Blown

Another Bit Torrent favorite is dropping torrents due to copy right infringement.

Support your local Bit Torrent. Because P2P appears to be fading fast.

The popular torrent-indexing site Mininova.org late yesterday took the drastic step of removing all but a few torrents in response to a copyright infringement lawsuit. Dutch rights group BREIN went to court against Mininova in June, and later that summer, the site was ordered to remove any links to infringing content and prevent any further uploads of such content. Mininova is still considering appealing the ruling, according to a blog post published yesterday, but it decided to take down millions of links in the meantime.

The end of Mininova as we know it comes just a few days after The Pirate Bay announced the closure of its tracker. It also marks yet another wasted opportunity to monetize BitTorrrent.

Mininova was by any measure one of the most popular — if not the most popular — torrent sites on the web, clocking 633 million page views in August and serving more than 10 billion torrents since being launched in early 2005. Mininova functioned as a search engine, meaning that it didn’t actually run its own tracker, but instead indexed torrent files tracked by The Pirate Bay and other tracker servers. In fact, The Pirate Bay and Mininova were in many ways a sort of duopoly ruling the BitTorrent world. The Pirate Bay’s tracker servers made it possible to swap files, and Mininova’s search engine made them discoverable.

Yet the two couldn’t have been more different. The folks behind the Pirate Bay cast themselves as rebellious outlaws and made fun of copyright owners’ requests to take down content. Mininova, on the other hand, responded to all takedown request and a few months ago even started to experiment with a proactive filtering solution to police its uploads. And while The Pirate Bay belongs to an obscure offshore company, with the people associated with it long claiming that they don’t own a piece of it, Mininova is incorporated in the Netherlands, complete with an office address and a CEO.

Mininova has also been increasingly cooperating with rights holders to distribute licensed content via BitTorrent. At last check, its Content Distribution service offered access to some 9,000 torrents ranging from obscure e-books to impressive TV documentaries. And the only torrents Mininova left up are part of the Content Distribution service. That should give its content partners a temporary boost as users start to download licensed content for the lack of any better alternative, but it remains to be seen if those few thousand torrents are enough to keep Mininova going as a business.

I’ve said it before: The chances of turning torrent sites into businesses that are not only legal but actually make rights holders money are incredibly low. BitTorrent users don’t like paid content or intrusive advertising, and they’ll always have a plethora of alternatives at their disposal that won’t bother about rights and royalties. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. YouTube has demonstrated that it’s possible to monetize content that’s been uploaded, and sometimes even mashed up, by end users, and it took rights holders a while to get used to the fact that giving up control helps them to make more money (in fact, Viacom still hasn’t seen the light.)

I’d argue that the same could be done with a torrent site. Don’t expect a perfect system, but one that’s good enough, and still much better than the status quo. Unfortunately it looks like it’s too late for Mininova to even try.

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BitTorrent’s Future? DHT, PEX and Magnet Links Explained

This week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker for good, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who although wishing to adapt, were confronted with hard to grasp terminology and technology. Time for some explaining

The Pirate Bay’s recent confirmation that they had closed down their tracker since DHT and Peer Exchange have matured enough to take over, was coupled with the news that they had added Magnet links to the site. This news has achieved its aim of stimulating discussion, but has also revealed that there is much confusion over how these technologies work.

The key thing to understand is that nobody is being forced to use Magnet links or trackerless torrents. While these long-standing technologies may prove to be the future, they will co-exist with tracker-enabled torrenting for quite some time. For now, nobody will be forced to immediately change their existing downloading habits, although it may be wise to switch to a BitTorrent client that is compatible with these technologies.

In an attempt to clear some of the mystique surrounding DHT, PEX and Magnet links we will walk through all three briefly, hoping to assure those who’ve become confused earlier this week.

DHT

Using DHT instead of trackers is one of the things The Pirate Bay is now trying to encourage, and torrent downloads that rely solely on this technology are often referred to as “trackerless torrents.” DHT is used to find the IP addresses of peers, mostly in addition to a tracker. It is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing.

DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker such as that previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

DHT is by no means a new technology. A version debuted in the BitTorrent client Azureus in May 2005 and an alternative but incompatible version was added to Mainline BitTorrent a month later. There is, however, a plugin available for Azureus Vuze which allows it access to the Mainline DHT network used by uTorrent and other clients.

Peer Exchange (”PEX”)

Peer Exchange is yet another means of finding IP addresses. Rather than acting like a tracker, it leverages the knowledge of peers you are connected to, by asking them in turn for the addresses of peers they are connected to. Although it requires a “kick start”, PEX will often uncover more genuine peers than DHT or a tracker.

Magnet links

Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.

Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.

It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Pirate Bay links cf. Mininova links: When the Magnet link specification first came out, in January last year it called for a particular format (”base32 encoded”). The links that EZTV, Mininova and ShareReactor have displayed for some time all conform to that original specification. In May of last year the specification was changed, in favor of “hex encoding”, and that is the format of the links being displayed by The Pirate Bay. Torrent clients should accept either format.

Compatible Clients

All the main torrent clients: uTorrent 1.8.5, Vuze 4.3.0.2, BitTorrent 6.3, BitComet 1.16, and Transmission 1.76 (and others) support Peer Exchange and DHT (via a plugin in the case of Vuze). Neither BitComet nor Transmission yet support Magnet links but Transmission is planning to include Magnet link support in the upcoming 1.8 release. Bearing in mind that no site, including The Pirate Bay, has yet abandoned support for traditional torrent files, there is plenty of time for support to be added.

We hope that this article has cleared some of the smoke that was generated by The Pirate Bay’s announcements earlier this week. There is no need to panic, cry or be angry, and it’s not a problem if you’re still confused after reading this article. Torrents will still be available and aside from some extra downloading options thanks to sites that add Magnet links, nothing drastic will change in the near future.

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Vuze BitTorrent Client Boosts KickassTorrents’ Visitors

Already making a name for itself by offering new and innovative features, KickassTorrents is a relatively new BitTorrent site that launched just a few months ago. Recently the site quadrupled its traffic, largely thanks to its inclusion in the integrated search engine of the BitTorrent client, Vuze.

The rookie BitTorrent indexer KickassTorrents has been growing steadily since early 2009, but in the last few weeks the site has seen a surge in daily visitor numbers thanks to the BitTorrent client, Vuze.

Unlike most other BitTorrent applications, Vuze has a search feature that returns results from torrent sites within the application itself so users don’t have to use their web browser. With the latest update of Vuze, KickassTorrents was added to the search.

Luckily, the owner of the site was contacted by Vuze beforehand to warn him about the traffic spike that was ahead, and to request some changes to the search template so it could be easily integrated into the client. This warning was indeed necessary, as the site received an additional 100,000 unique visits a day through Vuze.

These are impressive numbers indeed, but not that surprising if you consider that Vuze has more than a million active users that use the client at any given hour of the day. According to Vuze’s Director of Marketing Chris Thun, two thirds of these users utilize the built-in search functionality.

“Our search is a pretty popular feature with over 65% of monthly Vuze users leveraging the convenience and speed of Vuze search. My guess would be that we’re driving a fair amount of traffic to these sites,” Chris told TorrentFreak. Vuze users can download the torrents directly in the client, or visit the website the torrents are listed on.

Vuze’s integrated search currently uses Mininova and KickassTorrents. The latter replaced BTjunkie in the most recent update of the client. “We liked KickassTorrents’ clean design and layout, and liked the quality of the results coming from their API integration,” said Chris when explaining Vuze’s decision.

“BTJunkie is still an option for users, as it can be added to their default list of search sites simply by clicking ‘add/edit’ in the filters on the right side of the Vuze search results page. In fact, a wide variety of sites can be added to personalize the Vuze results,” he added, referring to the dozens of Vuze search templates that are available online.

There is no doubt that Vuze’s listing of KickassTorrents as the default search engine is a huge deal for the site. BTjunkie on the other hand wasn’t even aware of the fact that they were delisted. With millions of visits every day, a few thousand visits can go easily unnoticed.

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