Now that torrent technology has become one of the most popular ways to distribute large files, it's important to find the right Bittorrent client. If you're on a Mac, that's Transmission. I used to be a fan of Azureus (now called Vuze), but I switched to Transmission because it's less cluttered and takes up a lot less screen real-estate.

Transmission's not bare-bones in terms of features -- you can fine-tune your upload and download speeds, change ports, and check your ratio -- but its design is minimal and not too distracting. I don't want a busy-looking torrent app, I want one that I can set up quickly and leave alone until my downloads finish. Transmission provides that, while still letting advanced users get under the hood where they need to. It's also free and open source! That's why it's one of my favorite Mac apps.

There are several options out now for users that want to search several engines at once for torrrent downloads. My current favorite is still uSniff, but I'm always on the lookout for something newer and better.

Thanks to a persistent commenter, I found out about TorrentFly this morning and decided to check it out.

TorrentFly will search up to twelve sites at once (Sumotorrent, Mininova, PirateBay, Monova, NewTorrents, SeedPeer, Fenopy, TorrentZ, MyBitTorrent, BtJunkie, TorrentHound, Idealtorrent) and you can select which engines you'd like to search.

You're also able to set your preferred column to sort and number of results per page. Clicking any column heading will re-sort your results by health, name, size, seeds, peers, or engine.

So, it's torrent booty ye be after? Well, matey, I'll be happy to share a list of me favorite places to find forbidden treasures.

Millions of torrents, thousands of places to look for them...What's a wayfarin' buccaneer to do? Why, search a whole pile of places at the same time, of course. After all, you're more likely to find gold with seven maps to the same pot than you are with just one.

Enough of the played-out pirate jargon already, on to the sites!

Simultaneous Searching

NowTorrents. Searches up to twelve sites at once. I like the file type tabs and health indicator, and they offer a Firefox and IE compatible search plugin.

uSniff. I wrote about uSniff before, and I use it quite often. I don't really search a lot of different sites, usually just Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and they're both supported (along with six others). The interface is clean and responds quickly - the search box throws some people off, though. I don't understand why, it's giant, orange, and says "search" on it. They also have a search plugin for IE and Firefox.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is protecting your rights online again, this time with a tool called Switzerland. Switzerland lets you check your ISPs compliance with net neutrality, making sure they're not trying to shut down specific kinds of traffic, like BitTorrent and VOIP. Naturally, Switzerland is Open Source.

It's also a command-line tool, and still in alpha, so it's not necessarily for everyone. If you're comfortable with this kind of app, and you're concerned about your ISP's behavior, definitely give it a go. How exactly does it know whether your ISP is fiddling around with your bandwidth? The EFF says, "It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets." It recognizes packets injected or modified by some of the most popular tools ISPs have been using to mess with p2p traffic, including SandVine and AudibleMagic.

Bittorrent has become pretty popular as an efficient, decentralized way of distributing large files, and now the same technology is being applied to streaming. P2P-Next is working on an experimental .tstream format that will share streaming video using a minimum of bandwidth. It works like a regular torrent -- users who have part of a file 'seed' it for download by other users -- but with a twist. Each user grabs the blocks of data that make up a video just before they need them to play the next minute of content, upload it to the next user right away, and then "undownload" it.

The undownload functionality turned out to be the key breakthrough for this project, since part of the appeal of streaming is that you don't have to keep a massive file on your hard drive all at once. The Tstream format has a little help gaining widespread adoption: one of the organizations currently testing it is the BBC. If you want to try it for yourself, check out this trial run of SwarmPlayer. Windows and Linux versions are out right now, and the Mac version is due next week.

[via Torrentfreak]

With torrents hiding in all corners of the 'net finding what you want can be difficult. Sure you could go to all the sites that host torrent files one by one or you could use Speckly and search all of them in one shot.

Speckly takes what you're looking for and searches most of the popular torrent sites for you. Speckly further breaks down your search results into categories to help narrow down your results.

In our test we searched for the very popular Linux distro Ubuntu which returned 312 matches. From this Speckly also listed that 198 matches were for the software, 39 for books and 2 for movies. Un-categorized results were listed as others.

Speckly results also lets you know how many" complete sources" (seeders) have the file as well as how long the file has bee online. This all helps in determining the success of retrieving what you are looking for.

All in all Speckly is a great option if you know what you want but don't want to spend the time hoping from one site to the next looking for it.

Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you're concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to shut down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share.

YouTorrent is a meta-search that can find verified torrents across a number of popular torrent sites, including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova's featured torrents section. With all those sites combined, you can use YouTorrent to search over 6TB of data. This is a very good thing for the torrent community in general, as it shows how widely BitTorrent is used for non-piracy purposes.

[via TorrentFreak]

More and more TV shows are finding their way online in the form of torrent files. The question is how do you find them? And once you do, how do you keep downloading them? That's where torrent episode downloader, TED for short, comes in.

TED isn't another bit-torrent application. Actually you can't even download a single show with TED. Think of TED as the go to guy between you and your torrent software. You tell TED what shows you want to download and TED will scour the Internet for it and will pass on this information to your torrent application to do the rest of the work.

In addition to single downloads, you can also configure TED to download complete seasons so that once you have determined what show you want downloaded, TED will keep a look out for new episodes.

For the bandwidth conscious crowd TED will also give a brief synopsis of the show so you can determine if its worth the download or not.

Granted there are torrent applications available that have features similar to TED built in, but if you favorite torrent application lacks this then you might want to consider using TED as well.

*Disclaimer: you shouldn't download copyrighted material unless you have permission from the copyright holder to do so.

[via gHacks]

Kevin Kowalewski of Seneca College wanted to build something for the summer. Instead of the usual tree house or go kart he decided to build a BitTorrent client, in a browser.

Torrent Relay's interface is pretty easy to figure out and works with all the mainstream browsers including those found on the PS3, Wii or iPhone. Either upload or paste the url of the torrent file and let the site do its thing. After a bit, you're taken to another page to initiate the download.

Keep in mind that this is a summer project so don't be surprise if you get a lot of "server busy" messages and are asked to donate or click an ad. Currently downloads over 400MB are not permitted, so no Kubuntu downloads for you.

We can see the value of a service like this once cloud computing really takes off and everything lives in the clouds. This way we're still able to get our weekly fix of Bleach.

When Azureus launched the Vuze desktop video player with built in BitTorrent support last year, a lot of folks shrugged. A few checked out the new Vuze client, but many kept using the company's trusty old BitTorrent client. Now the company is killing off the standalone client and changing its name to Vuze. There's also a new version of the Vuze client which adds a few new features.

Probably the most significant change in Vuze 3.1 is support for searching multiple BitTorrent tracking web sites. Previously if you wanted to find a video, you could only search through the Vuze catalog of free and for-pay downloads. Now you can find a whole lot of results from other sites including Mininova and Sumotorrent as well. You can also add other sites to search simply by clicking the add/edit button.

Vuze 3.1 also adds some basic social networking features. Users can create profiles, add friends, and recommend torrents that they think their friends would like. There's no way to chat or see if your friends are online, so these social elements feel tacked on rather than tightly integrated into the experience.

When you install Vuze 3.1 you'll be asked to install a browser toolbar as well. Feel free to uncheck the box next to this option. The wording is a bit tricky since it makes it sound a bit like you need to accept the terms and install the toolbar to continue the installation. But this is not the case.

[via NewTeeVee]

It's no secret that people use peer to peer software like BitTorrent or Lime Wire to download copyrighted movies, music, and software. But that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate uses for the technology. Next time you need to explain to your ISP that while you've been using massive amounts of bandwidth, you haven't actually been doing anything illegal, you might want to check out this wiki listing legal uses of P2P software.

The wiki shows a rather impressive list of legitimate P2P applications, ranging from VoIP client Skype to FAROO, a search engine built using peer to peer technology. Of course, there are also plenty of sites offering legal music and movie downloads, including Joost, Babelgum, Miro, and the BBC iPlayer. And plenty of filmmakers and musicians including Trent Reznor and have decided to release free copies of their works over BitTorrent.

Since this site is a wiki, anyone can login and edit the list. So if you're aware of individuals or groups that are using P2P software in innovative ways, you can add to the list.

[via Boing Boing]

So in our last post about the P2P media sharing site CloudFire, y'all jumped in and answered our question about BitTorrent's Bram Cohen.

This time around, there are no questions to answer. It's first come, first serve.

We have 100 invites to the first lucky folks who use "downloadsquad" without quotes naturally to sign up here.

We've had a bit of a play with CloudFire and the things that jump right out to us is that it seriously is easy to share media files with people who might not be as geeky as a lot of us are. And you know what, us geeky people like easy things too, that's why a lot of us use Macs.

There are some random issues as expected, and you have to make sure that the person connecting to your media has the most updated version of Flash, but other than that it works nicely. A good amount of bandwidth on your end doesn't hurt either.

They're completely open to your feedback and have been asking us what we think.

It's still very pre-beta and stealthy so here's your chance to join in!

UPDATE: If the code doesn't work then you might not have gotten in on the 100 invites. If we get more, we'll pass along the word!

DDoS attacks are hardly unusual. A site says something controversial that gets under the wrong person's skin, and it's not long before they get flooded with enough requests to knock out their servers temporarily. When an attack happened over the weekend at the popular webshow site Revision3 , they started to wonder what they had to done provoke it. Now Rev3 has found the source of the attack, and that's raising even more questions. Rev3 was hit by MediaDefender, the self-described "leading provider of anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention industry."

Rev3? Piracy? They're a site that produces original shows! Why would some kind of draconian piracy-enforcement have a bone to pick with them? Turns out that the attack was targeted at Revision3's BitTorrent ports. They've been using BitTorrent, a popular peer-to-peer sharing protocol, to push their shows out to the public more quickly and cheaply through a distributed model. It's good for business, good for their fans, and nothing at all like piracy.

Rev3 talked to MediaDefender and discovered that the anti-piracy company had been covertly using the Rev3 BitTorrent tracker to move its own files, quite without the knowledge of Revision3. The attack happened when Rev3 caught on and blocked MediaDefender's torrent traffic. This apparently caused the MediaDefender servers to go completely nuts with attempts to reconnect -- over 8,000 a second -- and took down the entire Revision3 infrastructure, including the servers for all their video content, their advertising, and their internal email.

MediaDefender claims it didn't intend to attack Revision3, but as for using Rev3's resources for their own torrents, it's going to be hard to call that an accident. Rev3 has involved the FBI at this point, and it looks like MediaDefender is going to have some explaining to do. Also this seems like a happy enough ending, we can't help wondering whether there are hidden MediaDefender torrents lurking on the servers of any other legitimate services.

Torrent2exe is a web-based utility that does for BitTorrent files what Audio/Video to Exe does for audio and video files. That is, both utilities let you take a file that's typically useless without companion software and make it usable on its own. While Audio/Video to Exe makes audio and video files playable without a media player, Torrent2exe makes files distributed via BitTorrent downloadable without a separate BitTorrent client.

Here's how it works. You download a torrent file (just the tiny torrent, not the big ole file it helps you to download) to your desktop, and then upload that torrent to Torrent2.exe. Click the download button, and you'll get an executable file. When you run this program, a standalone BitTorrent program will start up and immediately try to download the source file to whatever directory the executable is in.

The site also allows you to enter the URL of a torrent instead of uploading a file from your desktop. But we had less success with that method.

If you want to convince your less tech-savvy friends or relatives to download a Linux distribution or Creative Commons licensed movie, Torrent2exe could come in handy. Instead of telling them to download a BitTorrent client, then a torrent file which they have to load into that client, you can just create an executable that you can send to them.

[via Instant Fundas]

The world probably needs another desktop video player like it needs a hole in its head, right? Setting aside the fact that we're not sure the world has a head, Chameleo is a new video player that's actually worth checking out. The open source application from Korea's NomadConnection has an attractive interface, support for multiple file formats including MPEG 1/2/4, H2.64, and WMV, and a nifty widget engine.

Chameleo is still in its early phases. The current release is just version 0.1. But the application already ships with an excellent screen capture plugin that lets you full screen or cropped still images from any video. Another plugin lets you resize videos, while another lets you search subtitles.

The video player doesn't handle web video like Joost or Babelgum. But it has an integrated BitTorrent client which lets you download and watch videos by supplying a Torrent file. Chameleo is currently available for Windows, but Mac and Linux clients are expected soon.

[via NewTeeVee]