46 ms·

Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

527 points by Torlan 4y ago

pavelevst 4y ago
Still no sequential downloads :(
SAMIJAN2636 4y ago
ElCheapo 4y ago
Still no support for webtorrents, making it impossible to use it for helping to lighten the load of my favorite peertube VODs :(
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  I like how expecting real torrent clients to bend over for the WWW is in any way considered to be a reasonable stance.
- tecleandor 4y ago
  Seems like that libtorrent support for webtorrent would be helpful for that. That was done recently in https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123, merged to master, but hasn't been released yet. Per the master changelog, that should be soon, I guess... https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/blob/master/ChangeLog https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/blob/master/ChangeLog
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    I might be wrong, but afaik transmission doesn't use libtorrent. It's using their own libtransmission.
    - tecleandor 4y ago
      That's true, I didn't express it clearly, but someone was proposing/suggesting libtorrent for the webtorrent part in a github issue.
- cassepipe 4y ago
  Could you explain what it is why it would be nice to have ?
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Webtorrent is a modification to the bittorrent protocol to allow it to be used from a web browser with no plugins/extensions. It's built on top of WebRTC. Webtorrent and regular torrents can exist of the same file, but crucially, at least some small percentage of the people in the network have to support both webtorrent and regular torrent to act as a kind of bridge between the two. If this isn't the case, you might have a webtorrent user who has the file, and a regular torrent user who wants the file, but the two people can't connect to eachother because they're talking different protocols, so the file won't be delivered.
    - cassepipe 4y ago
      So where would transmission support come into play ? In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent ? Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission ? Both ?
      - londons_explore 4y ago
        > In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent The actual .torrent file is the same for both, so it already has support there. > Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission This. Currently if all peers who have the data of a torrent are webtorrent clients, then transmission won't be able to download that file. Most importantly, the webtorrent ecosystem is still small, and browser-based webtorrent-only clients suffer because frequently they can't get the file data they need because all the other peers only talk the original-torrent protocol.
      - MayeulC 4y ago
        Well, webtorrents are just regular torrents using websockets as a transport mechanism, since you can't just have raw sockets from a browser sandbox. If it supported these as a transport mechanism, transmission would be able to communicate with torrent clients that run in the browser, making the potential number of peers much higher (both for swarms that are mostly in-browser, and for those that have a majority of traditional clients). It would be very useful for seeding peertube videos from transmission, for instance, which was the quoted use-case.
- remram 4y ago
  Which clients do have support for webtorrent?
  - xd1936 4y ago
    Many! https://webtorrent.io/faq https://webtorrent.io/faq Notable ones include Libtorrent[1], Peertube[2], and their own Webtorrent Desktop[3]. 1. https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/223 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/223 2. https://peertube-viewer.com/posts/2021-02-20-peertube-viewer-and-webtorrent/ https://peertube-viewer.com/posts/2021-02-20-peertube-viewer... 3. https://webtorrent.io/desktop/ https://webtorrent.io/desktop/
    - remram 4y ago
      I meant torrent client programs, not libraries or websites.
tecleandor 4y ago
Now that's a great cleanup!
- kome 4y ago
  quite impressive effort. v3 was already very polished, i cannot wait to try v4.
diegoholiveira 4y ago
After Netflix and others streaming services, I stop using Transmission. What’s the current usage of BitTorrent?
- MaxikCZ 4y ago
  To not have to worry which streaming service currently streams the season of the show you want to watch.
  - Tajnymag 4y ago
    Or at all. There's plenty of older TV shows and movies that you can't get your hands on anymore. Buying a second hand DVD from ebay or Craigslist doesn't count.
- nalaz 4y ago
  I haven’t noticed any difference. If anything high definition releases are now easier to find because they are ripped right off streaming services practically immediately.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Used it to download GIMP the other day.
- artogahr 4y ago
  Streaming services are increasingly going over cable TV route and screwing customers over. The age of piracy is back.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    Please, don't call copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a penal crime that involves violence, theft of property and is often accompanied by murders. Torrenting is just copying data.
    - aequitas 4y ago
KennyBlanken 4y ago
This release is really important if only because it supports BitTorrent V2 spec. Transmission has a huge market share, particularly in open source circles. Lack of support for the V2 spec has stopped many open source projects from migrating their torrents to the V2 spec, because transmission clients won't work. Please support and use other open-source torrent clients, because Transmission's long-standing history of going years between updates and their significant market share simply is not healthy. The first client to support v2 spec was two years ago; same year the libtorrent library that some clients use supported v2: https://torrentfreak.com/biglybt-is-the-first-torrent-client-to-support-the-bittorrent-v2-spec-201011/ https://torrentfreak.com/biglybt-is-the-first-torrent-client...
- zaik 4y ago
  I think Transmission works great. What's the v2 killer feature?
  - bayesianbot 4y ago
    The protocol should be able to find same files in other torrents - you could be downloading a bunch of files (like a season of TV), but are able to find and download one file from another torrent that is better seeded (like one single episode torrent). But I don't think any of the clients implement that yet.
    - madacol 4y ago
      That's great! I suppose they removed bittorrent's weirdness of allowing chunks to overlap multiple files. That was the original sin that caused all this
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    There are lots of changes that are nice-to-have efficiency improvements. But there are no new killer features. I would guess that the extra user headaches from having outdated software not work with new torrents will exceed the benefits of slightly faster downloads and slightly better availability.
mullsork 4y ago
Congrats! It would be interesting to hear more about the rewrite, 18% code reduction is significant. Have any of the contributors written about it somewhere?
netheril96 4y ago
As a Chinese, I really need the anti leeching capabilities, as too many people here use Xunlei that only download but never upload. Sad to see that the maintainers skip this again.
- RektBoy 4y ago
  Write it on their github maybe? Also I would be interested, how many people there use a VPN for torrents?
  - netheril96 4y ago
    There are already GitHub issues like this. The maintainers simply close them.
    - yaddaor 4y ago
      As is their right and somehow even their duty if it is not in alignment with the project's philosophy or goals. You can create a fork and implement the feature or pay someone to implement it for you. That's the wonderful benefit of free software.
      - netheril96 4y ago
        So is my right to complain on HN.
- hrbf 4y ago
  It’s probably impossible to track that with any meaningful precision. Historically it’s the (central) tracker that implements the bookkeeping.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Impossible to track with 100% accuracy, yes. But not completely meaningless to do some basic tracking. A torrent client could implement some tracking on their own, where they keep track of seen clients and keep track how much been uploaded vs downloaded from them (effectively ratio per client) and upload slower to clients you've never encountered that have been uploading.
cassepipe 4y ago
When I first came to Linux I adopted Transmission. It seemed less featureful than others but now I like its simplicity, does everything it needs and it is also very reliable. It is not very known but there actually is a transmission-cli for common torrent operations that may come in handy some time.
- nness 4y ago
  There's also the Transmission Remote GUI, which is a nice GUI for remotely controlling the Transmission daemon, on say, a NAS: https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui It's great for keeping downloads going overnight without having to leave all the power-hungry devices powered on.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    FWIW, qbittorrent also has a built-in web interface. It's also one of the most feature-rich BitTorrent clients. https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      And you can install it with just the web interface as qbittorrent-nox.
- p2detar 4y ago
  It's a great piece of software. I'm running a web remote v2.92 on an rpi with simple basic auth protection, and it has been working flawlessly for years now.
  - xattt 4y ago
    Back in my day, I was running Transmission on a WRT350N router… It was quite an ordeal to set up before there were DD-WRT builds where it was integrated into the build.
  - 4y ago
ksec 4y ago
My biggest problem with BT / Transmission is that they dont work well with DNS Ad blocking solution. As the BT client will quickly swamp and use up all available DNS quota for torrents. I am wondering if anyone has a solution to that?
- Macha 4y ago
  I can't say I've noticed this, and I'm a little surprised DNS gets much use in bittorrent at all, is the client doing rDNS on peers or something?
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    Probably just resolving tracker IPs.
  - talideon 4y ago
    Essentially, yes. It's basically looking up the PTR records. If you look at the UI, you'll see them listed in the peer list.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  'dns quota'? Are you trying to use an abacus as your DNS server? Torrents typically don't do more than a few thousand DNS lookups - which isn't much more than a few people browsing the web. And most of those lookups are just for showing pretty flags and country codes in the UI, and aren't needed anyway.
  - ksec 4y ago
    I dont know but transmission 3.0 era uses 200K+ DNS lookup with about 30 active torrent in a space of two to three weeks. I dont think I ever got to the bottom of it.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      Thats like 1 per second. Which isn't really much. Thats probably 1 per person who connects or tries to connect to your machine.
RektBoy 4y ago
Why use this, when there's qBittorent?
- tiagod 4y ago
  Transmission used to handle more simultaneous torrents. Looking at the changelog, seems like 4.0 should handle even more.
- Tajnymag 4y ago
  Why wear a blue shirt, when there's yellow shirts available?
  - reyqn 4y ago
    So no functional differences?
    - Tajnymag 4y ago
      I would say Transmission has simpler UI. Outside of UI, it's also packaged differently, compared to Qbittorrent, Transmission can be installed completely headlessly without dependencies to QT/GTK+X. In terms of actual features, Transmission is more lightweight. It doesn't support super-seeding, broadcatching, native SOCKS support and doesn't have built-in search engine integration.
      - baal80spam 4y ago
        > I would say Transmission has simpler UI This is true but for me this is a disadvantage. qBitTorrent allows to fine-tune a lot of settings. Not as many as Tixati but still.
        tenpies 4y ago
        What settings would the average user find useful beyond adding a blocklist (which Transmission supports)? Genuinely curious as someone who used Transmission back in the day and appreciated the simplicity.
squarefoot 4y ago
If someone asks me to install a Torrent client on a single machine, my favorite would be QBittorrent, however at home I use XigmaNAS' Transmission client extensively, and operate it from other machines in the LAN using the Transgui interface (also available on Windows and MacOS). This allows me to turn off everything but the NAS, which with all RAID disks spun down and a TDP of 15 Watts makes for some good energy savings. https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui
- lynguist 4y ago
  Qbittorrent unfortunately turned into a buggy mess and has no leadership. The github has hundreds of known issues that are not addressed. No qbittorrent client works reliably on Windows or Mac for at least a year or two. It gets hung up scanning downloaded torrents etc.
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    Didn't know about that, thanks for the heads up.
  - aembleton 4y ago
    Seems to work OK on my Pi with the web interface.
  - russelg 4y ago
    I run 5+ instances of qBittorrent on my unraid server and have not experienced any of these issues, same on macOS.
  - bananamerica 4y ago
    qbittorrent on Linux has a crazy memory leak that makes it use more than 1gb of memory very fast and possibly. I had to stop using it for quite a few months. I refonwloaded it recently and it wasn't fixed.
    - anon_123g987 4y ago
your_challenger 4y ago
I haven't used torrent in a long time. Does it have any other usecase than piracy?
- sdfjkl 4y ago
  Yup, downloading stuff reliably over lousy internet connections (packet loss, high latency, intermittent uptime). HTTP really sucks with that.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Linux distros use it for distributing their installers.
  - isaacremuant 4y ago
    LibreOffice as well and it's a joy to use because they tend to be very fast downloads.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  It's really good for distributing huge datasets, stuff that can take multiple days to download. It's also very good for using maximum available bandwidth efficiently, and have downloaders contribute bandwidth. Linux isos are frequently pointed out as a use-case. I've seen it used for distributing neural network weights recently (stable diffusion and others). Rainbow tables and password lists too: https://freerainbowtables.com/ https://freerainbowtables.com/ I have used it to efficiently distribute big files (disk images) over hundreds of computers in LANs. Computers on local switches can exchange data with each other, and computers can come and go on the network.
  - zaik 4y ago
    OpenStreetMap is such a huge dataset, for example: https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/
- talideon 4y ago
  Plenty! If you have largish binary assets of any kind that need to be distributed across multiple nodes, it's fantastic. For instance, if you're in the infrastructure group in a company, and you need to distribute VM images around the place, it's great.
haunter 4y ago
Love Transmission but went to picotorrent a few years ago, even smaller footprint https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent Sadly it’s Windows only
- hellweaver666 4y ago
  I stopped using clients on my computer as my NAS has a built in client that allows me to quickly download content straight to that device without using my computer as a middleman. Transmission was my go to for a very long time though!
  - calpaterson 4y ago
    NAS bittorrent clients are often based on transmission. For example, Synology's is.
- politelemon 4y ago
  There does seem to be a docker image for it through https://hub.docker.com/r/picotorrent/server https://hub.docker.com/r/picotorrent/server but last updated 2 years ago, so not sure what's going on there
  - Goz3rr 4y ago
    Moved to GHCR it seems https://github.com/picotorrent/server/pkgs/container/server https://github.com/picotorrent/server/pkgs/container/server
sylware 4y ago
A long time ago I was a user of transmission, then they moved to c++ and it was over. I would use other now.
- laundermaf 4y ago
  How does that affect you as a user?
  - sylware 4y ago
    I am a developer user (yes, developers are also users), I understand why c++ is toxic for the humanity, then I did use other clients and I am still pushing to avoid it.
- hu3 4y ago
  What did they use before?
- irusensei 4y ago
  I could understand if it was coded in a way that forces you to install extra modules like say PHP but stopping to use something because it went from C to C++ just makes you sound like a zealot.
  - sylware 4y ago
    c++ zealots are no less worse that languageX zealots mate.
- drdaeman 4y ago
  Everyone talks about the application but this could actually be a very valid argument, if we shift focus to libtransmission. Over 10 years ago I've worked on a very custom BitTorrent-related application for an ISP. Roughly, it was a piece of software that acted like caching proxy but for torrents, intended to lower upstream congestion. Legal questions aside, it was a success - but, anyway, back to Transmission. I needed a very custom client, and libtransmission was (in my personal opinion) hand-down the sanest and powerful option. I liked the design of the API, how there are only a minimum number of hoops to "just" get a torrent running, and yet how one can gradually expand. Honestly I don't remember any details beyond the overall impressions - it was very long time ago - but I liked it. And what I remember is that one of the features I valued was that it was written in C - because I wanted to use it from Python. I mean, C ABIs are generally quite significantly easier to work with in any language that has FFI, compared to C++ ABIs. CFFI had improved since then, of course, and I haven't looked into v4 library at all so maybe they have an interface without any C++ nuances... But in general, the point is that libraries written in C are typically easier to interface with.
MayeulC 4y ago
I'm really excited to see support for torrents v2. If only because transmission will stop chocking on hybrid torrent files, which should lead to more adoption across the board. I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version. Or grab a "super-torrent" that lists isos for all known distributions, select the ones you're interested in, and let it update... Of course, that can be used for file-sharing repositories too. Maybe transmission is not interactive enough for such a use-case (you'd have to ask the user what they want to do when the torrent mutates, and possibly add simple scripting interfaces for more complex heuristics).
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version. That sounds horrible. My own expectation is that if I have a torrent file/magnet link and I download from it, I always get the same content. This is why I commonly keep the magnet link/torrent file around even if I delete the content itself, so if I want the same thing in the future, I just re-download it and I'm 100% it's exactly the same. This change would break that expectation, for what benefit? This could be implemented as a HTTP call instead, that serves different torrent files, so you can just change whatever serves the torrent file in order to mutate what gets downloaded.
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    > This change would break that expectation, for what benefit? This could be implemented as a HTTP call instead The main benefit is not having to rely on a centralized HTTP server and repository, as well as the associated infrastructure: DNS, TLS, CA, etc. One could host a blog over torrents (more or less what IPFS is doing). We already have RSS feeds for what you describe (though not supported natively by transmission). > My own expectation is that if I have a torrent file/magnet link and I download from it, I always get the same content. That wouldn't change significantly. The mutable torrent content is basically a .torrent that points to whatever the current version is; so just save that instead. The good thing with mutable torrents (or mutable content in the DHT, as pointed out in another comment) is that instead of the hash (content-addressing) being stored in the DHT, a public key is retrieved. Once you got a torrent ("trust on first use" of sorts), you can verify that the new version is from the same uploader (or at least, one that knows the private key). I would present it with a new set of checkboxes in the torrent client: "download new versions", then if checked "delete previous version after downloading updated content" and for more granularity "download new files", "download updates to existing files". Of course, for ease of use it would be better to have a historical view. I think the main use-cases would be to archive every intermediate version, or to just grab whatever is latest. There's infinite variations in-between. One thing I would like to stress, and that I didn't point out enough in my original comment is that this goes extremely well with v2 torrents and their de-duplication feature: if the same file exists in multiple versions of the torrent, peers with any version can contribute to the swarm. It's not as good for deduplication as a rolling hashes could be, but you could host whole distribution repositories with mutable v2 torrents.
xavxav 4y ago
> The project is much more responsive to bug reports and code submissions than it has been in the past. Cool to see community listed as a feature up there with the tech stuff
- mhh__ 4y ago
  If I die I want to be deprecated in the changelog
  - cool-RR 4y ago
    "He was deprecated doing what he loved... sniffle"
- dmix 4y ago
  This and the code modernization is the biggest announcement. That means future improvements are going to be 2x easier and we’ll see the product mature much quicker in the future.
captainmuon 4y ago
Good to see it being in active development. But the one feature I'm waiting for is a network whitelist. For example, it should never connect over my home or office network, but only via anonymous VPN. (Edit: I know you can do this already with firewall rules, or containers, but I don't trust myself to not make a mistake. Ideally this should be part of the OS. You should be able to right-click somewhere in the window and say "use this network for this app".) The other feature I'd like to see is sequential downloads, but the developers object out of principle so that is never going to come.
- tssva 4y ago
  It already has the ability to specify an IP address to bind to. I use an OpenVPN up script to stop any running instance, replace the bind address with the current VPN interface address and start an instance.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  I have to agree with them, it’s antithetical to what torrent is about.
  - captainmuon 4y ago
    Depends on what torrent is about. For me, it is about watching shows that you can't officially watch where I live yet. Once I week, I hit up a site and, click a magnet link, and a couple of minutes later I can watch my favorite show. (The cost of the VPN is incidentally about the same as a streaming subscription. I think for this reason it is tolerated by the powers that be.) I don't expect torrents to be available for a long time. Only very few people keep the torrent entry in their client alive for long, even though I keep around all the files. This is as opposed to eMule and older systems, where you can download any file in the user's media folder.
    - dkdbejwi383 4y ago
      I believe the previous commenter meant that sequential downloads are orthogonal to the design of Bit Torrent.
pixelfog 4y ago
Can I bind my vpn's network interface to it? Last I checked this wasn't possible
- zogomoox 4y ago
  It's possible, set bind-address-ipv4 (and depending on your needs rpc-bind-address) in settings.json
preisschild 4y ago
Is there a (semi-) official docker image for this new beta? Would love to test it.
whalesalad 4y ago
Gotta say these are some gorgeous release notes.
yborg 4y ago
15.7 MB binary on macOS, in an age where it's usual to deliver a 400 MB Electron package. I kneel.
- statintheegg 4y ago
  I wonder how much stuff its including there. I use the alpine package for transmission and its 1mb https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/transmission-daemon https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/tran...
  - cocoto 4y ago
    These 1mb are only for the daemon and not taking into account the dependencies. Although I’m pretty sure the linux version is more lightweight in general because the gtk dependency is very likely to already be installed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- alcover 4y ago
  Let me stay upright. 15M seems a lot. What's in there ? High-def country flags for Retina ? edit: ok, size is ~4.5M on my Debian, of which transmission-gtk accounts for 3.6. Maybe graph libs are bigger on mac ?
  - yborg 4y ago
    It's a multi-architecture package - ARM and Intel.
  - systoll 4y ago
    3.8mB is an auto-update framework – https://sparkle-project.org https://sparkle-project.org 3.5mB is for a Quicklook plugin, so that Torrent files can be previewed in the Finder. 4.5mB is UI 'stuff'. The Cocoa 'nibs' that define the application UI tend to be bigger than comparable GTK XML files.
butz 4y ago
Oh, Transmission has QT client. And I somehow always thought of Transmission as GNOME application. That makes my migration to KDE easier.
branon 4y ago
Been using Transmission for years, my instance's stats is up to 1,902 days active across 72 sessions. Really rock-solid software, excited for the new version.
johnchristopher 4y ago
There's a very stupid bug with Transmission: when you switch between a local or a remote daemon the UI to download new torrents doesn't update the destination path and it will sometimes (being charitable, happens all the time to me) pick up the destination path from the other daemon setting thus recreating the default transmission download folder or the mounted path to an external HDD plugged to your PI running the transmission daemon. /media/pi/WD\ Elements on your user@local machin instead of ~/download/torrents. I hope it's fixed.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Are you talking about transmission remote gui or something else?
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    The GTK client. You can switch between remote or local daemons and it messes up the next torrent download because it uses the previous ly loaded config.
jupp0r 4y ago
Wow that's an impressive changelog. Both user facing features and getting rid of what sound like lots of tech debt. Congratulations to the people who made this happen!
palebt 4y ago
It's a shame Transmission is not more popular. It's small, reliable and clean. More software should be like this nowdays.
- pid_0 4y ago
donatj 4y ago
I don't know if it's noted on there somewhere, but it fails to run on my old High Sierra Mac I use for torrents.
vonseel 4y ago
Is it still single-threaded and the UI chokes when doing a blocking operation like moving a large torrent to a different hard drive? I didn't find any mention of parallel/threads/concurrent in the release notes. I've been torrenting since the early 2000s and using torrent clients on Mac and Linux for over ten years, and there have been various issues in both Transmission and qBittorrent for as long as I can remember. I'm not sure if rTorrent is better, but lots of people seem to like it. QBT has a tendency to break on upgrades and then it tries to rename files and do re-checks and all sorts of messy stuff - maybe due to my configuration since I have "append !qB" to incomplete files - but I personally don't think a client should ever rename a file from 'video.mp4' -> 'video.mp4.!qB' unless the checking is complete and it has already determined the file needs to be partially re-downloaded. Also, checking torrents is basically a broken feature since v4.4 - according to a bunch of people on the internet. I'm on the latest version, but going back to a working version could be a nightmare with hundreds of torrents on multiple hard-drives. I used to use Transmission exclusively but pretty much stopped using it because of the single-threaded limitation. Also, Transmission on linux didn't support categories or labels like the Mac GUI version did, which I required for organization. I'm not sure how much goes into a Torrent client, though I did read [madreyels]<https://mandreyel.github.io/posts/rust-bittorrent-engine/ https://mandreyel.github.io/posts/rust-bittorrent-engine/> post on writing a bittorrent engine in Rust. I'm not saying rust is the answer, but I would welcome a new and improved bittorrent client meeting my requirements in any language if it works better than the existing options.

527 points by Torlan 4y ago

pavelevst 4y ago

Still no sequential downloads :(

SAMIJAN2636 4y ago

ElCheapo 4y ago

Still no support for webtorrents, making it impossible to use it for helping to lighten the load of my favorite peertube VODs :(

verisimilitudes 4y ago
I like how expecting real torrent clients to bend over for the WWW is in any way considered to be a reasonable stance.
tecleandor 4y ago
Seems like that libtorrent support for webtorrent would be helpful for that. That was done recently in https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123, merged to master, but hasn't been released yet. Per the master changelog, that should be soon, I guess... https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/blob/master/ChangeLog https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/blob/master/ChangeLog
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  I might be wrong, but afaik transmission doesn't use libtorrent. It's using their own libtransmission.
  - tecleandor 4y ago
    That's true, I didn't express it clearly, but someone was proposing/suggesting libtorrent for the webtorrent part in a github issue.
cassepipe 4y ago
Could you explain what it is why it would be nice to have ?
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Webtorrent is a modification to the bittorrent protocol to allow it to be used from a web browser with no plugins/extensions. It's built on top of WebRTC. Webtorrent and regular torrents can exist of the same file, but crucially, at least some small percentage of the people in the network have to support both webtorrent and regular torrent to act as a kind of bridge between the two. If this isn't the case, you might have a webtorrent user who has the file, and a regular torrent user who wants the file, but the two people can't connect to eachother because they're talking different protocols, so the file won't be delivered.
  - cassepipe 4y ago
    So where would transmission support come into play ? In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent ? Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission ? Both ?
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      > In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent The actual .torrent file is the same for both, so it already has support there. > Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission This. Currently if all peers who have the data of a torrent are webtorrent clients, then transmission won't be able to download that file. Most importantly, the webtorrent ecosystem is still small, and browser-based webtorrent-only clients suffer because frequently they can't get the file data they need because all the other peers only talk the original-torrent protocol.
    - MayeulC 4y ago
      Well, webtorrents are just regular torrents using websockets as a transport mechanism, since you can't just have raw sockets from a browser sandbox. If it supported these as a transport mechanism, transmission would be able to communicate with torrent clients that run in the browser, making the potential number of peers much higher (both for swarms that are mostly in-browser, and for those that have a majority of traditional clients). It would be very useful for seeding peertube videos from transmission, for instance, which was the quoted use-case.
remram 4y ago
Which clients do have support for webtorrent?
- xd1936 4y ago
  Many! https://webtorrent.io/faq https://webtorrent.io/faq Notable ones include Libtorrent[1], Peertube[2], and their own Webtorrent Desktop[3]. 1. https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/223 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/223 2. https://peertube-viewer.com/posts/2021-02-20-peertube-viewer-and-webtorrent/ https://peertube-viewer.com/posts/2021-02-20-peertube-viewer... 3. https://webtorrent.io/desktop/ https://webtorrent.io/desktop/
  - remram 4y ago
    I meant torrent client programs, not libraries or websites.

tecleandor 4y ago

Now that's a great cleanup!

kome 4y ago
quite impressive effort. v3 was already very polished, i cannot wait to try v4.

diegoholiveira 4y ago

After Netflix and others streaming services, I stop using Transmission. What’s the current usage of BitTorrent?

MaxikCZ 4y ago
To not have to worry which streaming service currently streams the season of the show you want to watch.
- Tajnymag 4y ago
  Or at all. There's plenty of older TV shows and movies that you can't get your hands on anymore. Buying a second hand DVD from ebay or Craigslist doesn't count.
nalaz 4y ago
I haven’t noticed any difference. If anything high definition releases are now easier to find because they are ripped right off streaming services practically immediately.
nmfisher 4y ago
Used it to download GIMP the other day.
artogahr 4y ago
Streaming services are increasingly going over cable TV route and screwing customers over. The age of piracy is back.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  Please, don't call copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a penal crime that involves violence, theft of property and is often accompanied by murders. Torrenting is just copying data.
  - aequitas 4y ago

KennyBlanken 4y ago

This release is really important if only because it supports BitTorrent V2 spec. Transmission has a huge market share, particularly in open source circles. Lack of support for the V2 spec has stopped many open source projects from migrating their torrents to the V2 spec, because transmission clients won't work. Please support and use other open-source torrent clients, because Transmission's long-standing history of going years between updates and their significant market share simply is not healthy. The first client to support v2 spec was two years ago; same year the libtorrent library that some clients use supported v2: https://torrentfreak.com/biglybt-is-the-first-torrent-client-to-support-the-bittorrent-v2-spec-201011/ https://torrentfreak.com/biglybt-is-the-first-torrent-client...

zaik 4y ago
I think Transmission works great. What's the v2 killer feature?
- bayesianbot 4y ago
  The protocol should be able to find same files in other torrents - you could be downloading a bunch of files (like a season of TV), but are able to find and download one file from another torrent that is better seeded (like one single episode torrent). But I don't think any of the clients implement that yet.
  - madacol 4y ago
    That's great! I suppose they removed bittorrent's weirdness of allowing chunks to overlap multiple files. That was the original sin that caused all this
- londons_explore 4y ago
  There are lots of changes that are nice-to-have efficiency improvements. But there are no new killer features. I would guess that the extra user headaches from having outdated software not work with new torrents will exceed the benefits of slightly faster downloads and slightly better availability.

mullsork 4y ago

Congrats! It would be interesting to hear more about the rewrite, 18% code reduction is significant. Have any of the contributors written about it somewhere?

netheril96 4y ago

As a Chinese, I really need the anti leeching capabilities, as too many people here use Xunlei that only download but never upload. Sad to see that the maintainers skip this again.

RektBoy 4y ago
Write it on their github maybe? Also I would be interested, how many people there use a VPN for torrents?
- netheril96 4y ago
  There are already GitHub issues like this. The maintainers simply close them.
  - yaddaor 4y ago
    As is their right and somehow even their duty if it is not in alignment with the project's philosophy or goals. You can create a fork and implement the feature or pay someone to implement it for you. That's the wonderful benefit of free software.
    - netheril96 4y ago
      So is my right to complain on HN.
hrbf 4y ago
It’s probably impossible to track that with any meaningful precision. Historically it’s the (central) tracker that implements the bookkeeping.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Impossible to track with 100% accuracy, yes. But not completely meaningless to do some basic tracking. A torrent client could implement some tracking on their own, where they keep track of seen clients and keep track how much been uploaded vs downloaded from them (effectively ratio per client) and upload slower to clients you've never encountered that have been uploading.

cassepipe 4y ago

When I first came to Linux I adopted Transmission. It seemed less featureful than others but now I like its simplicity, does everything it needs and it is also very reliable. It is not very known but there actually is a transmission-cli for common torrent operations that may come in handy some time.

nness 4y ago
There's also the Transmission Remote GUI, which is a nice GUI for remotely controlling the Transmission daemon, on say, a NAS: https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui It's great for keeping downloads going overnight without having to leave all the power-hungry devices powered on.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  FWIW, qbittorrent also has a built-in web interface. It's also one of the most feature-rich BitTorrent clients. https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    And you can install it with just the web interface as qbittorrent-nox.
p2detar 4y ago
It's a great piece of software. I'm running a web remote v2.92 on an rpi with simple basic auth protection, and it has been working flawlessly for years now.
- xattt 4y ago
  Back in my day, I was running Transmission on a WRT350N router… It was quite an ordeal to set up before there were DD-WRT builds where it was integrated into the build.
- 4y ago

ksec 4y ago

My biggest problem with BT / Transmission is that they dont work well with DNS Ad blocking solution. As the BT client will quickly swamp and use up all available DNS quota for torrents. I am wondering if anyone has a solution to that?

Macha 4y ago
I can't say I've noticed this, and I'm a little surprised DNS gets much use in bittorrent at all, is the client doing rDNS on peers or something?
- MayeulC 4y ago
  Probably just resolving tracker IPs.
- talideon 4y ago
  Essentially, yes. It's basically looking up the PTR records. If you look at the UI, you'll see them listed in the peer list.
londons_explore 4y ago
'dns quota'? Are you trying to use an abacus as your DNS server? Torrents typically don't do more than a few thousand DNS lookups - which isn't much more than a few people browsing the web. And most of those lookups are just for showing pretty flags and country codes in the UI, and aren't needed anyway.
- ksec 4y ago
  I dont know but transmission 3.0 era uses 200K+ DNS lookup with about 30 active torrent in a space of two to three weeks. I dont think I ever got to the bottom of it.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Thats like 1 per second. Which isn't really much. Thats probably 1 per person who connects or tries to connect to your machine.

RektBoy 4y ago

Why use this, when there's qBittorent?

tiagod 4y ago
Transmission used to handle more simultaneous torrents. Looking at the changelog, seems like 4.0 should handle even more.
Tajnymag 4y ago
Why wear a blue shirt, when there's yellow shirts available?
- reyqn 4y ago
  So no functional differences?
  - Tajnymag 4y ago
    I would say Transmission has simpler UI. Outside of UI, it's also packaged differently, compared to Qbittorrent, Transmission can be installed completely headlessly without dependencies to QT/GTK+X. In terms of actual features, Transmission is more lightweight. It doesn't support super-seeding, broadcatching, native SOCKS support and doesn't have built-in search engine integration.
    - baal80spam 4y ago
      > I would say Transmission has simpler UI This is true but for me this is a disadvantage. qBitTorrent allows to fine-tune a lot of settings. Not as many as Tixati but still.
      - tenpies 4y ago
        What settings would the average user find useful beyond adding a blocklist (which Transmission supports)? Genuinely curious as someone who used Transmission back in the day and appreciated the simplicity.

squarefoot 4y ago

If someone asks me to install a Torrent client on a single machine, my favorite would be QBittorrent, however at home I use XigmaNAS' Transmission client extensively, and operate it from other machines in the LAN using the Transgui interface (also available on Windows and MacOS). This allows me to turn off everything but the NAS, which with all RAID disks spun down and a TDP of 15 Watts makes for some good energy savings. https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui

lynguist 4y ago
Qbittorrent unfortunately turned into a buggy mess and has no leadership. The github has hundreds of known issues that are not addressed. No qbittorrent client works reliably on Windows or Mac for at least a year or two. It gets hung up scanning downloaded torrents etc.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Didn't know about that, thanks for the heads up.
- aembleton 4y ago
  Seems to work OK on my Pi with the web interface.
- russelg 4y ago
  I run 5+ instances of qBittorrent on my unraid server and have not experienced any of these issues, same on macOS.
- bananamerica 4y ago
  qbittorrent on Linux has a crazy memory leak that makes it use more than 1gb of memory very fast and possibly. I had to stop using it for quite a few months. I refonwloaded it recently and it wasn't fixed.
  - anon_123g987 4y ago

your_challenger 4y ago

I haven't used torrent in a long time. Does it have any other usecase than piracy?

sdfjkl 4y ago
Yup, downloading stuff reliably over lousy internet connections (packet loss, high latency, intermittent uptime). HTTP really sucks with that.
pabs3 4y ago
Linux distros use it for distributing their installers.
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  LibreOffice as well and it's a joy to use because they tend to be very fast downloads.
MayeulC 4y ago
It's really good for distributing huge datasets, stuff that can take multiple days to download. It's also very good for using maximum available bandwidth efficiently, and have downloaders contribute bandwidth. Linux isos are frequently pointed out as a use-case. I've seen it used for distributing neural network weights recently (stable diffusion and others). Rainbow tables and password lists too: https://freerainbowtables.com/ https://freerainbowtables.com/ I have used it to efficiently distribute big files (disk images) over hundreds of computers in LANs. Computers on local switches can exchange data with each other, and computers can come and go on the network.
- zaik 4y ago
  OpenStreetMap is such a huge dataset, for example: https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/
talideon 4y ago
Plenty! If you have largish binary assets of any kind that need to be distributed across multiple nodes, it's fantastic. For instance, if you're in the infrastructure group in a company, and you need to distribute VM images around the place, it's great.

haunter 4y ago

Love Transmission but went to picotorrent a few years ago, even smaller footprint https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent Sadly it’s Windows only

hellweaver666 4y ago
I stopped using clients on my computer as my NAS has a built in client that allows me to quickly download content straight to that device without using my computer as a middleman. Transmission was my go to for a very long time though!
- calpaterson 4y ago
  NAS bittorrent clients are often based on transmission. For example, Synology's is.
politelemon 4y ago
There does seem to be a docker image for it through https://hub.docker.com/r/picotorrent/server https://hub.docker.com/r/picotorrent/server but last updated 2 years ago, so not sure what's going on there
- Goz3rr 4y ago
  Moved to GHCR it seems https://github.com/picotorrent/server/pkgs/container/server https://github.com/picotorrent/server/pkgs/container/server

sylware 4y ago

A long time ago I was a user of transmission, then they moved to c++ and it was over. I would use other now.

laundermaf 4y ago
How does that affect you as a user?
- sylware 4y ago
  I am a developer user (yes, developers are also users), I understand why c++ is toxic for the humanity, then I did use other clients and I am still pushing to avoid it.
hu3 4y ago
What did they use before?
irusensei 4y ago
I could understand if it was coded in a way that forces you to install extra modules like say PHP but stopping to use something because it went from C to C++ just makes you sound like a zealot.
- sylware 4y ago
  c++ zealots are no less worse that languageX zealots mate.
drdaeman 4y ago
Everyone talks about the application but this could actually be a very valid argument, if we shift focus to libtransmission. Over 10 years ago I've worked on a very custom BitTorrent-related application for an ISP. Roughly, it was a piece of software that acted like caching proxy but for torrents, intended to lower upstream congestion. Legal questions aside, it was a success - but, anyway, back to Transmission. I needed a very custom client, and libtransmission was (in my personal opinion) hand-down the sanest and powerful option. I liked the design of the API, how there are only a minimum number of hoops to "just" get a torrent running, and yet how one can gradually expand. Honestly I don't remember any details beyond the overall impressions - it was very long time ago - but I liked it. And what I remember is that one of the features I valued was that it was written in C - because I wanted to use it from Python. I mean, C ABIs are generally quite significantly easier to work with in any language that has FFI, compared to C++ ABIs. CFFI had improved since then, of course, and I haven't looked into v4 library at all so maybe they have an interface without any C++ nuances... But in general, the point is that libraries written in C are typically easier to interface with.

MayeulC 4y ago

I'm really excited to see support for torrents v2. If only because transmission will stop chocking on hybrid torrent files, which should lead to more adoption across the board. I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version. Or grab a "super-torrent" that lists isos for all known distributions, select the ones you're interested in, and let it update... Of course, that can be used for file-sharing repositories too. Maybe transmission is not interactive enough for such a use-case (you'd have to ask the user what they want to do when the torrent mutates, and possibly add simple scripting interfaces for more complex heuristics).

capableweb 4y ago
> I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version. That sounds horrible. My own expectation is that if I have a torrent file/magnet link and I download from it, I always get the same content. This is why I commonly keep the magnet link/torrent file around even if I delete the content itself, so if I want the same thing in the future, I just re-download it and I'm 100% it's exactly the same. This change would break that expectation, for what benefit? This could be implemented as a HTTP call instead, that serves different torrent files, so you can just change whatever serves the torrent file in order to mutate what gets downloaded.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  > This change would break that expectation, for what benefit? This could be implemented as a HTTP call instead The main benefit is not having to rely on a centralized HTTP server and repository, as well as the associated infrastructure: DNS, TLS, CA, etc. One could host a blog over torrents (more or less what IPFS is doing). We already have RSS feeds for what you describe (though not supported natively by transmission). > My own expectation is that if I have a torrent file/magnet link and I download from it, I always get the same content. That wouldn't change significantly. The mutable torrent content is basically a .torrent that points to whatever the current version is; so just save that instead. The good thing with mutable torrents (or mutable content in the DHT, as pointed out in another comment) is that instead of the hash (content-addressing) being stored in the DHT, a public key is retrieved. Once you got a torrent ("trust on first use" of sorts), you can verify that the new version is from the same uploader (or at least, one that knows the private key). I would present it with a new set of checkboxes in the torrent client: "download new versions", then if checked "delete previous version after downloading updated content" and for more granularity "download new files", "download updates to existing files". Of course, for ease of use it would be better to have a historical view. I think the main use-cases would be to archive every intermediate version, or to just grab whatever is latest. There's infinite variations in-between. One thing I would like to stress, and that I didn't point out enough in my original comment is that this goes extremely well with v2 torrents and their de-duplication feature: if the same file exists in multiple versions of the torrent, peers with any version can contribute to the swarm. It's not as good for deduplication as a rolling hashes could be, but you could host whole distribution repositories with mutable v2 torrents.

xavxav 4y ago

> The project is much more responsive to bug reports and code submissions than it has been in the past. Cool to see community listed as a feature up there with the tech stuff

mhh__ 4y ago
If I die I want to be deprecated in the changelog
- cool-RR 4y ago
  "He was deprecated doing what he loved... sniffle"
dmix 4y ago
This and the code modernization is the biggest announcement. That means future improvements are going to be 2x easier and we’ll see the product mature much quicker in the future.

captainmuon 4y ago

Good to see it being in active development. But the one feature I'm waiting for is a network whitelist. For example, it should never connect over my home or office network, but only via anonymous VPN. (Edit: I know you can do this already with firewall rules, or containers, but I don't trust myself to not make a mistake. Ideally this should be part of the OS. You should be able to right-click somewhere in the window and say "use this network for this app".) The other feature I'd like to see is sequential downloads, but the developers object out of principle so that is never going to come.

tssva 4y ago
It already has the ability to specify an IP address to bind to. I use an OpenVPN up script to stop any running instance, replace the bind address with the current VPN interface address and start an instance.
tambourine_man 4y ago
I have to agree with them, it’s antithetical to what torrent is about.
- captainmuon 4y ago
  Depends on what torrent is about. For me, it is about watching shows that you can't officially watch where I live yet. Once I week, I hit up a site and, click a magnet link, and a couple of minutes later I can watch my favorite show. (The cost of the VPN is incidentally about the same as a streaming subscription. I think for this reason it is tolerated by the powers that be.) I don't expect torrents to be available for a long time. Only very few people keep the torrent entry in their client alive for long, even though I keep around all the files. This is as opposed to eMule and older systems, where you can download any file in the user's media folder.
  - dkdbejwi383 4y ago
    I believe the previous commenter meant that sequential downloads are orthogonal to the design of Bit Torrent.

pixelfog 4y ago

Can I bind my vpn's network interface to it? Last I checked this wasn't possible

zogomoox 4y ago
It's possible, set bind-address-ipv4 (and depending on your needs rpc-bind-address) in settings.json

preisschild 4y ago

Is there a (semi-) official docker image for this new beta? Would love to test it.

whalesalad 4y ago

Gotta say these are some gorgeous release notes.

yborg 4y ago

15.7 MB binary on macOS, in an age where it's usual to deliver a 400 MB Electron package. I kneel.

statintheegg 4y ago
I wonder how much stuff its including there. I use the alpine package for transmission and its 1mb https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/transmission-daemon https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/tran...
- cocoto 4y ago
  These 1mb are only for the daemon and not taking into account the dependencies. Although I’m pretty sure the linux version is more lightweight in general because the gtk dependency is very likely to already be installed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
alcover 4y ago
Let me stay upright. 15M seems a lot. What's in there ? High-def country flags for Retina ? edit: ok, size is ~4.5M on my Debian, of which transmission-gtk accounts for 3.6. Maybe graph libs are bigger on mac ?
- yborg 4y ago
  It's a multi-architecture package - ARM and Intel.
- systoll 4y ago
  3.8mB is an auto-update framework – https://sparkle-project.org https://sparkle-project.org 3.5mB is for a Quicklook plugin, so that Torrent files can be previewed in the Finder. 4.5mB is UI 'stuff'. The Cocoa 'nibs' that define the application UI tend to be bigger than comparable GTK XML files.

butz 4y ago

Oh, Transmission has QT client. And I somehow always thought of Transmission as GNOME application. That makes my migration to KDE easier.

branon 4y ago

Been using Transmission for years, my instance's stats is up to 1,902 days active across 72 sessions. Really rock-solid software, excited for the new version.

johnchristopher 4y ago

There's a very stupid bug with Transmission: when you switch between a local or a remote daemon the UI to download new torrents doesn't update the destination path and it will sometimes (being charitable, happens all the time to me) pick up the destination path from the other daemon setting thus recreating the default transmission download folder or the mounted path to an external HDD plugged to your PI running the transmission daemon. /media/pi/WD\ Elements on your user@local machin instead of ~/download/torrents. I hope it's fixed.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Are you talking about transmission remote gui or something else?
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  The GTK client. You can switch between remote or local daemons and it messes up the next torrent download because it uses the previous ly loaded config.

jupp0r 4y ago

Wow that's an impressive changelog. Both user facing features and getting rid of what sound like lots of tech debt. Congratulations to the people who made this happen!

palebt 4y ago

It's a shame Transmission is not more popular. It's small, reliable and clean. More software should be like this nowdays.

pid_0 4y ago

donatj 4y ago

I don't know if it's noted on there somewhere, but it fails to run on my old High Sierra Mac I use for torrents.

vonseel 4y ago

Is it still single-threaded and the UI chokes when doing a blocking operation like moving a large torrent to a different hard drive? I didn't find any mention of parallel/threads/concurrent in the release notes. I've been torrenting since the early 2000s and using torrent clients on Mac and Linux for over ten years, and there have been various issues in both Transmission and qBittorrent for as long as I can remember. I'm not sure if rTorrent is better, but lots of people seem to like it. QBT has a tendency to break on upgrades and then it tries to rename files and do re-checks and all sorts of messy stuff - maybe due to my configuration since I have "append !qB" to incomplete files - but I personally don't think a client should ever rename a file from 'video.mp4' -> 'video.mp4.!qB' unless the checking is complete and it has already determined the file needs to be partially re-downloaded. Also, checking torrents is basically a broken feature since v4.4 - according to a bunch of people on the internet. I'm on the latest version, but going back to a working version could be a nightmare with hundreds of torrents on multiple hard-drives. I used to use Transmission exclusively but pretty much stopped using it because of the single-threaded limitation. Also, Transmission on linux didn't support categories or labels like the Mac GUI version did, which I required for organization. I'm not sure how much goes into a Torrent client, though I did read [madreyels]<https://mandreyel.github.io/posts/rust-bittorrent-engine/ https://mandreyel.github.io/posts/rust-bittorrent-engine/> post on writing a bittorrent engine in Rust. I'm not saying rust is the answer, but I would welcome a new and improved bittorrent client meeting my requirements in any language if it works better than the existing options.