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µTorrent for Mac released
- tdavis 18y agoµTorrent gets a lot of praise, and for all I know rightly so, but I am curious about the advantages of µTorrent on Mac over Transmission. Glancing at the feature list, it seems like they're pretty equivalent.
- nickb 18y agoTo me, a big plus is UI. I just love µTorrent UI. If you have few torrents in Transmission, the window gets huge. µTorrent's window doesn't grow as Transmission's.
- wesley 18y agoErr, you can disable the auto grow setting in transmission if that's what you are talking about?..
- tlrobinson 18y agoµTorrent on Windows was leaps and bounds faster than other Windows clients (at least it was a couple years ago when I tested them). I'm not sure if the same is true for the Mac version, but if so I'm looking forward to switching to µTorrent.
- kqr2 18y agoFor speed, you can run rtorrent which is just a command line client. It also has a lot of nice options which may not be available in a gui. http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/rtorrent/rtorrent.1.html http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/rtorrent/rtorrent.1.html http://rtorrent.darwinports.com/ http://rtorrent.darwinports.com/
- Zev 18y agouTorrent is using 1% cpu and 14MB ram here on my MBP. rTorrent is using about the same on my server.
- est 18y agoIn fact the fastest HTTP/BT/ed2k download agent on this planet is Thunder(aka Gigaget), which is built on a hybrid P2SP network. Someone may consider it leeching, though.
- kaens 18y agoI'm so glad I found rtorrent. I had just started learning my way around (n)curses to implement basically the same client interface, in python. Instead, I'm looking at rtorrent's implementation, in my free time, and working on other things. Saved myself a lot of time trying to do something I probably would have done rather poorly.
- blasdel 18y agoI absolutely love rtorrent, I've used it for 3 years! I occasionally see crashes in extremely long-lived processes, but I've had it run for 6months+ with a week+ of CPU time used.
- mattmaroon 18y agouTorrent has awesome RSS functionality built in. I seem to remember Transmission's being nonexistent. Plus I just generally liked the UI much better. I had both running side by side at one point.
- unalone 18y agoHow does RSS help torrents?
- moxy 18y agoI would imagine that one could use the RSS feed directly from utorrent either to automatically download torrents, or to choose torrents to download based on the incoming feed.
- mattmaroon 18y agoYep.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI download all of the TV I watch that way. Tvrss.net is great.
- avinashv 18y agoI prefer Transmission's UI for 1, 2 or 3 torrents, but any more than that and the window becomes cluttered. uTorrent is unparalleled in number-of-torrents to memory-footprint ratio (at least, in Windows).
- mattmaroon 18y agoDoes transmission let you prioritize files within torrents? I don't remember it doing that, and I love that feature in uTorrent.
- rms 18y ago
- rufo 18y agoIn my personal tests, uTorrent running in Crossover on my Mac gets about 25%-50% higher transfer speeds than Transmission, and connects to peers faster.
- moxy 18y agoHm. A sample size of one.
- pistoriusp 18y agoI concur with your experience.
- arthurk 18y agoI just tried it myself and uTorrent does give me better transfer speeds than Transmission (~80kb/s vs. ~60kb/s). It's not much and I tend to like Transmission more because it's Open Source but I wonder why there is such a difference.
- tdavis 18y agoVery interesting; thanks for the thoughts, everyone. I will check out the Mac version.
- blasdel 18y agoDHT support is a huge reason, plus µTorrent's bandwidth-maximising logic is the best available. It makes a massive difference on large public trackers that are highly overloaded and unresponsive. You'll start downloading a lot quicker, and use much more bandwidth; because you can find more peers quicker, and make much better use of them. The best implementations available are µTorrent, rTorrent, and Azureus, all with different strong suits. I exclusively use rTorrent in GNU Screen, but I don't download much from large public trackers.
- muitocomplicado 18y agoNice release, but looks like there's a lot of features missing in this beta, like Labels, RSS, etc.
- JeffJenkins 18y agoI'm using Opera's built in client. It doesn't have many bells and whistles, but I rarely download torrents and it's already there.
- jmtame 18y agoDon't forget that torrents are useless if an ISP blocks them, like Comcast did with BitTorrent (and is currently appealing). Please remember to support the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008.
- tdavis 18y agoWe have Comcast and I've found that if I limit the upload to less than 50% of the cap the system never reacts.
- PStamatiou 18y agothat's nice but nothing beats newsgroups + unison
- jrnkntl 18y agosabnzbd+ beats the hell out of unison.
- jeresig 18y agoHuh... you're right, it looks totally awesome. I've been using Unison for a while and have been... less than excited about it. I'll have to try this right away.
- PStamatiou 18y agoactually, hellanzb is pretty spiffy. http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/12/how-to-download-with-newsgroups http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/12/how-to-download-with-new... it does my paring and unraring too
- silencio 18y agotoo slow for recent content like tv shows. i typically find torrents of the tv shows i watch right after they finish airing on the east coast and download them even quicker.
- subbu 18y agoAll newsgroups seem to be subscription based. Any free newsgroups just for finding/downloading stuff?
- PStamatiou 18y agoi pay $30/month for a high-end giganews account with 20 SSL connections.. simply put, it's fast, secure and maxes out my fiber line. as for free newsgroups, sometimes your ISP has usenet server access but naturally it's not very fast and binary retention is only but a few days, if at all.
- ericb 18y agoI know very little about torrents, aside from having tried a client once or twice. Is there any aspect of the way the torrent-ing process deals with files that reduces the chance of also getting a virus with the download? It seems like "official" torrents of say intrepid ibex are probably fine, but is other random content just as risky as it was on kazaa, etc?
- eggnet 18y agoFirst, you download a small .torrent file. That small file contains the hash of the contents as well as a hash of each segment of the contents of the final data. If you trust the source of the .torrent file then it doesn't matter who you connect to to get any portion of the actual torrent. Each segment of the file you receive is checked against a hash and the entire final data is also checked against a hash.
- litewulf 18y agoBut to answer the original question: yes it is just as risky. But because people are all uploading and downloading the same file (if they used the same torrent), bad files are negatively reinforced and good files positively.
- halo 18y agoNope. BitTorrent is just a protocol for transferring files. Much like other similar protocols like http, ftp etc it makes no attempt to limit the type of files relayed through it and is a little out of its scope.
- Feynman 18y agoD'oh! Intel only! :/
- thomasmallen 18y agoDoesn't work. Tried to associate my Torrent files to open in uTorrent, and when I opened them Finder locked up and just closed the file's window. Back to Transmission; I like the minimal UI in uTorrent, too bad it doesn't work yet.
- maximilian 18y agoHow does "Limit upload rate automatically" work? What does it limit it to? What kind of algorithm do they use?
- sah 18y agoNewer versions of uTorrent have features designed to maximize its bandwidth usage while getting out of the way of other network traffic, so that it doesn't monopolize your connection. Not much has been written about that stuff so far, but some of it is pretty interesting technology. There's a little bit of info in this forum thread: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813 http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813