eMule Introduces Merkur

The opensource filesharing client
eMule that connects to the edonkey servernetwork has introduced a (fairly) innovating feature in the filesharing world. The feature is called Merkur. Merkur compresses files when they are downloaded. The developers claim it does not take much cpu power and compression would be something in the range of 0% (zip, rar, ace), 2-15% (bin, avi, mp3) and 15%-? (uncompressed files). Besides the compression, another advantage of Merkur is that compressed packages are checked for transfer errors, so you only have to redownload smaller parts of the file when corruption is detected.



eMule is (unlike edonkey) under heavy development. The project is in alpha status and is still very young (first release: July 7, 2002). At this time, the program only supports edonkey filelinks, not Overnet links.



The release of alternative clients for programs that are (practically) not under development seems to become a trend in filesharing. DC++ as a replacement for Neo-Modus Direct Connect is maybe the best example. DC++ has developed features (such as Multiple Hub Connections, cleaned up interface and manually resuming files from different source even if it has a different name) that are not in the original client.



Gnucleus



By the end of June,
Gnucleus seemed to be leading the Gnutella pack, but since the release of 1.8.4, all has been very quiet and now it is said the client is lagging behind and is even hurting the network. But there is good news, Gnucleus is not dead, there are beta versions which introduce the following new features in Gnucleus:


* Queuing (is on the way, but not sure if it’s in the beta)

* Implementation of PFSP (The same protocol Shareaza uses for partial file downloading)

* Gnucleus is split in two. GnucDNA (the core network) and GnucleusR3 (the GUI). This way, it’s easier to make changes to the program.