A list the five best BitTorrent clients available for Linux so that you can download your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more.

1. uTorrent

• Streaming: Watch videos within seconds with progressive downloads – no need to wait. Especially great for previewing a file before committing to the full download.
• Remote Access: Start, stop, and monitor torrent downloads on the go. Access your client from any Web browser, or download our Android app.
• Ratings and Comments: Leverages the collective wisdom of the community to ensure the quality and security of downloaded torrents.
• Drag-and-Drop Sending: Easily send massive personal files – e.g. home movies, cell phone videos and hi-res photos. Select a file on your computer, drag it into the µTorrent “Drop files to send” box and a Web link is yours to share.
• Portable Mode: Run your µTorrent client directly from a USB key and take it with you anywhere.

2. Transmission

• Uses fewer resources than other clients
• Daemon ideal for servers, embedded systems, and headless use
• All these can be remote controlled by Web and Terminal clients
• Local Peer Discovery
• Full encryption, DHT, µTP, PEX and Magnet Link support

3. Deluge

• Web UI
• GTK+ UI
• BitTorrent Protocol Encryption
• Mainline DHT
• Local Peer Discovery (aka LSD)
• µTorrent Peer Exchange
• UPnP and NAT-PMP
• Proxy support
• Global and per-torrent speed limits
• Configurable bandwidth scheduler
• Password protection
• RSS (via Plugin)

4. KTorrent

• Upload and download speed capping / throttling & scheduling
• Internet searching with torrent search engines using KHTML part.
• Support for UDP trackers.
• IP address blocklist plugin
• Port forwarding with UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)
• Protocol encryption
• DHT (mainline version), and support for trackerless torrents
• µTorrent peer exchange (PEX) support

5. Vuze

• Vuze Meta Search offers aggregates results from a variety of top sites.
• Automatically adapts to optimize for your network.
• Watch in Full Screen HD (1080p).
• Can play virtually any type of video file – AVI, XVID, Quicktime, and more.
• Offline playback (on planes, trains, automobiles)
• Drag-and-drop content to play back on the device of your choice: iPhone, iPod, iPad, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PSP, and TiVo.
• Vuze Remote: control your Vuze client from any computer or smartphone with a web browser.
• RSS Feed support

Are you looking for BitTorrent software for your Mac? Here is a list of some of the more popular BitTorrent clients available for the Mac OS.

1. uTorrent

• µTorrent Remote and Mobile: Simple, secure access to µTorrent from anywhere. No complicated network configuration required. Add and manage your torrents from any browser, mobile browser and even an Android app.  
• Scheduler: Pre-schedule start, limit and stop activity for downloads at regular intervals throughout the week. A valuable feature if you’re stymied by metered and shared networks.
• Feeds: Subscribe and follow torrent RSS feeds. Set up Smart Feeds to auto-magically fetch torrents and start downloads for you.
• Scheduler: Start, limit and stop activity at regular intervals to abide by metered and shared networks.

2. Transmission

3. Bittorrent

• Lightweight client
• Local peer discovery
• Configurable bandwidth scheduler
• Global and per-torrent speed limiting
• RSS Downloader
• Spyware-Free

4. XTorrent

5. BitRocket

• RSS support (Download .torrent’s from within the application)
• Integrated (Customizable) Search Engine (Download .torrent’s from within the application)
• Flexible Filtering
• Torrent Generator
• Live Info View
• UPnP and NAT-PMP Port Forwarding

Control your Mac and Linux BitTorrent downloads on the go with this portable Android app.

• view your torrents list
• pause or resume a torrent
• adding a torrent from a http url
• support for Honeycomb (Android 3.0)

Follows through on promise it made last month "prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete."

Mac BitTorrent users can now enjoy the same engine that powers the popular Windows version.

ALSO READ: Top 5 BitTorrent Clients for MAC

For the most part, due to limitations in both the hardware and the service contract, you probably won’t be downloading much directly from the Internet to the phone itself.  There are a few beta Android applications that claim to allow for eitherBittorrent or Usenet downloading, but I have not been successful in getting them to work, either with 3G or Wi-Fi connections.  AndroidTorrent can open .torrent files, but does not actually get the download started, while the Groundhog Usenet reader can download the headers from binary newsgroups, but it cannot, as far as I can tell, actually download files in a binary format, much less handle the more complicatedunrar and par operations.  Rapidshare and Megaupload also proved to be unworkable from the built-in Android browser.  And it should be mentioned that large-scale downloading would almost assuredly create problems of bumping into the actual limits to the supposedly “unlimited” data plans (rumored to be around 5GB a month).

Despite those unfortunate limitations, Android-powered phones can be very useful for members of the downloading community, just in the role of portable dashboards for remote operation.  Torrent-fu for Bittorrent, and NZBdroid for Usenet allow users to control downloading from where ever they are via the Android phone, queuing up files to be enjoyed later, but also in the case of Torrent-fu giving users the ability to scan commercial goods via their barcodes, search major Bittorrent portals like BT-Junkie and IsoHunt, and then initiate downloads, all remotely.  And, of course, those files could be accessed by the Android phone if the remote computer is set up to serve files as well (although video files, for instance, would likely have to be re-encoded before they could be watched on the phone itself, but that’s a different article).

Torrent-fu is a free application available from the Android Marketplace and works on all variety of Android phones.  It acts as a client application for uTorrent (or Transmission) when the latter program is set up for control via its Web UI.  A bit of knowledge about port forwarding will be necessary, but without too much hassle you can leave uTorrent running on your home computer, and then both manage and add .torrent files to it completely from your phone.  Downloaded .torrent files, integrated search from within Torrent-fu, or most inventively, via the scanning of barcodes, can all generate downloads.  As a test, I scanned an old Big Lebowski DVD, and Torrent-fu did an excellent job of providing me with a number of different options for download.  Overall, Torrent-fu does an excellent job of giving any Android phone owner the power to amass a large media collection, while entirely away from their main computer.

NZBdroid is also available from the Android Marketplace, for either free or a $.99 donation, whatever the user decides.  It is very similar to Torrent-fu in concept, except that this app remotely controls a user’s SABnzbd+ downloading from Usenet.  As a huge fan of Usenet (and SABnzbd+) I truly love this application.  Since SABnzbd+ is essentially designed for a web-based interface anyway, NZBdroid is a bit easier to set up than Torrent-fu and really just operates in the background, only appearing when an .nzb file is downloaded from the web to the phone.  At that point the NZBdroid icon pops up allows for the information contained in the .nzb file (which is essentially just an XML file anyway) to the SABnzbd+ instance running on the home computer for eventual download.  All the options presented to control SABnzbd+ from the web are present on the phone as well.  NZBdroid is simple, powerful, and is absolutely worth the suggested $.99 donation for anybody seriously into Usenet downloading.

We are still very much in the early days of smart phones, as they continue to evolve from merely portable telephones into what are essentially small but relatively powerful computing devices.  Their processing power, storage limitations and most crucially data transmission bottlenecks (both physical and financial) prevent them from being used currently up to their potential for downloading from Bittorrent, Usenet and direct download sites, but there are some very cool applications like Torrent-fu and NZBdroid that already give them some very interesting functionality.  And in the future we are likely to see even more powerful phones with greater storage and even cheaper bandwidth capabilities that will let users fully take advantage of portable computing.

Have any of you tried out these programs?  Other Android apps for Bittorrent or Usenet?  How do the iPhone or the Pre compare in this regard?  I’d love to hear any other experiences Zeropaid users have had with mobile downloading.