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

A roundup of the five best BitTorrent clients available for downloading 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. 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

3. BitTorrent (mainline)

• RSS feed support.
• Download and upload scheduling.
• Transfer caps to avoid ISP overusage fees.
• Add Torrent from URL.
• Intelligent: BitTorrent auto-adjusts bandwidth usage based upon your network and the Internet.
• Plug-n-Play.
• Advanced: BitTorrent leverages µTP, the latest BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent maximizes the use of network bandwidth while reducing congestion & it doesn't interfere with your other surfing.
• Low memory footprint.

4. BitTornado

• Upload/download speed throttling.
• Option of Disabling and Setting Priority of Files in any torrent.
• Detailed information about connections to other peers.
• UPnP Port Forwarding (Universal Plug and Play).
• IPv6 support (OS support required).
• PE/MSE support.
• Quick resume.

5. BitComet

• HTTP/FTP Download.
• Preview while Downloading: Preview of avi, rmvb, wmv and other video files is available during downloading process.
• Magnet URI: Start BitTorrent download without .torrent file any more, using DHT network.
• Disabling or Setting Priority of files in torrent: Files can be skipped for downloading, or set to higher / lower priority, allowing you to select which file finish first.

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

Updated version feature channels users can browse through to find content, as well as the option to rate and comment on torrents.

BitTorrent Mainline client 7.1 introduces apps to "provide a flexible, easy way to add and extend BitTorrent functionality, discover new media/games/software, and lots of other cool things at your leisure."

2008 was an interesting year in file-sharing and 2009 didn't necessarily disappoint. There was plenty of ways to look at it, but there is one way one can look at the year - eventful. ZeroPaid reviews 2009.

Earlier this year I reported how the latest version of the Vuze BitTorrent client lets you drag-and-drop content from your Vuze Library (or desktop) for playback on a number of devices.

Now it’s added Tivo and PSPs to the list of options.

The way it works is that devices simply appear in the Vuze sidebar when they’re available.  All you have to do is drag-and-drop to the device of your choice, and Vuze auto-detects whether or not the video format is compatible with device you select, convert the file if necessary, and make it available for playback.

All you have to do is sit-back and play your HD content.

“Our goal is simple:  Empower you to watch your content on any screen you want,” reads a post on the Vuze blog.

Adding Tivo makes for an interesting new option and pushes Vuze even further into the living room.

The only thing still lacking on the Vuze HD Network is quality content, but unless it starts embedding ads like Hulu it won’t be able to offer copyright holders financial incentives to make offering their content worthwhile, and ads are sort anathema to everything BitTorrent stands for.

It’s a tough call.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

The crew behind the BitTorrent client Vuze read with disbelief last week that Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton said he couldn’t see “anything good having come from the Internet.”

“Period,” in fact.

Vuze says that part of the problem Lynton may have with the Internet is that although there is finally the technology to effectively deliver content online, “the industry has only begun to solve the business model side of how we productively monetize this distribution.”

It says that what Sony and other Hollywood execs need to do is adopt the “burning platform paradigm,” that is “experiment like your business is at stake.” Having already watched the music industry run itself into the ground for refusing to evolve and embrace digital content distribution, the movie industry ought to take heed and recognize that “consumers are changing.”

“Let’s change with them, and identify business models that embrace this change,” it adds.

To this end Vuze commissioned a survey that concludes that BitTorrent users, specifically Vuze, are “Hollywood’s best customers.”

According to the data, Vuze users were 34% more likely than average Internet users to have gone to the movies or rented a DVD, and 24% more likely to have purchased one.

“We’ve been making the case for years now that Vuze users are avid entertainment fans,” it observes, and it may just be right.

For TV producers the news is a bit grim, for 40% of Vuze users report watching less live TV and as a whole.

The report sampled 693 Vuze users and 606 “general” Internet users, so its conclusions are arguably a bit light.

However, the report does square nicely with other done previous that have come to the same conclusion: file-sharers consume more entertainment products.

“Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” conducted by the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway, and the second largest in all of Europe, concluded that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

“The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada,” a study commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, found that for every album downloaded illegally legal CD purchases increased by 0.44, or by about half an album.

Admittedly both cover music and not movies, but that’s only because the issue hasn’t been as of great importance to Hollywood as it has been the music industry until recently as households acquire faster and faster Internet connection speeds.

Either way, the message to Hollywood should be the same, and that is that it needs to stay ahead of the game and listen to what consumers want. Right now it’s apparently ignoring its “best customers” at its own peril. Consumers, especially Vuze, or BitTorrent users in general for that matter, don’t mind paying for digital content so long as its fairly priced and easily accessible.

jared@zeropaid.com

Vuze, formerly Azureus, continues to try and create new ways for users of the BitTorrent client to watch HD video content on devices that they “already care about and own.”

Back in March it introduced a new Sidebar tool feature that lets you to drag-and-drop videos from your Vuze Library (or desktop) to devices such as an iPhone, PS3, or an XBox 360.

Now it’s expanding their effort to deliver HD video content wherever, whenever you want them, by introducing “Vuze to Go,” a completely portable, self-contained version of the Vuze BitTorrent client that installs and runs on and from any portable disk drive.

“Vuze To Go” installs on any portable disk drive, like a USB hard drive or a flash thumb drive, rather than on your computer’s hard drive, and enables access to the full functionality of Vuze – anytime and anywhere.,” reads a Vuze blog post describing the new application. “Just plug your portable drive (complete with Vuze To Go) into any PC and you’re ready to go. Vuze will run seamlessly from the portable drive, and all of your downloads can also go directly to that drive.”

“And, like Vuze on your main computer, you’ll be able to play all the content in your Vuze Library even when you’re offline,” it adds.

The only drawback is that the PC version of “Vuze to Go” costs $9.99, with a free 2-week trial for those wanting to take it for a test drive first. Some may balk at the cost, but you have to consider the price in the context of accessing Vuze’s HD video library whenever, and wherever you like.

jared@zeropaid.com

Vuze, formerly Azureus, has always distinguished itself by enabling users to install a wide variety of plugins to customize the BitTorrent client and the downloading experience. From SafePeer (highly recommended by the way) to 3D View the list of available Vuze plugins goes on and on.

Now Vuze has another plugin to join their ranks – SwarmScreen.

SwarmScreen makes it harder for others to figure out your downloading habits in BitTorrent by hiding your real BitTorrent traffic in a sea of connections to randomly selected torrents.

Why is this necessary?

Apparently researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new “guilt-by-association attack” whereby BitTorrent communities can be identified simply by monitoring the downloading behavior of one user in that community

Simply put, the exploit allows copyright holders who determine what content a single BitTorrent user is sharing to then convincingly argue that all users in the communities are doing the same without monitoring them directly.

“This was particularly surprising because BitTorrent is designed to establish connections at random, so there is no a priori reason for such strong communities to exist,” says Fabián Bustamante, one of the study’s authors.

From the SwarmScreen project page:

We show that strong communities naturally form in BitTorrent, with users inside a typical community being 5 to 25 times more likely to connect to each other than with users outside. Historically, this ability to classify users has been abused by third parties in ways that violate individual privacy. We show how these strong communities enable a guilt-by- association attack, where an entire community of users can be classified by monitoring one of its members. Our study demonstrates that, through a single observation point, an attacker trying to identify such communities can reveal 50% of the network using only knowledge about a peer’s neighbors and their neighbors (i.e., up to two hops away). Further, an attacker monitoring only 1% of the network can correctly assign users to their communities of interest more than 86% of the time. (.pdf)

Enter SwarmScreen. SwarmScreen is designed to obfuscate your downloading habits by using multiple swarms to hide your traffic.

And so that your traffic doesn’t look suspicious, SwarmScreen carefully adjusts random connections so that they appear the same as your real ones.

The downside is, as would seem obvious, that it does indeed slow your download speeds. However, it does allow users to control the level of privacy/performance tradeoff via an “intuitive tuning knob.”

“We call our tuning knob SPF (SwarmScreen Protection Factor) — analogous to sunscreen, the higher the setting, the more privacy you get,” says the plugins FAQ page. “Lower SPF values reduce privacy but give you better download performance, so you can pick the trade-off between privacy and performance.”

In short, SwarmScreen gives Vuze users another layer of downloading security in an increasingly monitored P2P world.