µTorrent for Mac released | Hacker News Reader

µTorrent for Mac released

mac.utorrent.com

77 pointsnickb46 comments

µTorrent 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.

To 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.

Err, you can disable the auto grow setting in transmission if that's what you are talking about?..

µTorrent 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.

For 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://rtorrent.darwinports.com/

uTorrent is using 1% cpu and 14MB ram here on my MBP. rTorrent is using about the same on my server.

In 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.

I'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.

I 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.

uTorrent 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.

How does RSS help torrents?

I 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.

Yep.

I download all of the TV I watch that way. Tvrss.net is great.

I 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).

Does transmission let you prioritize files within torrents? I don't remember it doing that, and I love that feature in uTorrent.

Yes it does

Well, doesn't look like this mac release has any RSS functionality at all.

In my personal tests, uTorrent running in Crossover on my Mac gets about 25%-50% higher transfer speeds than Transmission, and connects to peers faster.

Hm. A sample size of one.

What did you expect, a double blind test published in a peer reviewed journal?

It reminds me:

the phrase direct observation sounds so much better than anecdotal evidence. </quote> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283746

I concur with your experience.

I 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.

Very interesting; thanks for the thoughts, everyone. I will check out the Mac version.

DHT 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.

Nice release, but looks like there's a lot of features missing in this beta, like Labels, RSS, etc.

I'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.

that's nice but nothing beats newsgroups + unison

sabnzbd+ beats the hell out of unison.

Huh... 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.

actually, hellanzb is pretty spiffy.

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/12/how-to-download-with-new...

it does my paring and unraring too

too 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.

All newsgroups seem to be subscription based. Any free newsgroups just for finding/downloading stuff?

i 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.

My ISP was slow, but its binary retention was still at 3 months. It wasn't good for any major downloading, but if you kept on top of your downloading it was easy to follow a half-dozen shows. Although the speed varied considerably, I downloaded Blade Runner in 720p in one day, and a 420p episode of Pushing Daisies in 3 days.

Don'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.

We have Comcast and I've found that if I limit the upload to less than 50% of the cap the system never reacts.

I 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?

First, 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.

But 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.

Nope. 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.

How does "Limit upload rate automatically" work? What does it limit it to? What kind of algorithm do they use?

Newer 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

Doesn'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.

D'oh! Intel only! :/

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