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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

No surprise here, really.

uTorrent went downhill steadily after it got bought by BitTorrent. The original uT was beautiful in its well-thought minimalist design and lean code. The first thing BitTorrent did was they messed with the UI. Then started bundling some BS features like streaming, ratings and so on. And an elegant, simple, yet intricate piece of software started crumbling. I used to give uT as an example of really good software design and execution, but sadly it's no more... time for a rewrite it seems :)

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Transmission is my go-to client on linux and os x. Very smallish and simple UI. I wonder if their port to windows [1] is usable.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/trqtw/

Transmission is where its at. Can be controlled from a web interface and the command line to boot.

Transmission's great. Came with Ubuntu, lets me download Torrents from magnet URIs, out of the way with no hassle.

Or what mTorrent used to be (the greek m looks like a u, but isn't, and is pronounced "micro" for the SI prefix)

Are you talking about µTorrent? If so, µ is pronounced "mu" or "mew"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C

Ah, my bad. Its Wikipedia page is MTorrent though (uppercase)

I suppose everyone interested in a good uTorrent client already got v2.2.1 (or even v1.x) installer for future use and won't switch from it in the next decade, so it's perfectly reasonable to create new Vuze from version 3.x for everyone else. You see, people even call streaming - "essential" :).

IIRC, old versions like 1.6.1 were single exe files.

Streaming is an absolutely essential feature of uTorrent and is the only reason to still use it (well, maybe not after the scene shifted away from XVID and to mp4). Let's spare the discussion of whether or not it is healthy for the torrent; its plenty fine on torrents already well seeded.

Are there any other torrent apps that offer comparable streaming or front-loading of specific files. I've tried a couple abandoned open-source options but they were absolutely unusable.

qBittorrent [1] can download pieces in sequential order.

[1] http://www.qbittorrent.org/

Most clients don't allow this option as it makes the network less efficient. The swarm is efficient due to the fact that users download the pieces randomly and therefore are able to re-seed pieces that a low percentage of other users have.

Do you know of any research on this? It seems intuitive, but it'd be interesting to look at the numbers, simulated or not.

It's not random. Clients generally download the rarest pieces first. That way, the torrent is less likely to break when the swarm disappears.

If everyone downloads the most popular pieces first, then as the swarm shrinks, clients will soon only have pieces that everyone else has and nobody's downloads would finish.

The essence of uT is its ability to download. In that I'm perfectly fine with uT supporting in-order downloading, but any content-specific functionality is a feature bloat. It's a slippery slope that it is just all too easy to follow.

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