If you’re in the habit of downloading TV programs, movies, music and other content then you’ll undoubtedly heard of BitTorrent which is generally considered the most effective way of doing this. Questions I often get asked are ‘What is this BitTorrent thing?’ and ‘How do I use it?’. For a good explanation of both these I’d refer people to an excellent guide on linuxreviews.com which explains pretty much everything you’d need to know. The BitTorrent protocol basically works in a fashion that you only get as good as you give so the faster you upload the faster you download. This basically excludes anyone with anything less than a broadband connection but has the advantage that you can get some very quick download speeds.
There are a number of download clients available all with their advantages and disadvantages. Last year I started a little project to build a web front end to the official Python client. It turned out pretty well and I’ve been using it successfully since then. Unfortunately, I’ve never had a great deal of time to work on it so I only ever implemented basic functions – I was planning on doing some work on it and releasing it properly, that was until I discovered that someone else had already done the same thing and probably a lot better than I could! The program I discovered is called ‘TorrentFlux‘ and is perfect for controlling your torrents remotely and anyone that just wants a client that won’t hog your CPU.
It includes some cool special features like RSS feeds and the ability to view torrent file meta information. Definitely worth a try if you haven’t already.
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