TorrentFlux

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.