BitTorrent To Refocus On What Made It Rich - uTorrent (torrentfreak.com)

Best known for its uTorrent client, BitTorrent Inc has been focusing more on other projects for a while. But now, with another shake-up imminent, the company has made a fresh commitment to focus on uTorrent and Mainline clients. From an article on TorrentFreak: Caught between the bad publicity generated by millions of pirates using the software for less than legal activities, a reliance on its huge revenue, plus its role in distributing content from signed-up artists, BitTorrent Inc. has at times been required to delicately maneuver around the client's very existence. Now, however, that might be about to change. According to a report from Variety, changes are underway at BitTorrent Inc that could see uTorrent and its Mainline sister client come back into the limelight. First up, the company has yet another new CEO. Rogelio Choy joins the company after spending two years at parking service Luxe Valet. However, Choy is also a former BitTorrent employee, serving as its Chief Operating Officer between 2012 and 2015. The hiring of Choy reportedly coincides with a shake-up of BitTorrent Inc.'s product line. BitTorrent Live, the patented live video streaming project developed by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, will be set loose as a separate, venture-funded company, Variety reports.

Comments

Oh joy.

[Chas]

So we can have another compromised ad-whoring torrent program to fuck our systems up with.

NO THANKS!

Re:Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can have another compromised ad-whoring torrent program to fuck our systems up with.

NO THANKS!

This isn't the Windows 10 thread!

Re:Oh joy.

[Highdude702]

im retarded never mind that. i was thinking RUtorrent. which is what I was talking about. Please mod my post above as idiotic and incorrect. Thank you!

Re:Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

was about to ask what the hell you smoking. at least you have the courage to correct your errors unlike some of the fail shit that is posted on here.

Re:Oh joy.

[kelemvor4]

Actually, apparently you have never used it. Its an ad-less client that can be setup for remote access across all platforms. It's one of the best available, only to be beaten by deluge in my opinion. I'ts not our fault that you choose to use shitty software without looking around. Some of the best most useful software I've ever used has been free OSS. Just have to google a little bit to find good shit, the good stuff wont always be on the first page.

WTF are you talking about? uTorrent is full of ads.

Re:Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent 2.2.1.25302 was the last usable version, before the development team shit the bed.

Re: Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

utorrent proper has had ads for years.

Re:Oh joy.

[Highdude702]

Oh i got that good stuff. Why do you think i got it mixed up? lol

Re:Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm anon right now as I'm too lazy to login right now. BUT, I wanted to acknowledge your post. I'll mod you +5 Informative with my faux mod points. Indeed this was the last good version of uTorrent. uTorrent themselves won't give you any support on any old version FYI so don't even bother asking on their forums...

Re: Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that they used to borrow your CPU to mine bitcoins for themselves. https://www.engadget.com/2015/03/06/utorrent-bitcoin-miner/

Re:Oh joy.

[thegarbz]

Sounds like you haven't updated your client in about 7 years. uTorrent is an laden malware shoveling auto updating piece of shit. It was once an awesome client, but people moved to the bloated garbage of azure or whatever it was called just to escape. And that's saying a lot.

Re:Oh joy.

[Highdude702]

If you look at my other post you will see I was mistaken and corrected myself I meant rutorrent, was kind of high at the time. But I believe deluge is the best client available all around

Re:Oh joy.

[thegarbz]

But I believe deluge is the best client available all around

Absolutely no doubt. Mind you I think it's client / server architecture is a killer feature given my torrent box is headless and GUIless.

But your original post was only half wrong even without the correction. uTorrent used to be absolutely awesome, and as someone else pointed out it is quite telling that when you type uTorrent into Google one of the suggestions is "utorrent 2.2.1" widely regarded as the last good version.

Re:Oh joy.

[Highdude702]

Yea I remember those days. I havent used it in atleast 7 years. so I couldnt tell you anymore. Deluge and RUTorrent if you want auto grabbing is the best. As you said my client on my main pc connects to the daemon on my home server. Really a wonderful tool. And super fast and agressive if you want it to be.

If I owned it

[thegarbz]

I would kill it with fire, scrub the name from the internet, and ensure copies of that once great client turned horrendous chugging piece of malware shit never surface again.

The best thing BitTorrent Inc could do is forget it ever bought uTorrent and then release the uTorrent version that predated the purchase. What an upgrade that would be.

Re:If I owned it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a mystery to me why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.

It offers the experience that uTorrent used to be fore it was completely destroyed, with the added benefit that it's also cross-platform.

Re:If I owned it

[Anonymous Coward]

Because qBitTorrent seems to only work with public trackers if I'm seeding torrents. I got fed up trying to configure the broken-out-of-the-box network settings and moved to uTorrent where it worked without any fuckery.

Re:If I owned it

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, yeah right. I use qBitTorrent out of the box all the time and I don't seed. how anyone could honestly look at uTorrent and qBittorrent and decide uTorrent is better is beyond belief. I am guessing you are somehow associated with uTorrent as opting for a malware infested platform only makes sense when you are not aware of the alternatives.

Re:If I owned it

[gravewax]

so in exchange for "easily" blocking seeding you accept malware, ads and Bitcoin miners being installed on your machine. personally I would have spent the 5 minutes to work out how to stop seeding, none of them make that simple (including utorrent), but it can be done. Certainly better to learn than be infested with the shit being pushed down with utorrent

Re:If I owned it

[dinfinity]

why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.

Because it isn't, last time I checked.

I install qBittorrent about once every six months, then uninstall it again because it just doesn't do what I want it to do (specifically in terms of the interface and its handling of RSS feeds). I actually kept it installed for a while before what.cd died, specifically because it was whitelisted there.

Tixati however has proven to be the client for me as it is very much power-user oriented, GUI-wise not Spartan but also not bloated (comparable to foobar2000 in my opinion). The only big downside is that it is not open source, which is why I keep an eye on qBittorrent.
Tixati has a terrible quite oldfashioned website, but it is worth checking out: https://www.tixati.com/discove...

Re:If I owned it

[Anonymous Coward]

qBittorrent has never been as good as uTorrent was. uTorrent _was_ a tiny, fast, feature packed little app that you could do anything you needed with. After it was bought it became bloated, slow, unsafe and ridiculous. qBittorrent is quite large in comparison, not as responsive, and the gui is not as nice as uTorrent's was. I looked and looked for a replacement for the crappy thing uTorrent became, but have never found it. Everything is always lacking in some big area.

Re:If I owned it

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't install any BitTorrent client on anything but a VM so I don't really give a damn if it destroys the OS

All the other crap gets routed home and never goes beyond the host machine. Doesn't seem to have an impact on its ability to handle torrents

That was easier than trying to figure out what magical beasts I had to sacrifice on the holy altar of qBitTorrent's config to get it to work, and that is worth it to me.

To the other anon who hasn't had any problems: bully for you

Re:If I owned it

[Kjella]

I install qBittorrent about once every six months, then uninstall it again because it just doesn't do what I want it to do (specifically in terms of the interface and its handling of RSS feeds). I actually kept it installed for a while before what.cd died, specifically because it was whitelisted there.

May I ask what you feel is missing? It got an RSS feed reader, you can set up automatic download filters - simple and regex, pick what feeds each rule applies to, you can set quite a few other options for your RSS downloads than your regular downloads. I see it doesn't really have a smart filter to prevent multiple versions of the same episode from getting downloaded, but usually I just amend the filter until there's only one version in practice.

Re:If I owned it

[thegarbz]

I moved to deluge myself. Extra bonus is the client server model allows me to run it on a headless server.

Re:If I owned it

[dinfinity]

IIRC, the issue was that it did not provide a usable interface to use the RSS feeds without auto-downloading.

I dislike auto-downloading, because I like to make varying choices about which release of an episode I'd like to see. Some releases have incorrect framerates or are otherwise of low quality, but if that release is the only one available when I want to watch the episode, then so be it. I really don't want to battle with programming an auto-downloader when eyeballing the right choice out of maybe 6 options for an episode costs me 5 seconds.

I also don't really want to download all of the options, and not just because it is unnecessary downloading. I'm all for giving back (my target-ratio is 25), but I really dislike supporting low-quality releases (as they tend to take up a significant share of the peers who don't care about quality, of which there are many). My upstream bandwidth should generally go to good releases.

In general though, I found the qBittorrent interface to be just too limited for my taste. Given some time I could probably enumerate all the little things I miss in the interface compared to Tixati (sequential downloading and fine-grained priority controls spring to mind). I'm going to check qBittorrent out in a couple of months again anyway. You could install Tixati and click around in it to make the comparison yourself.

Re:If I owned it

[mjwx]

It's a mystery to me why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.

This.

I switched to qBitTorrent years ago and haven't looked back.

My current mission is to find a nag free anti-virus that doesn't install all and sundry into every browser, nook and cranny it can.

Re:If I owned it

[Anonymous Coward]

of course it has an impact moron, even in a VM in chews up huge amounts of CPU cycles eating your money through your electricity bill. They have been caught multiple times screwing users over with things like a Bitcoin miners and malware.

Too Late?

[Voyager529]

When "2.2.1" is one of the Google Autocomplete terms for "utorrent", it basically sums up the fact that uTorrent was 'done' at about that time. Meanwhile, uTorrent qBittorrent and Transmission have nearly all the same features, and seedbox providers have more-or-less standardized on rTorrent/ruTorrent (RIP Torrentflux).

What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there? I'm thinking that uTorrent's best days are behind it, and as long as 2.2.1 lives on Oldversion or OldApps, that is its legacy.

Re:Too Late?

[beckett]

seedbox providers have more-or-less standardized on rTorrent/ruTorrent (RIP Torrentflux). What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there?

I guess this product's not for you, and the <<1% of torrenters that are in the market for seedboxes.

for the vast majority of torrent users, they're going to continue to use utorrent on their desktop at home, and they're going to find their torrent client by googling it, and continue to torrent on public sites. Don't need to thumb your nose at those users either, because it's the huge, cheap, local hard drives in all those home computers with crappy connections, running shitty utorrent that comprise the long tail catalogue of filez on both public and private sites.

Re:Too Late?

[Kjella]

What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there? I'm thinking that uTorrent's best days are behind it, and as long as 2.2.1 lives on Oldversion or OldApps, that is its legacy.

That's what I'm thinking too, I switched to qBittorrent that is open source and... it's done? Or well I see there's lots of tiny little enhancements and bugfixes in the release notes but honestly I can't think of a single noticeable change in the last couple years... nor any that I'd want, really. They'd have to pull off some entirely new non-torrent downloading functionality out of the hat to make me go back to uTorrent, which then begs the question.... why is it mixed up with uTorrent in the first place? Then again, looking at my peer logs a lot of other people use it (and by far most use 3.4.9), so I guess they have an audience. Whether they have one that'll let itself be monetized, well... whatever. There's plenty good alternatives if they get intrusive or obnoxious.

Re:Too Late?

[gitano_dbs]

The 2.2.1 version its from 2011, not really that "old". The next versions all crippled it on ADDs whitout adding real features.

Let the crappy adware die

[Anonymous Coward]

A one-time great, lightweight client compromised to the depths of hell by its corporate masters. Let it die.

BitTorrent Live: wasted potential

[Guspaz]

BitTorrent was so successful because it was an open system: an open standard with a public domain reference implementation. Anybody could use it, anybody could write a client for it.

BitTorrent Live failed because it was a closed system: a proprietary standard, a super clunky closed-source client, and a closed system that only allows a very small amount of curated content.

If BitTorrent Live had been as open as the original protocol, or at least free and open for non-commercial use, it could have been revolutionary, and put the power of video streaming back in the hands of individual users. BitTorrent (the company) could then have earned revenue by producing their own client or licensing the technology for commercial use. Instead, it's a flop that was dead-on-arrival.

Re:BitTorrent Live: wasted potential

[Anonymous Coward]

Live is not spinning out because it is failing.

Live is spinning out so it can get mainstream programming and crush Sling TV and DirecTV Now.

Re:

[dgaller]

Bad publicity having nothing to do with the BTC miner they tried to slip in.

uTorrent was not a BitTorrent Inc product...

[Anonymous Coward]

BitTorrent Inc bought the uTorrent client and utterly ruined it after it was already extremely popular. It was not developed in-house. This is important background information that should have been mentioned in the OP.

BitTorrent's original (mainline) client was very barebones and lightweight, with few features. One of the primary reasons BitTorrent took off and gained incredible success as a protocol was the widespread development of 3rd party clients around the basic protocol. uTorrent was one of the first "really good" 3rd party clients.

Reminds me of Skype

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me so much of Skype. The best 'upgrade' they could give it is to remove all the crap they screwed up and go back to the old version.

pile of shit

[gravewax]

uTorrent went from being my favourite app to being a Ad pushing bucket of shit. I won't touch it again, they lost my trust and loyalty and I don't think there is anything they can do to get it back. currently using qBittorrent, fast, easy, full featured and ad fucking free

W/out BT I'd neve have found oldversion.com

[karlandtanya]

Don't knock 'em--even assholes have a function...

Re:W/out BT I'd neve have found oldversion.com

[Anonymous Coward]

You only need one arsehole. BT can safely die without significantly affecting the number of arseholes in the world.

Re: W/out BT I'd neve have found oldversion.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but we need to be able to share our assholes so BT can stay.

Who's still even using it?

[joshuaf]

Hasn't everybody moved onto qbittorrent by now anyway? Kind of late to focus on utorrent, didn't most people ditch it a long time ago for something better?

Re: Who's still even using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

IDK I never updated Vuze and it works fine. Other than the fact it thinks it's XBMC(and does a shitty job at that) it's fine.

Peaked with uTorrent 2.2.1

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

uTorrent 2.2.1 = perfection, and continues to work to this day.

Re:Peaked with uTorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. Not even sure I updated to 2.2.1 I've just been cruising along saying no thank you every time it asks me if I want to update. Works beautifully.

Re:Peaked with uTorrent 2.2.1

[jbrizz]

It doesn't handle a fast connection very well though. I tried a lot of clients but settled on Transmission (Linux) as the one that best handled my 1000/500 connection. Anything libtorrent was the slowest, too CPU hungry, and utorrented seemed to thrash the disks too much.

qBittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are still using any other method to run torrents then please make the switch now!

too late

[Anonymous Coward]

We've all moved to other clients already, and we're comfy.

fix the bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can fix the corruption bug I reported in 2006.

Basically if you have a torrent it will download fine the first time. But get an 'updated' torrent and some files are smaller it will corrupt those file sometimes. Basically it will decide to put some of the next file in the 'extra' space. It only does this if you per-allocate files.

Or maybe they can fix the crashiness of large file torrents?

qBittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we all just used qBittorrent now instead.

reliance on huge revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

a reliance on its huge revenue

There's your problem. This is a company nobody needs; why would they have huge revenue? Their torrent client is only average in a market where there are some really nice ones (though people disagree about which ones are the nice ones, uTorrent comes out on top in hardly anyone's list). What do these people have to offer? Are they experts at something? Have they ever accomplished anything noteworthy, other than buying a trademark from a protocol inventor?

Where and when you can watch free hd movies

[Charllon]

I have spotted one site where you can watch free films released by talented producers https://www.clickforfestivals..... If you have any more links please submit in comment below