Torrentage Project

I have chosen to develop the PHP clients mentioned in the previous entry. I will endeavour to bring more visual representations of the data, and offer time stamped comparisons in a visual representation.

I will call the combined and modified code: Torrentage.

PHP BitTorrent Clients

I have looked into other extended BitTorrent client functions, and have found interesting aspects added to clients written in PHP.

PHP clients run off a server set up by the user, and so offer the ability to have remote control of .torrents and also give the ability to have multiple user accounts and offer each one different admin permissions. A couple examples of these clients include Torrentvolve and Torrentflux.

These two clients are open source and allow anyone to modify their code any way they want. It would be interesting to develop one of these
clients to add extra visual representations of data to make them more user-friendly.

BitTorrent Data

I was interested in how data is displayed in different BitTorrent clients, so i decided to sample what different clients have to offer...

I took at a few of the most popular clients:

ABC (yet Another BitTorrent Client)
http://pingpong-abc.sourceforge.net/screenshot_3.1.png

BitComet
http://www.bitcomet.com/images/ss_main.png

µTorrent
http://download.utorrent.com/screenshots/utorrent3.png


I noticed that all clients essentially display and use the same data (download speed, progress etc. , but don't use much in the way of visualising the data. Out of the examples above the only visuals are used by µTorrent in the progress bar.

I think it would be a great benefit to BitTorrent clients to use more ways in displaying data, and could increase their userbase.

Slow Torrents

There is a lot of talk about BitTorrents being slow (as is mentioned on the BitTorrent Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent).

And there are even articles that provide steps on how to improve BitTorrent speeds: http://torrentfreak.com/speed-up-your-torrents/


It is a shame amongst the BitTorrent user community that so many do not upload to their full potential.

Most seeded torrent...

After a little browsing I found a project similar to what I was thinking up regarding torrents, where a University student has attempted to make the most seeded torrent in history... but failed, quite badly...

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3530260/The_most_seeded_torrent_on_the_internet_(for_the_search__for_the

P2P-Art

A fairly innovative project can be found at http://www.p2p-art.com/.

Although the project is basic an uninteresting, it shows the p2p protocol to be an overlooked tool for art distribution and creation.

BitTorrent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a protocol extension of P2P.

The original client has been around for a few years, and the developer released the source code for anyone to freely edit, which spawned dozens of different Torrent clients.

BitTorrent works by relying on the user having a Torrent client, and having a .torrent file of what they want to download. The client opens the .torrent flie, which contains information on what needs to be downloaded, and a list of torrent 'trackers' that literally track who is downloading/uploading torrents listed on their server.

BitTorrent is probably the latest target for controversey in the anti-p2p push by corporations, and many of the torrent tracking sites (that often offer the ability
to download the torrents) have come under fire, or have even been shut down due to legal action.

Popular torrent clients include:
µTorrent
Azureus
BitComet
BitTornado

Popular torrent tracker sites include:
http://www.demonoid.com
http://thepiratebay.org
http://isohunt.com
http://www.torrentz.com