The BitTorrent team is happy to welcome Dr. James Lee as a senior advisor to the company. He will be working with us on device initiatives in the BitTorrent ecosystem
Learn more about Dr. Lee and his role here.
Archive for December, 2010
Pioneer One Episode 2 Premieres
For all you Pioneer One fans anxiously awaiting the next episode in the made for BitTorrent series, today is the day. Pioneer One Episode 2 is here! We’ve partnered with our friends at VODO again to bring you this award-winning sci-fi drama for free, which is in part to your generous donations along with sponsorship support from VeriSign’s .TV made it happen.
Episodes one and two may be downloaded immediately via a custom app within BitTorrent Mainline and μTorrent App Studio; or download the torrent via VODO here.
If you haven’t seen the Pioneer One pilot (released in June), we highly recommend you check it out. It’s a great series, and we encourage you to support filmmakers who are embracing new digital distribution models.
We’d also like to thank everyone in the broader BitTorrent community whose incredible support resulted in today’s release. Over a million of you downloaded the film, and your direct contributions to the filmmakers totaled about $33,000. Your donations are proving that this alternative digital distribution model is working, and both fans and artists are benefitting.
Future episodes are already in production, so stay tuned! You can also subscribe to Pioneer One’s email newsletter for updates. And don’t forget to follow Pioneer One on Facebook and Twitter.
If you’re a creator you may be thinking, “How do I feature my content on BitTorrent?” Musicians and filmmakers are invited to submit their works for the chance to be spotlighted to millions of BitTorrent users around the world as part of BitTorrent’s Featured Artist Pilot Program. This is how we are doing our part to bring great content to our users, while also giving emerging artists the chance to build a fan base through the App Studio.
- Jordy -
New Ways to Share and Play Your Torrents
Today we are releasing two new apps to enhance your BitTorrent and μTorrent experience, and allow you to do things not before possible. As with past apps, our goal is to continue to improve the user experience by adding new functionality that is simple and user friendly.
The first is a VLC player app, which automatically displays the torrents you’ve downloaded in a list and allows you to play each through the VLC media player with a single click. Many of you may know that VLC is a media player that can handle just about any file type. So, when you click to play a file, the chance of you getting that annoying dialog asking you to find the program to play the file is very small – VLC just knows. As such, it’s a perfect match to the varied file types in the BitTorrent ecosystem. Keeping with the qualities that we know you value, this app is also light and easy to use.
The second new app is µCast, which makes it easy for you to create an RSS feed of your torrents and share it with others. For example, maybe you want to send a collection of your favorite music from the Zulu Music app to your friends. To do this, simply create a name for your TorrentCast (e.g. http://uca.st/MyFavoriteIndieMusic) and then choose the files you want to share with your friends. When you’re done, send your friends your TorrentCast link. They in turn will load the link into their BitTorrent client (File/Add RSS Feed), and will then have access to your favorite files. And there’s more. Your TorrentCast is like a living mix tape, because you can add files at any time and your friends will instantly get them. You can also open up your TorrentCast to collaboration, so your friends can also add files to it.
Also, as part of our effort to help artists reach BitTorrent users, µCast can be used as a way for creators to get their music and movies to their fans. How? Just as described above, except that you first have to convert your content to a torrent. Luckily, this isn’t too difficult…even if it sounds a bit technical. Here is how:
- From the µTorrent or BitTorrent client, select File/Create New Torrent (or CNTRL N).
- Locate a file or file directory on your computer, hard drive, server, etc. that you want to publish.
- Under “Trackers,” make sure the following trackers are listed; if they’re not, add them exactly as shown:
- - udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
- - udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
- Unless you know what you’re doing, you can leave the other fields blank. Then just choose where to save the Torrent.
- Now you just need to add the torrent to your µTorrent or BitTorrent client by selecting File/Add Torrent (or CTRL O) and selecting the torrent(s) you just created. Then you can use µCast to add these torrents as described above.
We think you’ll be happy with these apps, and we’ll be listening closely to your feedback for ways to improve them. Enjoy!
- Jordy -
μTorrent Mac Beta
Today, we are releasing a beta version of the μTorrent Mac client. Several of the enhancements in this version have been top requests from you – the users – within our Idea Bank. As was the original intent of the Idea Bank, we are taking your valuable feedback and using it to enhance and provide an even better μTorrent Mac experience!
Here are some of the new key feature enhancements:
- Add Torrent Dialog with Save Settings and File Selection – When a torrent is added via upload or URL, there is a new dialog, which allows you to choose a download location and make decisions about what files to include in the download.
- Growl Support – μTorrent now supports the popular Growl notification system. Users can configure notifications when downloads or seeding is complete or when a torrent has been auto-added.
- Dock Icon Badging – The dock icon can now display real-time upload and/or download speed information.
- Move Torrent Save Location – Now you can right click on a torrent and go to advanced and set a new download location. The relevant files will be moved to a new location for the user without interrupting the download.
We have also made a few other minor updates, which can all be found in the release notes. As always, we look forward to your feedback!
- Brett -
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