14 DAY TRIAL // uTorrent, the most popular bittorrent client in the world now owned and developed by BitTorrent, is getting closer to the 2.0 release, which packs some pretty big features and updates. One feature is support for the new uTP protocol, the latest iteration of the BitTorrent protocol dating from 2001, which can adjust bandwidth consumption depending on network conditions. The new uTorrent 2.0 Release Candidate 1 also comes with very interesting features and support for video streaming. UPDATE: Video streaming was introduced in the latest 2.1 alpha release, not in the release candidate version.
The official release notes for the RC list these updates:
-We've added UDP tracker support! -uTP has been improved significantly over the previous alpha, with many bugs fixed and performance improvements. It's no longer hidden in Advanced settings. -The setup dialog has been overhauled to make it much easier to use and with a built-in speed test. It's still not quite complete yet, but this will give you a good taste of what we're up to with it! -A new transfer cap feature has been added to track bandwidth usage, along with graphs to show your usage.
Better things are still to come, though. As TorrentFreak notes that perhaps the most exciting new feature in the upcoming 2.1 build is the video streaming functionality now available. A fresh “Stream” tab is visible in the torrents list that has a “play” button for the video ones. Clicking on it will start “buffering” the video and, after a while, seconds or minutes, depending on your connection speed, the number of seeds and peers and so on, it will turn green indicating you can start watching the video.
This type of functionality for peer to peer protocols may have seemed far-fetched even a few years ago but now with streaming video widely available thanks to the likes of YouTube, most people don't have the patience to wait for a movie to download. The technology also opens a lot of possibilities for content providers and there are even plans to take it one step further by enabling p2p live streaming, something that BitTorrent is currently working on.
uTorrent 2.0 Release Candidate 1 and 2.1 alpha for Windows are available for download here.