uTorrent Mac Beta 0.90

Fedora 10 (Linux) was released last week. And, eager to update my ancient Fedora 6 on an equally ancient PC, I debated whether to use the Open Source Vuze (formerly Azureus) bittorrent client or try something else. Azureus (I haven't tried the renamed Vuze version) was both a useful tool and constant thorn in my side. It kept complaining about the ports I had open in my firewall, seemed to have fits everytime I updated Java (Azureus/Vuze is a Java app), and generally felt and looked out of place whether I ran it on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X. So, I decided to give the free µTorrent a try. I liked what I saw on a Windows Vista PC. "Too bad," I thought, "that it isn't available for the Mac". Then, I aw the announcement for...

µTorrent Mac 0.90 Beta

So, I installed this beta release on my Mac and tested it by downloading some episodes (legally I might add) of the excellent (IMHO) fan created Star Trek Phase II (aka New Voyages) video episodes. Believe it or not, the only thing I have ever used bittorrent for is to download Linux/BSD distros and Star Trek Phase II videos.

You can see the view of the General panel above.

This is what the files panel looks like.

And, this is what the Peers window panel looks like.

It turns out that using Star Trek Phase II episodes for my test was a good choice. Although they provide DVD ISO files, they also provide smaller WMV (Windows Media Video) files of episodes too. I used these smaller files for the test and discovered that the free edition of Flip4Mac provided by Microsoft was out of date (I guess I don't play WMV files often on my Mac) and needed an update.

You can see the Flip4Mac 2.2.1 free version update in progress above.

You can see a frame of the WMV file playing in Quicktime using the Flip4Mac CODEC in the screenshot above.

Although µTorrent Mac did the job in terms of downloading the Star Trek Phase II video files, there is one unsatisfying aspect to it: I could not easily tell how much of the file I had contributed back to the peer torrent community. I usually leave my feed back out running long enough to contribute my share back to the net. As you can see, the Microsoft Windows version of µTorrent provides a lot more information about each torrent.

Where the Mac version has tabs for General, Peers, and Files, the Windows version provides the following additional tabs/panes of information: Trackers, Pieces, Speed, Logger. And,it seemed to me that the General torrent pane has a lot more information present in the Windows version compared to the Mac version.

The main thing, however, is that I can now use the same (or nearly same) bittorrent tool when working on a Microsoft Windows PC or a Mac. And, I'm sure we'll see the Mac version display the same kind of information the Windows version does as µTorrent Mac gets closer to a production release (or perhaps the next version). In general, it looks like a good start and a good addition to my Mac toolkit.