
Picotorrent: a tiny, hackable BitTorrent client - seddin
https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent
======
kuroguro
They decided to call it "pico torrent" even tho the client is several times
larger than uTorrent?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Well, not several times.

uTorrent for Windows: 2.84 MB
[https://www.utorrent.com/downloads/win](https://www.utorrent.com/downloads/win)

picotorrent.exe: 3.98 MB
[https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent/releases](https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent/releases)

picotorrent also seems to come with a language pack while you download
uTorrent's separately at 1.3 MB. Not that I think it matters.

Also, don't forget to include any ads or malware that might download with your
next version of uTorrent:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware)

~~~
yborg
macOS Transmission : 10.6 MB macOS Slack : 185.8 MB

But it must be noted that Transmission doesn't support animated emojis.

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huhtenberg
> _PicoTorrent depends only on what Rasterbar-libtorrent needs_

The UI appears to be based on wxWidgets, so that would be another dependency.

~~~
viktorelofsson
Author here - the readme is a bit outdated, sorry about that :) wxWidgets is a
hard dependency since a few versions back.

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dang
2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11587039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11587039)

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microcolonel
I'm still waiting for WebTorrent to be implemented in more clients (including
libtorrent, which AFAIK underlies Picotorrent). I'd love to be able to quickly
deploy headless WebTorrent video seeds, especially if they were sequence-aware
(sending chunks in order, possibly incl. MPEG DASH format, though that is
patented somehow); and maybe commodity BitTorrent + WebTorrent CDNs could
become commonplace.

~~~
fro0116
I'm a huge fan of the WebTorrent protocol too, and think it has potential to
completely transform the content distribution paradigm on the web.

However, the JS implementation leaves much to be desired. It's a huge resource
hog compared to native libraries like libtorrent and torrents often freeze for
no apparent reason on faster connections. Development seems to have also
stalled quite a bit in recent times.

At this point I'd be more confident betting on something like IPFS in the long
term.

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Sektor
For years I've actually been looking for a client that can handle seeding 500+
files and not just completely crap itself all the time. uTorrent seems to be a
bit 'unsafe' and full of ads, deluge's web interface regularly falls over.
What options are there out there right now?

~~~
livueta
I've been a happy Transmission user for a while now.

    
    
      - nice variety of clients/platforms
    
      - webui isn't completely terrible
    
      - works well in daemon mode
    
      - haven't encountered perf issues seeding 2k+ torrents/~5TB data
    
      - supports modern features (DHT, PEX, magnets)

~~~
Mister_X
Yes, Transmission is the most stable client I've ever used (Win or Linux), but
like so may others, don't run out of disk space, or you're in for a major
hassle rebuilding your index.

~~~
ksec
Only problem is Transmission uses its own core, and as a whole, core + UI it
doesn't seems to be getting anymore development.

Which libtorrent just had its 1.2 released that has lots of changes.

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KayL
Is it the only BitTorrent client with regex file filters?

Is there any client able to perform scripts to interact with the client API
and downloaded files?

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mastrsushi
What makes this any better than Transmission?

~~~
Avamander
Maybe it doesn't have any legacy cruft?

It's worse than Transmission because it has no mention of any good modern-ish
features such as DHT, PEX, LSD(LPD) and it lacks both Linux, OSX and BSD
support. Oh and it's banned (not-whitelisted) from all the private trackers.

~~~
claudiawerner
In my experience most private trackers allow clients that use libtorrent in
general rather than specific clients that use it (e.g rTorrent).

~~~
kipari
The readme for this project specifies the user agent of the client as
Picotorrent/x.y.z, which makes me think that most private trackers would block
it.

~~~
kabwj
Spoof it.

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z3t4
I wonder why is not not Bittorrent built into browsers ?

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ksec
I initially wrote a reply about usage pattern being different because
uploading tends to be slower and requires the browser to be always on. But
then there is no reason why it can't resume uploading to at least 1:1 Ratio
next time it is opened.

Yes, why not? BT have many legitimate use-case.

~~~
thepangolino
If I remember correctly, the Opera browser used to have a BitTorrent client.

Then again, back then pretty much all browsers used to have an RSS reader as
well.

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qwerty456127
Windows-only?

