Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#91

Post by MayeulC » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:25 AM UTC

I'm really excited to see support for torrents v2. If only because transmission will stop chocking on hybrid torrent files, which should lead to more adoption across the board.

I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version.

Or grab a "super-torrent" that lists isos for all known distributions, select the ones you're interested in, and let it update... Of course, that can be used for file-sharing repositories too.

Maybe transmission is not interactive enough for such a use-case (you'd have to ask the user what they want to do when the torrent mutates, and possibly add simple scripting interfaces for more complex heuristics).

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#92

Post by capableweb » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:26 AM UTC

411111111111111 wrote: post #62

hrbf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably impossible to track that with any meaningful precision. Historically it’s the (central) tracker that implements the bookkeeping.

And as the reported stats originate from the torrent client... They're able to report whatever they want. I remember using some obscure tool before 2010 to intercept these packages and update them. I was in my early teens back then and used it to overreport my upload statistics by something like x2 on some private trackers, so they wouldn't ban me.

It used to be easy to falsify that information, but no more. Most private trackers would easily ban you for that nowadays, unless you can get all the other clients to also cheat with you using the same parameters. It's easy to cross-reference the information coming from N clients, so you'll be booted relatively quickly.

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#93

Post by weberer » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:27 AM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #20

As a Chinese, I really need the anti leeching capabilities, as too many people here use Xunlei that only download but never upload. Sad to see that the maintainers skip this again.

You need to sign up for a private tracker to get that.

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#94

Post by d_tr » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #23

When I first came to Linux I adopted Transmission. It seemed less featureful than others but now I like its simplicity, does everything it needs and it is also very reliable. It is not very known but there actually is a transmission-cli for common torrent operations that may come in handy some time.

The cli is also used by Fragments, a Gnome torrent app.

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#95

Post by MayeulC » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #44

londons_explore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webtorrent is a modification to the bittorrent protocol to allow it to be used from a web browser with no plugins/extensions. It's built on top of WebRTC. Webtorrent and regular torrents can exist of the same file, but crucially, at least some small percentage of the people in the network have to support both webtorrent and regular torrent to act as a kind of bridge between the two. If this isn't the case, you might…

So where would transmission support come into play ? In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent ? Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission ? Both ?

Well, webtorrents are just regular torrents using websockets as a transport mechanism, since you can't just have raw sockets from a browser sandbox.

If it supported these as a transport mechanism, transmission would be able to communicate with torrent clients that run in the browser, making the potential number of peers much higher (both for swarms that are mostly in-browser, and for those that have a majority of traditional clients). It would be very useful for seeding peertube videos from transmission, for instance, which was the quoted use-case.

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#96

Post by capableweb » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:29 AM UTC

lynguist wrote: post #82

cassepipe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain what it is why it would be nice to have ?

Webtorrent allows you to download torrents from a stock iPhone: you use a JavaScript interpreter from the app store (that is allowed as per the app store guidelines, same for Python interpreter), then just run Webtorrent that works in JavaScript only. Like that I downloaded a lot of things while outside.

Wait, you're not allowed to run anything using the BitTorrent protocol on iOS? I never had the need myself, but I just assumed it would be allowed, because there is no reasonable explanation you wouldn't. Like the whole protocol is banned from the AppStore?

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#97

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:30 AM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #78

londons_explore wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most BT clients do do a lookup of IP addresses. Many do it to provide little flags in the UI to say which country a user is from. Some also use the results as part of an algorithm to ban bad clients (if all clients from the same ISP are sending bad data, ban the whole ISP).

Transmission (or at least the official clients I have personally used) doesn't show country of a peer. Plus you can't determine the country of an IP by DNS, unless your geoip provider happens to be DNS-based; what you need is a geoip database.

Country is normally determined by doing a reverse DNS lookup, and then looking at the country code in the domain name. It's not very accurate, but you can do it for free without relying on any third party service or database.

Here is the libtorrent code that does it for every peer:

https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/blob/8786d17e59c90aee2c...

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#98

Post by capableweb » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:30 AM UTC

Y-bar wrote: post #15

diegoholiveira wrote: post #5

After Netflix and others streaming services, I stop using Transmission. What’s the current usage of BitTorrent?

For example, buying a 4K HDR movie on iTunes does not allow you to even cache it locally ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251320670 ), it is 100% streamed meaning you have to have a very sizeable and stable internet connection to watch it uninterrupted. Downloading it from a side channel means you can buy it on your favourite platform and actually keep it on your computer.

> Downloading it from a side channel means you can buy it on your favourite platform and actually keep it on your computer.

That would give the distribution platform the idea that what they are doing is OK. In this case, just download it and don't pay for it, if they are not actually providing you of any service. Vote with your wallet.

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#99

Post by squarefoot » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:32 AM UTC

lynguist wrote: post #79

squarefoot wrote: post #57

If someone asks me to install a Torrent client on a single machine, my favorite would be QBittorrent, however at home I use XigmaNAS' Transmission client extensively, and operate it from other machines in the LAN using the Transgui interface (also available on Windows and MacOS). This allows me to turn off everything but the NAS, which with all RAID disks spun down and a TDP of 15 Watts makes for some good energy sav…

Qbittorrent unfortunately turned into a buggy mess and has no leadership. The github has hundreds of known issues that are not addressed. No qbittorrent client works reliably on Windows or Mac for at least a year or two. It gets hung up scanning downloaded torrents etc.

Didn't know about that, thanks for the heads up.

Re: Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

#100

Post by capableweb » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #91

I'm really excited to see support for torrents v2. If only because transmission will stop chocking on hybrid torrent files, which should lead to more adoption across the board. I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version. Or grab a "super-torrent" that lists isos…

> I wish transmission supported mutable torrents (BEP46). It would allow completely re-thinking distribution: grab a torrent of your favorite distribution, and have it auto-update to the latest version.

That sounds horrible. My own expectation is that if I have a torrent file/magnet link and I download from it, I always get the same content. This is why I commonly keep the magnet link/torrent file around even if I delete the content itself, so if I want the same thing in the future, I just re-download it and I'm 100% it's exactly the same.

This change would break that expectation, for what benefit? This could be implemented as a HTTP call instead, that serves different torrent files, so you can just change whatever serves the torrent file in order to mutate what gets downloaded.