Transmission FOSS BitTorrent client hits version 4.0

Version 4 of the most widely used FOSS BitTorrent client is here, and it's worth a look if you have any difficulties with streaming media services. Transmission is the default BitTorrent client for quite a few Linux distros. As a general rule we advise against running anything-point-zero releases of, well, pretty much anything …

[Neil Barnes]

Second hand DVDs are not very cheap in second hand shops

They're ridiculously cheap. Round here, half a Euro for a CD and a Euro for a DVD which will have cost significantly more. That's cheap enough to pick up a handful, watch them, and take them back to the shop next week if you don't want to keep them - keep the goodness going around and help the charity too. What's not to like?

Why? I guess because, hey, everything's streaming now, granddad. You want a Dolby with that?

But some of us remember that unless the medium is in your hand (or on your shelf) you're playing it at someone else's pleasure...

[katrinab]

Re: Second hand DVDs are not very cheap in second hand shops

You could always rip them to Jellyfin if you prefer the streaming interface, as I do.

Last time I looked, which admitedly was a long time ago, CDs actually tended to cost more when bought new than DVDs. Even if you compared the CD soundtrack to a movie with a DVD of the movie containing the same sound track with added dialogue and video.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Second hand DVDs

It seems to depend where you shop - my local is doing five for a quid at the moment! The problem is that after a while you realise you have most of the films you want to watch, and the ones on the charity shop rack are either ones you've got already or ones you'd have to be forced to watch in a Clockwork Orange chair.

The other suspicion about streaming services is that (especially in the current climate) you never know whether some old favourite is going to be butchered, or suppressed entirely, at the behest of whatever activism is flavour of the month.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Second hand DVDs are not very cheap in second hand shops

I've had a couple of DVD players die on me due to shoddy mechanics – no these were not the cheapest devices – so it's rip and stream. Also, MPEG2 really is showing its age with artefacts and a complete inability to handle colour gradients.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

Well... Yes and no...

"Region locking" means that DVDs bought in one country may not play in another, unless your player is "multi region". Some DVD players allow "region switching", but then only a fixed number of times before it sticks to one region. Woe betide anyone who switches region too often to play that Japanese import of My Neighbour Totoro and then finds their DVD player will only play Japanese DVDs.

And this sort of bullshit was baked into the very design of DVDs by the consortium of big studios that came up with them.

edit - bad example, it turns out Japan is in the same "region" as the UK (region 2). Substitute for Hong-Kong import of Enter the Dragon, rinse, and repeat.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

Hong-Kong import is likely a bad example too: unless you are careful you will get a region free pirate copy. Back when I worked there one clue was a much lower price and the film was thoroughly compressed to fit on a CD.

If you do need multi-region, use a USB DVD player and VLC. VLC cracks the decryption without setting the region code on the player. It does like to have a region code to select the preferred language audio and subtitle tracks but it never tells the drive.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

MakeMKV (for backup purposes only, obviously) seems to ignore the region as well.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

They're looking for ways, though . . .

[captain veg]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

Well they tried to "prevoke" it, before DVD Jon rode to the rescue.

-A.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

Wasn't Australia in the same region as South America? Been so long, I can't quite remember.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

Yes, but that was a defacto extra region: region 4 PAL format was Oceania, NTSC was South America. When they first came out, you needed a clever TV to not care about the difference.

I think someone got a High Court of Australia ruling that region encoding was an illegal conspiracy against competition in Australian consumer law, so selling players that enforced the restriction was technically illegal. You would find players sold in boxes that had been opened and resealed, saying "customised for Australian conditions" without spelling out exactly what that meant: they were region-free.

[ThatOne]

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

> Some DVD players allow "region switching", but then only a fixed number of times before it sticks to one region.

That isn't a problem IMHO: Unless you're a globetrotter and buy DVDs on all your trips all over the world, you'd usually just have one other country you might regularly buy DVDs from, and in this case it's as convenient to dedicate a DVD player just to that region (assuming it's different). DVD players are dirt cheap nowadays...

[chivo243]

Most DVDs

Most that came through my hands were run through handbrake, and the file is easily found in my library, where as the DVD may be in any of 7 different boxes spread over three different countries and two continents...

[mickaroo]

Re: Most DVDs

Mostly a "me too" reply. Whenever I'm bored on a slow Thursday, I run a few more of my DVDs through Handbrake and store them in my movie archive.

I use an ancient LG-DVD USB drive that has a double USB-A plug. One plug is data and power, the other is power only. That dates back to the days when one USB port couldn't supply enough oomph to power the drive.

And it's region-free ]:-)

[Cian_]

Something possibly of interest to said Reg FOSS desk is the origins of Transmission - and also Handbrake the popular media transcoder. Both started as native BeOS apps written by the same author due to there being no other native applications for it.

Both have long since lost BeOS support, or even Haiku support except using QT. Shows the afterlife something can have when its OSS

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> Both started as native BeOS apps

That is very cool. I didn't know that -- thank you!

One of my regular go-to first install apps on my handful of Windows boxen is Process Controller, another BeOS port:

https://www.softpaz.com/software/download-process-controller-windows-6363.htm

[vekkq]

Transmission running on Windows

That is new.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Transmission running on Windows

[Author here]

> That is new.

Not all that new. Version 3 ran on Windows too and shipped with a Windows installer. I've used it.

https://github.com/transmission/transmission/releases/tag/3.00

[vekkq]

Re: Transmission running on Windows

Thank you for pointing that out.

I think to remember that Transmission's demon didn't run on Windows, but that must have been forever ago. 2.97 also works in Windows.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Still torrenting

Anything big and public domain is usually faster by BitTorrent. The typical 1 to 25 Gbps that you'd get from volunteer paid cloud/colo machines is nothing compared to global demand. For a 100 GB file, it's minutes versus days.

IPFS seemed promising but the clients seem too short-lived to provide distributed caching.

[FrogsAndChips]

Re: Still torrenting too

For some albums that I want to add to my home media player but am too lazy to rip from the CD sitting on my shelves.

For this show that I started watching on Netflix but the last season is now only available on Amazon or Apple TV and I don't want to subscribe to an extra service.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: Still torrenting too

I was thinking along the lines of boot disks, classic movies, AI training sets, and Kiwix archives that aren't piracy.

Just rotate the streaming service subscription so you're only paying for one at a time. Also, definitely rip those old CDs. Some modern releases have been remastered with extreme dynamic range compression and less bass.

[DrBobK]

Re: Still torrenting

A friend of mine (cough cough) torrents TV shows that he has access to through various streaming services that he has paid accounts on because there are fewer glitches watching the torrented file than when watching the stream.

[Jamie Jones]

Transmission 3.0

Despite it's name, transmission 3.0 was only a small increment from the latest 2.9x version.

[rickabillie]

Yeah, I called Netflix and asked them about how divorced households would work, they had no idea and the CS agent gave me two answers, one that it would not work (kids could not use Netflix on their phone at their mom's house), then that they could. If it just has to hit my wifi once a month, that's fine, they are here more than half of the time. Their mom has Netflix too, but to ask them to switch accounts 4x a week would be unreasonable.

[captain veg]

To quote the article, "the company's FAQs said that your devices must connect to their home Wi-Fi at least once per month".

I don't see how Netflix could know anything about the WiFi. I assume that they actually mean the WAN IP address assigned to your terminal equipment. Which, of course, can change. For most people it does, occasionally. For fewer people, it does a lot.

You could use a VPN, but iPlayer's all I need.

-A.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Netflix

I do not use wifi at home currently.

I just spent the last week fighting an enterprise wifi problem at work. I don't want to think about it when I get home tonight. It may be months before I bother turning it back on. I'm mostly there to sleep and no one visits since the whole global pandemic thing. So let's just blame that and the 7 watt power draw.

So if you mean my home internet connection, in my case running to the little black box that plays Netflix for my dumb TV which is also not on WiFi via Ethernet cables, say that instead. Try it. Home internet connection.

When I get home, if my Netflix won't play because of a self inflicted "WiFi" problem you are going to suddenly start have a "problem with my credit card" problem.

Also they totally can see at least some info on your local network. Their servers get a post NAT IP on the outside, but the client app can pull the LAN IP and probably a fair bit more if it's a spy box like a Roku or a Smart TV. They control both ends of the connection at that point, and may not have to fight browser sandboxing restrictions. Some of the older smart TVs actually ran the whole thing through Yahoo of all things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, qBitTorrent ftw with a shoutout to Deluge.

[LateAgain]

Let's not forget BTTorrent

That was really nice. Went commercial.

Got replaced with SyncThing by anyone who prefers libre software.

[Ian Mason]

If you're back in civilisation Mr Proven, look me up and I'll buy you a beer.