Yes! TorrentBitch supports both viewing feeds and automatic downloading of torrents from RSS feeds.
Why are my torrents going so slow?
It is very likely that TorrentBitch is not configured correctly for your connection. Please read the Connection Setup Guide and follow the instructions.
What ports should I use for TorrentBitch?
It is generally recommended to not use any port in the range 6881-6889. Any other port except for 25 or 110 is acceptable.
Does TorrentBitch support proxies?
Yes. Open the Settings tab and go to "Network Settings". It supports SOCKS4, SOCKS5, SOCKS5_pw, HTTP Connect, and HTTP proxies. Peer communication proxying is supported with SOCKS4, SOCKS5, and HTTP Connect. HTTP Connect is HTTP proxies that allow arbitrary TCP connections. Not all do, which is why it's a separate item in the list.
Does TorrentBitch have a scheduler to stop torrents at certain hours?
Yes, in the Settings tab under "Network Options". It allows you to set an upload/download speed, and set it to Limit, or stop torrents altogether by the hour/day.
Is there a way to preview a file before it's finished?
There is no good way to do this. Because the BitTorrent protocol downloads pieces in arbitrary order, there is no guarantee that the part of the file necessary for previewing (usually the beginning of the file) is present. To further complicate matters, some torrents are packaged as an archive, which would be quite difficult to extract until it's complete.
Still, if you want to attempt to view the file periodically, you may eventually get lucky. First, make sure the file you are downloading is not an archive. If it's a ZIP or RAR (R00, R01, ...) file, forget it. Next, you'll have to interrupt the download, since BitTorrent locks the file in an exclusive mode until the file is complete. You can now try opening the file in whatever application is meant to be used to view it, but don't be surprised if very strange things happen. Finally, you'll want to resume the transfer, unless you've determined that you no longer want the file.
Why is my downloaded file huge even though I only downloaded a small bit?
When BitTorrent starts, it allocates space for the entire file(s). That is what you see at startup as the progress bar moves across the screen and the disk drive goes crazy. The reason it does this is because it downloads the file in pieces, and those pieces arrive in an arbitrary order. Unlike http or ftp, which download the file from start to finish, BT downloads it in random order.
My download speed seems slow, what can I do to increase it?
Here are some general guidelines to getting fast connections with BitTorrent:
- Give it time! Be patient! This is the most important suggestion for most speed-related problems. Sometimes it can take a while to contact a slow tracker. The beginning of a download will be especially slow since you don't have any pieces of the file to share with others. Recently, trackers have been quite overloaded and it's common to get timeout-related errors. Leave the client open and eventually it will connect.
- If your network uses NAT, make sure the BitTorrent ports are forwarded to the machine that runs the client. This will allow inbound connections from peers. Otherwise, only outbound connections will succeed. If you have a software firewall, make sure the BitTorrent client has the proper access.
- Make sure the torrent is "live." Use TorrentBitch to show you the number of peers and seeds to which you are connected. Or, check the status of the torrent and make sure there are other people connected. To get decent speed, a torrent must have at least a few other people connected. The more peers, the faster the transfer will be in general.
- Sometimes, limiting your upload rate will increase your download rate. This is especially true for asymmetric connections such as cable and ADSL, where the outbound bandwidth is much smaller than the inbound bandwidth. If you are seeing very high upload rates and low download rates, this is probably the case. The reason this happens is due to the nature of TCP/IP -- every packet received must be acknowledged with a small outbound packet. If the outbound link is saturated with BitTorrent data, the latency of these TCP/IP ACKs will rise, causing poor efficiency.
- Use a client that allows limiting of the upload rate, and set it to around 80% of the maximum rate observed. It can be tempting to limit the rate to very small values. On very healthy torrents, this will not adversely affect the download rate. However, when there are fewer peers you will generally get higher download rates by allowing the highest upload rate possible before saturating the link.
TorrentBitch says I'm uploading, what files am I sharing? What's being sent?
Don't worry. When you are downloading a particular torrent, you are also uploading that torrent at the same time. The parts of the file(s) that you have already downloaded are uploaded to other peers. This is normal, and it's how the protocol works. There is no "shared directory" setting as with other peer-to-peer applications. If you have a certain file (or files) that you want to make available to others, you must first create a .torrent file and upload it to a server, and then seed the file.
What happens if I cancel a download? How can I resume?
TorrentBitch fully supports stopping and later resuming a partial download. You don't have to do anything special. If you cancel a download before it's finished, the partial download remains on your hard drive. To resume the transfer, just click on the same torrent link again and when asked where to save the file, select the same location as last time. BitTorrent will see that the file exists and check it to see how much has already been downloaded. It will then pick up where it left off the last time.
Note: To resume properly, you must make the same selection when prompted as you made the first time. For torrents consisting of a single file, this is rather straight-forward: simply select the file. However, torrents that consist of a folder of multiple files can be a bit more confusing. To resume, you must select the folder that contains the BitTorrent folder.
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