BitLet plugin for WordPress bloggers

Those of you that use WordPress will certainly appreciate this: loixiyo created a BitLet plugin for Wordpress that allows you to link torrents so that they will be directly downloaded using BitLet.

Kudos!

Streaming video via BitTorrent!

We just relased a new applet that can be used to stream video content using Bittorrent, just as we do with the music player.

The applet is meant to let video publishers distribute their content without having to
all the distribution costs themselves.

Point your browser to bitlet.org/video to see a selection of sample videos to watch.

For now, the player applet itself is quite experimental and is able to play only torrents containing exactly one theora/vorbis-encoded video.

A couple of news

1. We added the seeders/leechers statistics in the download window.
2. We are working on quite a big feature. We hope to release something new in the next days, in order to gather your feedbacks and impressions. Stay tuned for the next updates.
   

Seeders and leechers in the download UI, and other news

Good news!
We recently updated the download window in order to show the number of seeders and leechers. (The ones which are currently connected to your client, to be precise.)
You should see the figures if you leave your mouse over the little led icon on the bottom right corner of the window.

Although we're happy about adding that feature (that was the second most voted open issue!), we think the visualization we're presently using is not the best way to present such information.

The download window is quite small and screen estate is scarce, but we thought about a couple other alternatives.

option 1: bottom right corner
The numbers are always visible right near the led icon. Seeders and Leechers are abbreviated.

option 2: top
Numbers appear on top of the page the third time you click on the statistics area (just like upload/download stats). They are not visible by default.

Which one do you prefer? Have you got any other great idea?
Don't hesitate to let us know!

Mock-ups were created with Balsamiq Mockups, an awesome tool for UI prototyping (and one of the few outstanding AIR applications out there).

If you want to play with the original mock-up, you can download it from here. If you want to send us back the results of your experiments, mail them back to us -_^.

As a side note, here are some other updates we hope you'll appreciate:

• We fixed a bug in the download code that made the applet attempt to establish connections on the wrong ports. Download performance should be better now :)
• We added support for the "key" announce parameter, as suggested by Marco Túlio Pires from dattebayo.com.
  
• We signed all the applets using a brand new certificate, and that's why your browser may have presented you with one of those cryptic security-related message windows (read more about certificates)
  

UPnP goes open source

A few weeks have passed since we announced the UPnP console, which is based on the same code that is used by the download applet to configure port mappings on your router.

Although UPnP should be a standard protocol, the code we wrote should be tested against as much hardware as possible, and not just our home routers. ;)

As some of you may know, we've been long considering open sourcing parts of BitLet.
We thought the UPnP library we developed for bitlet would be an ideal candidate to start with. It is quite small and synthetic, it solves a widely diffused need and it would benefit from further testing.

We called the library weupnp, and we published it under a LGPL licence. Feel free to adopt it if it suits your needs or to contribute to it.

Click here to access the code.

Local torrent selection

We are writing this couple of lines to announce a relatively update: selecting a .torrent file from your local drives should now be easier.

By clicking on the "Select local .torrent" button, you will be able to browse your local filesystem and select a torrent metafile you already downloaded and saved.

We are really happy to add this feature, because it's among of the first ones you suggested using our forum! ^_-

From now on, we'll try to give higher priority to the issues you propose and vote, so you will be more and more able to participate in deciding what direction BitLet should take.

Up & running again!

In order to overcome our last issues, tonight we moved BitLet.org to a new harbour.

After quite a long parenthesis we decided to bring BitLet back to the server which hosted it in the early days. It's the same server we used for our twin project, Novlet, and it's hosted by slicehost.

Again, we wish to express our gratitude to those who helped us, and allowed us to sail so far.