Transmission (BitTorrent client)

Transmission

Transmission on Mac OS X
Developer(s)	Charles Kerr (Daemon, Backend, GTK+ client), Mitchell Livingston (Mac OS X client)
Stable release	1.92 (March 15, 2010; 2 day(s) ago (2010-03-15)^[1]) _[+/−]
Preview release	1.80 Beta 5 (January 12, 2010; 2 month(s) ago (2010-01-12)^[2]) _[+/−]
Operating system	UNIX (Mac OS X, Linux)
Available in	Multilingual
Development status	Active
Type	BitTorrent
License	GPL/MIT
Website	www.transmissionbt.com

Transmission is a BitTorrent client which features a simple interface on top of a cross-platform back-end. Transmission is free software^[3] dual licensed under the MIT License and GNU General Public License.

1 Features
2 Development
3 Ports
4 Reception
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

Features

Transmission allows users to download files from the Internet and upload their own files or torrents. By grabbing items and adding them to the interface, users can create queues of files to be downloaded and uploaded. Within the file selection menus, users can customise their downloads down to components of individual files. Transmission also seeds -- that is, it can re-upload downloaded content.

Low resource usage: During testing, Transmission used less than a quarter of the memory required by other BitTorrent clients.^[4]
Prioritization to select which torrents, and which files inside those torrents, to download first
Magnet links support introduced in 1.80^[5]
Selective downloading
Optionally move torrents to a different folder when they finish downloading
Encrypted peer connections
Torrent file creation
Peer exchange (compatible with Vuze and μTorrent)
A built-in web client so that users can control Transmission remotely via the web (using RPC or WebUI)
Automatic port mapping (using UPnP/NAT-PMP)
Fast Resume — with peer caching
Blocklists for bad peers, periodically updated with the same bluetack peer list used by PeerGuardian and PeerBlock
Single listening port for all torrents
Scheduled bandwidth limits
Global and per-torrent bandwidth caps
Sorting/filtering options
HTTPS tracker support
IPv6 support (partial^[6]) introduced in 1.50
DHT (Mainline) support introduced in 1.70^[7], IPv6 DHT implemented for 1.80^[8]

Mac OS X specific features include:

Transfer Management
- Downloading and seeding queues
- Auto-seeding options
- Groups
Dock and Growl notifications
Quick Look technology built-in. (Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard only)
Customizable toolbar
Advanced progress box
Automatic updates using Sparkle
Universal Binary

Development

Transmission allows users to monitor a torrent's activity.

Transmission 1.60 and later removed support for Mac OS X v10.4. Currently, Transmission 1.54 is the last version that runs on Mac OS X 10.4.

The Transmission back-end (libTransmission) also serves as the basis of the Transmission daemon. The daemon supports a web front-end called Clutch. Older versions have been ported to form the basis of the update system for the video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots on PS3,^[9] as well as the backend for ImageShack's BitTorrent service.

Ports

There are several transmission clients for different operatings systems including Linux and Unix-like, Mac OS X and BeOS/ZETA; each operating system front-end is built using native widget toolkits.^[3]

An unofficial port of Transmission using a command-line interface on the iPhone OS was accomplished on March 3, 2008.^[10] Transmission is available for Android, with the name of Transdroid as a remote controlling console (not downloading torrents onto the phone).

On Windows, there are two third-party GUIs: Transmission Remote Dot Net^[11] and transmission-remote-gui^[12], as well as an unofficial full build of Transmission's Qt Client^[13].

It is also ported to the Maemo OS of the Nokia N810 and N900 internet tablets on which it does download the torrents to the device.

Reception

Transmission is the default BitTorrent client of many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu,^[14] Mandriva,^[15] Mint,^[16] Fedora,^[17] Puppy,^[18] CrunchBang,^[19] Zenwalk,^[20] and openSUSE.^[21]

On OS X, it is the most popular BitTorrent client downloaded from Mac software websites MacUpdate and VersionTracker^{[citation needed]}.

Fonera ships its routers with Transmission Preinstalled.^[22]

Version 0.6.1 of Transmission did not strictly adhere to the complete BitTorrent specification^{[citation needed]}. This resulted in the blocking of that version from many private trackers^{[citation needed]}. This issue was fixed in April 2007 by the release of 0.7^{[citation needed]}.