Developed through funding from the University of Delft in Holland and the EU, Tribler is a free BitTorrent P2P file sharing client designed to make file sharing easy to understand and use. The program runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and the interface is as basic as you’ll find, just a big search box and that’s it. No fiddling with config or settings, just fire up and search. And it’s fast. Very fast.
The other major difference between this and conventional BitTorrent clients like uTorrent, is the fact that it’s designed to be much more decentralised, no need to go to a website to get a torrent link, and it also features a proper streaming media player, so you can play stuff immediately (or at least after a buffering period) rather than download. I also like the implicit reputation meter, which is there to encourage real sharing rather than just doing a selfish file grab.
It’s a relatively low profile product, so the content availability is as patchy as you’d expect, but apart from that, it’s a very interesting project indeed. It’s clear that the development team also have one eye on the future of television streaming over the Internet as well as conventional file sharing, so this is definitely a product to watch for all sorts of reasons.
Tribler is developed at the Delft University of Technology and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Fundamental research to network technology, P2P networks, video streaming, user interaction helps us to integrate state-of-the-art knowhow into our software. We aim for an open source, fully decentralized peer-to-peer network, available for everybody, in every part of the world.
