iPhone gets native P2P torrent software

Your iPhone plays audio. Your iPhone plays video. Until now, you had to sync those suckers. Today, the insanely brilliant iPhone Hacker core announced a preliminary version of a Transmission Peer-to-Peer client for iPhone. The code is ported from the Transmission site to run on the iPhone's ARM microprocessor. Tests on downloaded files produced the identical MD5 checksum as downloading via wget.

Now before you start torrenting, there are some important matters you need to know. First: P2P + EDGE do not mix. Let me repeat that for emphasis. They DO. NOT. MIX. That's because EDGE + P2P takes down EDGE faster than toppling a Jenga pile. Update Further testing has gotten 5kb/s over EDGE without crashing but it's an iffy proposition. Use with care.

Second, we are posting this because there are many *legal* torrents, including music and video, available for download. So please don't start getting into a "Torrent Good"/"Torrent Bad" flamewar in the comments.

Third, this is EXTREMELY preliminary software. It will develop over time -- so you probably don't want to grab a copy and start torrenting right away until it becomes more stable.

Fourth, this is a command-line client. As it matures, someone is going to slap a GUI on that baby but at this time, do not look for the software to show up in Installer.app or Cydia.

Finally, be aware that torrenting will wear down your battery faster than, um... toppling a Jenga pile. (C'mon folks. We're really short on family-friendly metaphors here. Suggest your own in the comments.)

Way to go core!

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Source: http://wickedpsyched.net/iphone/torrent

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Your iPhone plays audio. Your iPhone plays video. Until now, you had to sync those suckers. Today, the insanely brilliant iPhone Hacker...

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Yanik Magnan

I'm not sure what you mean by it not showing up on Cydia because it's a command-line app... Lots of the packages on Cydia/Telesphoreo *are* command-line apps.

March 03 2008 at 2:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dylan Lukes

For "family-friendly metaphors" how about:

faster than a rushed divorce.

faster than Jay Jay the Jetplane.

or

faster than Thomas the Tank Engine.

March 03 2008 at 9:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Axel

Hm, the one thing I don't get is: WHY shouldn't you use it over EDGE? I mean, technically.

Is it really that you steal bandwidth from other users in the cell? I hardly believe that. So what else?

wondering ...

March 03 2008 at 4:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Axel's comment

Tony Hoyle

Technically you do - like anything else wireless ultimately it's shared bandwidth. If 20 users in your cell are using p2p then suddenly the available bandwidth has dropped quite considerably - in the same way it affects ISPs currently.

OTOH I don't see how torrents can work over edge anyway - all (nearly all? There may be one or two that still use public IP) providers give you private 10.x.x.x IP addresses, so there's no incoming connections. You'd just be leaching all the time. Might as well just use an FTP client as it'd be more efficient.

March 03 2008 at 6:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael

...for those who say why have this

Imagine itunes store worked on edge and was free. Thats what this program could become. Think of any song, search by singer/band, have it download to you iphone and play away.

The only limit is bamdwidth and in a few years on 5g or whatever we will no longer worry about it. For wifi this could be implimented immediately.

March 03 2008 at 3:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Macopoulos

Is it bossible to run rtorrent, get it from cydia or something?

rtorrent the clie based libtorrent client?

I'm asking cause i already have it compiled for my linksys nslu2 running of natively debian etch and it's processor is arm, so it may work if it gets compiled with the apple-darwin-iphone gcc and other libs?

Thanx

March 03 2008 at 1:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Regi

Uau, nice!
I compose musics, and I'll put my music for free p2p in this app.
Very cool, and helpful for "not yet" famous singers and composers.

March 02 2008 at 11:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bon

Maybe it's just me but is anyone else wondering why all the developers have overlooked a seemingly simple flash plugin for Safari on the iPhone and maybe a bit less simple, yet extremely important, bluetooth file transfer?

These, in my opinion, should have been top priority on any developer's list :

March 02 2008 at 10:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Bon's comment

Mario Burkhardt

you want flash? and you want a third party developer/hacker to write the code so that flash will work on your iphone?

Well maybe you guys that demand copy and past apps have a wrong understanding of how apps work and what they can do. There is a very limited set of frameworks that you can access as a developer to get input from the camera, find contacts, and so on, but to implement flash or copypaste would mean that the hackers would need to alter the whole firmware version, and so far that has always been apple's job.

March 03 2008 at 5:00 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jbrown510

Nicely said Mario :) Sorry I was such a ass the other day.

March 03 2008 at 8:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dmesh

but why the most hated torrent app on the web. Transmission has been banned from all the good torrent sites. Maybe they should fix the problems first then worry about migrating to another platform. C'mon utorrent get a mac version happening soon.

March 02 2008 at 9:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to dmesh's comment

Andrew Rush

Banned? I'm assuming you mean private trackers or something. I use Transmission and love it! There was a rocky point last year when every update caused some new problem, but currently it's working great, and has been for a while!

March 02 2008 at 10:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

livings124

This is not true. It is allowed at all the private (and public) torrent sites.

March 03 2008 at 9:49 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dustin

if they find a way to torrent on the itouch i'd buy it in a heartbeat

March 02 2008 at 9:15 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael

SICK - love this.

March 02 2008 at 8:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply