I’ve tested bittorrent in Opera – found myself a nice, big file and started downloading. It worked. How was the experience?
Well – Opera delivered what was needed, and not much more. The information I got was the download and upload speed, how much was downloaded and uploaded, estimated time left to finish download and how many I was connected to. This is basically the information needed, even if a bit more could be nice to know.
As I didn’t leave my PC to itself but continued working on it, including accessing the web, there were some features I missed from dedicated torrent clients; a way to limit the bandwith use a bit. I won’t claim anything after just one test, but noticing that Opera maxed out the available upload bandwith, other things felt slower – at times much slower than usual. However, this can very well be other things, including but not limited to my own imagination running wild.
Now, editing ini-files seems to be a nice way to tweak Opera to do like you want, and as I learned today (no time to read all the info at once, before testing ;)) it is possible to tweak bittorrent settings, too. Can’t try it out for a while yet, but I still wish these settings will get an easy to use interface to make changes.
For the time being though, the changes you can make to the opera6.ini file are these:
[BitTorrent] – add this section header and use the following:
| Setting | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Enable | Enables BitTorrent support in Opera | 1 |
| Warning Dialog | Displays warning dialog before initiating BitTorrent download | 1 |
| Listen Port | Port for incoming connections (make sure your port is available). | 18768 |
| Bandwidth Restriction Mode | 1 = automatic upload restriction, unlimited download, 2 = fixed rate restrictions for upload and download | 1 |
| Max Upload Rate | Maximum upload rate in kB/s. Used only if bandwidth restriction mode is set to 2 | 0 |
| Max Download Rate | Maximum download rate in kB/s. Used only if bandwidth restriction mode is set to 2 | 0 |