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 |
Amazing, but I wonder whether this effort was really needed… Personally, I think Opera does an amazing job with email+RSS, but they don’t market it around. I’m not sure whether Opera can be my main browser, but the mail client is very good and it’s a pity that it’s not available stand-alone and properly marketed. They already had podcasting and now bittorrent, and this makes them very well-positioned when these two “hacks” will integrate to change our downloading habits; however, I personally think they should market it around much more, especially in the US.
i just installed opera 8.02 with bittorrent on my Fedora linux.. i need to edit the port settings for bittorrent… how do i do this?
help
If you mean edit the port settings that Opera use, they’re in the opera6.ini-file, as described over.
If you mean editing the settings in Fedora – I don’t know (don’t use Linux myself.) But maybe you can ask at the Opera forums?
i have installed opera 8.54 on my PC and i need the bittorent plugin for this. from where can i download it?
You’d better download Opera 9 beta – that’s the one that have bittorrent now. the link for this is here.
Also, keep an eye on Opera’s Desktop Team to get the latest info and latest betas.
There is no need to change ini files in Opera. You can try about:config or opera:config in the address bar in Opera 9.x. Using those setup interface you don’t need to restart Opera for setup changes to take effect.
For all those peeps who need to edit their port settings for bittorrent there is a great website that helps you do it step by step:
Enjoy downloading!
@ vishnu:
type in address bar: opera:config , then Find Bittorrent.
Click on bittorrent and change parameters. Save and restart.
@zanef:
no need of pluggin, torrent is included. Download a torrent file and the download willl start right away
I am using Opera torrent and compare to uTorrent and Shareaza. I am going to test Vuze (Asureus) too. Until now – or by chance, uTorrent and Shareaza download at around 10kB/s while Opera at 50-60kB/s !! I’ll continuu testing.