qBittorrent 4.4.3

Traditionally, a BitTorrent user would need to have two things: a BitTorrent client and a favorite torrent site. The latter are beginning to phase out, as more clients tend to feature their own search engines. qBittorrent is such a client.

At a glance, qBittorrent has a very friendly interface. The main toolbar features big buttons that deal with the most used functions in BitTorrent craft: Adding torrents, starting, pausing, and changing download priorities.

qBittorrent makes holding a large number of seeds easy. The left side panel lets you filter your list by status, tracker affiliation and categories. There can be as many categories as you wish. However, a torrent file can only be featured in a single category.

The client's footprint on the system resources is rather small. The devs compare it with µTorrent, and I agree. It certainly reminiscent of µTorrent's lean constitution.

The Search Engine only works if you install Python. Don't worry if you didn't install it during set-up. qBittorrent prompts you again when you enable Search from the View menu.

To have the Search Engine enabled feels very comfortable. No more browsing for torrent sites that haven't been shut down yet. Yet truth be told, ThePirateBay still goes strong despite the authorities efforts to shut it down. Searches open in tabs, so you may keep different search results before deciding on what and when to download. The search filters are standard for a torrent, but they also include torrent sites as search criteria. So in case you were a fan of TPB or Demonoid, you can still use them without having to actually visit their pages.

As an added bonus, qBittorrent also has an RSS reader, although with the rise of browser notifications that technology will soon become obsolete, or so I think.

Features

• Torrent Search engine
• RSS Reader
• Light frame
• IP Filtering
• Screen lock password
• Multiplatform

Final Thoughts

There are a few comments on the SourceForge page that suggest that qBittorrent is somehow mishandling torrent files. However, I did not encounter any such problem. I really like this application and I think I'll start using it, especially since it's multiplatform.