There’s a bit of a controversy in the BitTorrent community, friends. Two rather prominent, so-called private trackers, whose names I will not mention “just because,” have announced that they will be banning Vuze, the former Azureus, one of the elder statesmen of the BitTorrent protocol. Say what you will about the direction Vuze took—I hated it—but there isn’t a more powerful torrent client under the sun. Make no mistake about it: it is an important loss, and one of the bigger developments is the recently quiet world of BitTorrent.

The decision was taken because of the potential for Vuze to be tampered with—it was a hassle to ensure that Vuze stats were on the up and up. Nothing is more vital to the success of private BitTorrent sites than accurate stat tracking. What do you want, chaos?

It’s a valid complaint, to a point: you cannot run a BitTorrent site with the threat of users gaming the system. Private sites usually operate on the upload-to-download ratio system: you’re required to keep your ratio above a certain number in order to keep your account in good standing. So, you’ve uploaded 20GB of data and downloaded 15GB of data, giving you a ratio of 1.33. Now, if you were to somehow tamper with the way your BitTorrent client reports stats, you could rig it so that it looks like you’ve uploaded 50GB and downloaded only 10GB, the site would suffer.

How often that has actually happened, who knows? I do know this: if you’re tampering with your clients’ stats you should be deported.

The sites in question now recommend Windows users use uTorrent; Mac users uses Transmission or uTorrent; and Linux users use rTorrent. It’s a peculiar decision.

Popular because of its simplicity and small footprint, uTorrent is a closed-source application, and one point was linked with the MPAA and RIAA. You’d think that people who were engaging in wanton copyright infringement would be a little more prudent with their activities, but far be it from me to question people’s decision-making skills.

The Windows version of uTorrent is far more mature than the Mac version. One feature you won’t find in the Mac version of uTorrent is RSS, something that’s been around seemingly forever.

Transmission is another client that’s popular because of its small footprint. (If you’re seeding on a dedicated box, or have a system with a decent amount of memory, having a small footprint is essentially irrelevant. I used to run Azureus 24/7, and never noticed my machine slowing down.) Again, it’s on the simple side, so people who want to “set it and forget it” will be right at home.

I don’t know, it sounds like I’m pro-Vuze here. I don’t give a damn; I use Usenet for my escapades. I will say, I did the majority of my torrenting—I barely torrent these days—using Azureus/Vuze, so it’s a little sad to see it being pushed out like this.

Still, if it’s for the good of the sites in question, then so be it.

Vuze comes from BitTorrent application provider Azureus and is built on the Azureus platform. We previously looked at Vuze when it was known as Zudeo in December 06. An awful lot has happened in this space since in the past six months, including the launches of Joost, Bablegum and Veoh. Vuze has evolved as well.

The key selling point of Vuze is HD content, which the company provides through a variety of content partnerships with companies such as Starz, The BBC, A&E, and Showtime. Vuze has a strong emphasis on community; users are able to create channels for content, rate, and have conversations around content. Producers can upload their original works and can even charge a download or rental fee.

Comparing it to the competition is difficult as Vuze is a distinctly different offering. Vuze is extremely easy to use, which in itself is rather amazing given it comes from Azureus; the Azureus BitTorrent client being known for its relative complexity. The line up is solid; yes, you can get a lot of the content elsewhere but usually it’s not in HD. The need to download content could be seen as a negative, low resolution previews are available on demand but for full HD clips it’s a matter of waiting, and depending on your internet connection this can involve a long wait. Then there is the legal aspect: this isn’t BitTorrent as most people know it because all content is 100% legal and in many cases is charged for, which begs the question: if it’s not delivered on demand and you have to pay for some of it, wouldn’t some users just download the illegal version for free? Perhaps iTunes would make for a better comparison in terms of the model.

Overall though Vuze is a good package, maybe not quite as appealing as Joost but with more to offer than Bablegum. I can’t fully compare it to Veoh yet as the Veoh client has crashed for me three times in as many hours but I can say with certainty that Vuze is more stable.

People who leave Azureus running all day long could benefit from this 2TB RAID array from Other World Computing, said to be the Largest Ever. It’s got a regal-sounding name, the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual 2.0TB RAID solution, as well as a price that only kings you afford—laughing out loud!—$1,099. The 7200RPM drives connect to your rig using either a FireWire 800, 400 or USB 2.0. If a G is too blue for your blood, OWC has smaller drive arrays available, ranging from 320GB to 1.5TB.

Now that I’ve discovered HD rips, well, the more space the better.

Product Page [Other World Computing]

Under the agreement, BBC will license a number of television shows to U.S. users, including Red Dwarf, Strange and Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal.

It is a tragedy that they didn’t include the only BBC show worth watching, The Office. Of course, that show is readily available on Azureus’ BitTorent client.

The benefits of Zudeo are pretty clear to publishers, who can leverage P2P networks to substantially decrease bandwidth costs and speed downloads for users.

This spells trouble for Pando and Red Swoosh, which offer competing products to publishers. Zudeo probably isn’t focused on those companies, though. There is a multi-party war brewing for IPTV eyeballs between iTunes, Venice Project, Zudeo and YouTube. Watch this space.

Azureus is known for their peer-to-peer applications and Zudeo will build off of that, allowing users to share their own content. But it will also allow corporate content providers to publish, showcase, and distribute high resolution, long form content. The company says the focus will be on “high quality DVD and HD content.” Essentially, Zudeo is a hybrid of YouTube’s social sharing and a B-to-C content channel.

“Media companies are embracing digital media distribution,” said Jarl Mohn, current chairman of the board of CNET Networks and an Azureus board member, in a release sent to TechCrunch on Friday. “Zudeo provides a very effective and secure P2P platform to distribute content to their audience.”

Azureus said that they are trying to “centralize and go viral.” Each listing will have a user rating and an embed code called Azureus Magnet so that users can share the content on other sites.

Azureus also announced a $12 million round of funding by Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital. This is a heap of cash for a video-sharing site if you consider that YouTube was initially financed for approximately $11 million. Azureus CEO Gilles BianRosa told us that the money would go towards marketing and team building.

Currently, Azureus has 15 employees. The company says that they have had 130 million downloads of their client, mostly from SourceForge.net, and are averaging 500,000 more per week. The company claims to have 15 million unique users.

Azureus’ deal with content providers is where they believe they will profit the most.

“Today, content creators and publishers can use Zudeo to freely promote and distribute their digital creations, with no limitation in length or video quality,” BianRosa said. “Furthermore, they can use our social networking tools to expose their content throughout the web, including blogs and social networks. Similarly, movie, games, and music fans can access a growing catalog of high resolution media content and share it with their friends easily.”