PUMP Is A Great P2P Video Application, And Then Some

File-sharing service VIPeers has released an upgraded version of it’s peer-to-peer media discovery and sharing tool PUMP, as reported on TechCrunch France. PUMP is touted as the “iTunes for video”, but it’s exactly much more than that and rather similar to apps like Miro and Joost. Update: and Vuze.

Update: forgot to mention that you need an invite code to download the software for now. Fortunately, we get to give away no less than 15,000 for TechCrunch readers. Code: PUMP-TECHCRUNCH-USA-15000.

PUMP is a desktop application that lets you search for and download the Flash versions of videos from a variety of services, including YouTube, Dailymotion, BitTorrent search engine Mininova, Jamendo, LegalTorrents and Google Torrent, and the results are presented in orderly tabs. You can even opt to include any other search engine you think is missing from the list. Videos can be played in practically any format and shared from within the interface on a multitude of social networks like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. The app even doubles as a full-fledged Web browser and podcasting tool thanks to the ability to import RSS feeds into the system.

It makes for easy management and discovery of videos, but what I really dig about the service is that is able to sync and convert content from both your imported iTunes and local PUMP libraries to your iPhone, iPod Touch or other mobile phones. It’s also a full-fledged BitTorrent client, which is little surprising considering VIPeers is also the company behind torrent sharing client Podmailing. Of course, we would never suggest that you’d be using PUMP to download any copyrighted content or anything.

The downsides: only available for Windows Vista and XP for now (it also uses IE for browsing), an uninspired UI and a bit of a memory drain. But don’t let that spoil the fun.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4457679&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1