Birdtorrent 0.4.0 is here. Installing this will allow Songbird to download .torrent files and the files contained within. There are a few caveats and one rather big bug.

What
1. Downloading torrents provides no feedback in the UI. It is highly recommended that you run Songbird from terminal to see the results.
2. Any downloaded media will appear in your current folder.
Ex. If my current directory in terminal is my HOME folder and I run ./Desktop/Songbird/songbird, the files will appear in my HOME folder.
3. Downloading takes over Songbird completely. Songbird will be unusable and will appear locked until the download completes. Running in terminal, you should see a periodic message alerting you of how many bytes have been downloaded.
4. It could also take quite a while for these messages to appear; I've waited up to 5 minutes.

I don't expect many people will try out Birdtorrent 0.4.0, but if you do, please post your feedback in the comments. It should be noted that I have only tested this on Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit (as with all releases of Birdtorrent).

Example terminal output of a torrent download (Birdtorrent 0.4.0)

Why
Ok, so this release sounds pretty ugly. I'll be the first to admit that. But I consider this release a success for a couple of reasons....

Firstly, the goal of this release was to make Songbird able to download media from torrents; and it does.

Secondly, I was able to find and fix a bug that was causing only certain torrent sites to work. I was checking for ".torrent" in the URL. Sites that used mime-types were failing, so I fixed that. Now, almost any, if not all, torrent sites should work.

That being said, use this version at your own risk. I plan to fix the lock-up issue in Birdtorrent 0.5.0. In fact, 0.5.0 will probably not add any new functionality. It will probably just contain a fix for this issue.

How
Some of you might be curious how I got this working. Quite simply, I just included the rtorrent simple client in my component. After sorting out some minor compiler issues, it essentially just worked. I was actually surprised how smoothly it went. It was simply a matter of taking what the simple client did and roll it into a method which I call when my sbTorrentContentListener is engaged.

Uncontrollable Circumstances
This release also allowed me to discover a possible issue that I neglected to outline in my Project Plan from last week. Seneca College, the school where I am enrolled, either blocks or severely throttles torrent traffic. While I understand why they do this, it is a thorn in my side because it poses obvious hurdles to demonstrating my add-on to my peers within the walls of the school. It also means that I really cannot test Birdtorrent while at school. This severely limits the time I can work on this project to the free time I have at home.

After speaking with Dave Humphrey, we decided the best way to get around this would be the "path of least resistance". It is highly unlikely that we would ever get torrents opened up at the school just for my use. Certainly not without a considerable uphill battle. Dave came up with the idea of setting up a small local torrent server in CDOT. This would not be facing the outside world at all and would be populated with some content I could download while on the school network. I have set up a contribution item on the DPS909/OSD600 Contribution Opportunities page. Any students who are interested should feel free to contact me and Dave on IRC or via email.

As always, I appreciate any feedback on this post. Cheers!