BitTornado

Official Site
Popularity Rating: 66

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In the beginning there was only the official client, which was great but had some features missing that many wanted. Eike Frost made some adjustments to the official client. Then the Shad0w took that client and expanded on it, calling it Shad0w's experimental client for a time. After a number of updates it became BitTornado, which is what it is today.

Initially the big draw to this client were things like upload capping and minimize to tray. But with BitTorrent 4.0 all clients have these features. In fact, this is now the only major client that still has one window for each torrent. While that may be the main drawback to this client, this has added a great deal to the bit torrent community. Many features were developed or seen here first, and other clients implemented them before long.

One of these simple yet helpful additions is the color indicator lights. These tell a user the health of the torrent. Green is good, yellow means there is likely a firewall issue, red means there is a connection issue, blue means among the connected peers there are zero complete copies. Just click on the light for more info on the colors. Many other clients also use this same color system.

Another thing many users like about this client is the amount of information on the torrent which is available in a relatively simple interface. There is more info on your download and the peers you are connected to than the official client had in the 3.x versions.

A details link can give you information on the tracker, the files in the torrent (if its a multi file torrent), the file sizes, etc. You can also select specific files to download from a torrent on this screen (for example, you could select only certain mp3s from a torrent with a full album). An advanced link to let you see the status of people you are connected to. A preferences link with many more options, such as adjusting the ports being used and setting a default download location.

For quite a while each time a torrent was resumed it would undergo a long hash check to determine the pieces that are complete and those that are not. This is annoying on large torrents, because it is cpu intensive and takes a long time. BitTornado was one of the first to add an auto-resume option. This remembers the progress of your torrents so you don't always have to wait for it to be checked when resuming.

This client also introduced a superseeding mode. This mode can greatly decrease the amount an initial seeder (or reseeder) will have to upload to get a complete copy out. Normally pieces were uploaded randomly, so it may send some pieces out multiple times before sending others once.

Superseeding notes: Version 4 of the official client supposedly eliminates the need for superseeding. Also, please do not use this mode by default - it is designed for those with a complete file on a new or poorly seeded torrent to send out the parts that appear the least. "When lots of people on a torrent use super-seed, it greatly reduces the torrent's efficiency."

This client has developed many of the features that other clients now use. It has just about every feature most people will need. Unfortunately for this client, many other clients have implemented most these features. That combined with the lack of a pretty, single window user interface which virtually all clients now have may be why this doesn't have more users. Supposedly a new GUI is in the works, so keep an eye out for this. The official clients recent updates are may soon make things like superseeding obsolete.