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cadillacdrummer3 · May 4, 2009, 02:09 PM

Hello,

I just purchased an iBook G4, after being a lifelong PC user. I am having a problem running Bittorrent on my new machine. It installs and runs fine, however, torrents do not activate. I have tried forwarding ports from my wireless router, and I have my firewall set to allow Bittorrent communications. My dad runs his PC notebook off the same router, and he's getting 75 kb/s speeds with Bittorrent. I am quite jealous, haha. When Bittorrent opens on my machine, it says "Message Parsing Failed" in the lower lefthand corner, and in the lower righthand corner, "Online, Ports Open". But nothing downloads. I have tried several torrents, many of which have a couple hundred seeders, so that is not the problem. I simply cannot find a reason why it isn't working. However, being that I know nothing of Macs, I am sure it is a simple problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Chuckit · May 4, 2009, 02:12 PM

Do you have the firewall open both on the router and on your Mac?

Atheist · May 4, 2009, 02:25 PM

What Bittorrent client are you using? I've tried a few but keep coming back to Transmission.

dzp111 · May 4, 2009, 04:38 PM

I second Transmission.

Worth a shot.

sek929 · May 4, 2009, 05:52 PM

Sadly, even Transmission is a really poor torrent client. uTorrent on Windows XP not only downloads much much faster on average, it also finds more peers and will open most torrent files that turn up as errors on the Mac side.

That said, Transmission is the best MacOS torrent client out there.

dzp111 · May 4, 2009, 06:14 PM

Originally Posted by sek929

Sadly, even Transmission is a really poor torrent client.

I have to disagree. Maybe it's my settings but my downloads a very quick, (depending on the amount of seeders, of course). My ISP does throttle my bandwidth between certain hours of the day but besides that, Transmission rocks for me.

Chuckit · May 4, 2009, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by sek929

Sadly, even Transmission is a really poor torrent client. uTorrent on Windows XP not only downloads much much faster on average, it also finds more peers and will open most torrent files that turn up as errors on the Mac side.

That said, Transmission is the best MacOS torrent client out there.

I've never found a torrent file that "turned up as an error" that was not, in fact, an error. I also don't find that choice of client makes that much difference in downloading speed. The peers you find and speed of the download seem to be determined by the tracker you connect to and the settings on your client (e.g., you should have as many connections as your network can handle and no more).

BTW, there is a beta version of µtorrent for the Mac.

cadillacdrummer3 · May 4, 2009, 07:28 PM

Originally Posted by Atheist

What Bittorrent client are you using? I've tried a few but keep coming back to Transmission.

I'm using the Bittorrent client. I also tried Tomato Torrent last night, to see if it was just a client problem. No luck with that, either.

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Do you have the firewall open both on the router and on your Mac?

Yes, I do.

ibook_steve · May 4, 2009, 08:06 PM

It's not just a matter of opening a firewall. You also have to have port forwarding enabled to the machine you are running the torrent client on to get the best performance (and in some cases to make it work). So for example, if my MBP is on my home network at address 192.168.0.100, I select a random high number port (I happen to use 52951), set that port number in the torrent client (I use uTorrent), and set up a port forwarding rule on my router. The rule forwards all packets destined for port 52951 to address 192.168.0.100, similar to what you would do if you were running a web server (all packets destined for port 80 would go to the server machine).

I really like uTorrent. I wish it had the same traffic graphing capabilities as the PC version, but it works great for me.

Steve

sek929 · May 5, 2009, 03:27 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

I've never found a torrent file that "turned up as an error" that was not, in fact, an error. I also don't find that choice of client makes that much difference in downloading speed. The peers you find and speed of the download seem to be determined by the tracker you connect to and the settings on your client (e.g., you should have as many connections as your network can handle and no more).

BTW, there is a beta version of µtorrent for the Mac.

I'll counter your anecdotal evidence with my own.

I've personally opened about a half dozen torrents in Transmission and got the 'not a valid torrent file' error message. Thanks to VMware I was able to cross-reference with uTorrent. uTorrent opened the files immediately. Also, I've noticed a massive speed difference on virtually everything. Even with 300+ seeders I was only seeing 10-20K/sec on transmission and I was only connected to 5 or 6 peers. On the exact same link (from TPB) uTorrent managed 100+ peers and way over 300K/sec transfer time.....on a virtual machine nonetheless.

My buddy andy now torrents from his old PC rather than his iBook due to the same reasons. Star Trek TNG seasons would take a week in transmission and just under a day in uTorrent on XP. This is using the exact same link from both ISO Hunt and TPB. It it not uncommon to come back to a torrent in Transmission and see it crawling at 2k/sec, pausing and resuming will bring the transfer back up in speed, but eventually something prevents Transmission from maintaining connections to enough peers.

Now we all know I'm no expert, but I've tried both side by side on the same torrents and uTorrent smacks the crap out of Transmission.

Spheric Harlot · May 5, 2009, 04:14 PM

I'm actually back to Vuze/Azureus (the newest version has removed most of the SUCK that the former versions had) after having used Transmission for a year or two.

Vuze downloads MUCH faster.

To verify this impression, I tried opening up the same torrent at the same time in both clients (yes, it works), and Azureus handily had three times and more the download rate of Transmission.

FWIW.

angelmb · May 5, 2009, 04:17 PM

Does somebody like LH-ABC ?, I find it faster than Transmission.

JellyBeen · 09:23 PM

Originally Posted by angelmb

Does somebody like LH-ABC ?, I find it faster than Transmission.

I just tried ABC. Using the same torrent file my upload/download speed is faster with Transmission 1.60. Perhaps its just that torrent though.

cadillacdrummer3 · May 7, 2009, 06:08 PM

Hi guys,

I downloaded Transmission on your recommendation, and it worked immediately upon download. Not sure why, but my torrents are running fine now. Thanks for your help!

JellyBeen · May 7, 2009, 10:47 PM

Originally Posted by cadillacdrummer3

Hi guys,

I downloaded Transmission on your recommendation, and it worked immediately upon download. Not sure why, but my torrents are running fine now. Thanks for your help!

Transmission is my favorite. Vuze is good too but its Java and that is a resource hog.
If uTorrent ever get their app to work correctly, then I may use it.