qBittorrent is a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

BitTorrent client The following is a general comparison of BitTorrent clients, which are computer programs designed for peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. The BitTorrent protocol coordinates segmented file transfer among peers connected ...

written in

native Native may refer to: People * Jus soli, citizenship by right of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Native Americans (disambiguation) In arts and entert ...

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

. It relies on Boost, Qt 6 toolkit and the libtorrent-rasterbar library (for the torrent back-end), with an optional search engine written in Python.

History

qBittorrent was originally developed in March 2006 by Christophe Dumez, from the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (UTBM). It is currently developed by contributors worldwide and is funded through donations, led by Sledgehammer999 from Greece, who became project maintainer in June 2013. Along with the 4.0.0 release a new logo for the project was unveiled.

Features

Some of the features present in qBittorrent include: *

Bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

scheduler * Bind all traffic to a specific

interface Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * '' Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics'' * '' Int ...

* Control over torrents, trackers and peers (torrents queueing and prioritizing and torrent content selection and prioritizing) * DHT, PEX, encrypted connections, LPD,

UPnP Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the n ...

NAT-PMP NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) is a network protocol for establishing network address translation (NAT) settings and port forwarding configurations automatically without user effort. The protocol automatically determines the external IPv4 a ...

port forwarding support,

µTP Micro Transport Protocol or μTP (sometimes also uTP) is an open UDP-based variant of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol intended to mitigate poor latency and other congestion control problems found in conventional BitTorrent ove ...

, magnet links, private torrents * IP filtering: file types ''

eMule eMule is a free peer-to-peer file sharing application for Microsoft Windows. Started in May 2002 as an alternative to eDonkey2000, eMule now connects to both the eDonkey network and the Kad network. The distinguishing features of eMule are th ...

dat'' or '' PeerGuardian'' *

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. I ...

support * Integrated RSS feed reader (with advanced download filters) and downloader * Integrated torrent

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

(simultaneous search in many torrent search sites and category-specific search requests, such as books, music and software) * Remote control through a secure

web user interface A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

* Sequential downloading (download in order). Enables "streaming" media files *

Super-seeding In file sharing, super-seeding (aka 'Initial Seeding') is an algorithm developed by John Hoffman for the BitTorrent communications protocol that helps downloaders become uploaders more quickly, but it introduces the danger of total seeding failu ...

option * Torrent creation tool * Torrent queuing, filtering and prioritizing *

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

support, available in ≈70 languages

Versions

qBittorrent is

, available on many

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s, including:

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 r ...

(including

ArcaOS ArcaOS is an operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was codenamed Blue Lion during its development. It builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing defects and li ...

and

eComStation eComStation or eCS is an operating system based on OS/2 Warp for the 32-bit x86 architecture. It was originally developed by Serenity Systems and Mensys BV under license from IBM. It includes additional applications, and support for new hard ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

. ,

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

statistics indicate that the most popular qBittorrent version of all supported platforms, 81% of downloads were for Windows computers. , FossHub statistics indicate qBittorrent as the second most downloaded software with over 75 million downloads. Packages for different

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s are available, though most are provided through official channels via various distributions. qBittorrent Enhanced is a fork of qBittorrent intended for blocking leeching clients such as

Xunlei Xunlei Limited () is a Chinese multinational technology company and an online service provider founded in 2003. The subsidiary of Xunlei Limited, Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd. () was formerly known as Sandai Technologies (She ...

. It is hosted on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, cont ...

Reception

In 2012, Ghacks suggested qBittorrent as a great alternative to

μTorrent μTorrent, or uTorrent (see pronunciation) is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client owned and developed by Rainberry, Inc. with over 150 million users. It is the most widely used BitTorrent client outside China; globally only behind Xunlei. ...

, for those put off by its controversial

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the ...

and

bundleware Pre-installed software (also known as bundled software) is software already installed and licensed on a computer or smartphone bought from an original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

References

External links

* *
qBittorrent
on FossHub {{FOSS 2006 software BitTorrent clients for Linux File sharing software that uses Qt Free BitTorrent clients Free file sharing software Free software programmed in C++ MacOS file sharing software Portable software Windows file sharing software Windows-only freeware