Vuze Blog

Introducing Vuze To Go

Find, Download, Play from any portable drive

We’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about portability of your content. Across our efforts to deliver your videos wherever, whenever you want them, we’ve been focusing on devices that you already care about and own – notably iPhone, iPod , Xbox 360, and PS3 to date.

In addition, there’s another device that most of you own. Based on a recent survey, 72% of you (Vuze users) own a portable hard drive to carry around your media files. Combine this with the fact that you use an average of 2.9 computers on a weekly basis, and we decided to focus some attention on making it easier for you to take your media with you.

Let’s face it, you don’t always have the ability (or desire) to install Vuze on the multiple computers you use at work, in school, or at a friend’s place. With this in mind, we set out to make it possible for you to run Vuze from the same portable drive where you store your media files, anywhere you go.

To do this, Vuze teamed with a company called Ceedo to create a simple, elegant app we’re calling Vuze To Go – a completely portable, self-contained version of Vuze.

Vuze To Go installs on any portable disk drive, like a USB hard drive or a flash thumb drive, rather than on your computer’s hard drive, and enables access to the full functionality of Vuze – anytime and anywhere. Just plug your portable drive (complete with Vuze To Go) into any PC and you’re ready to go. Vuze will run seamlessly from the portable drive, and all of your downloads can also go directly to that drive. And, like Vuze on your main computer, you’ll be able to play all the content in your Vuze Library even when you’re offline.

For you techies, Vuze to Go contains a virtual operating system, plus your familiar Vuze application.

While the core version of Vuze remains free (and always will), we’re offering a PC version of “Vuze to Go” for only $9.99. Try it out free for 2 weeks, and let us know what you think.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Chris

The low down on downloading

Last week, Ernesto from Torrent Freak asked us a question, “What are your top tips for optimizing download speed?” so our co-founder and CTO, Olivier Chalouhi set to responding. Seems to me that as many people as possible should profit from his wise words, so here they are:

1. Seed. Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.
2. Be connectable. Make sure you’re not fire-walled by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.
3. Manage your upload speed. It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.
4. Select the right torrents. Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.
5. Be realistic. Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.
6. Get a Friend Boost. I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed. When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

Happy downloading.

Search and you will Find

Some of you have already discovered our new search functionality, but for those of you that haven’t, we want to make sure you don’t miss out on this great new feature.

Now, when you type the name of the video you’re looking for into our search box, you’ll get a list of all the torrents from the Vuze Network and from some of the most popular other sites. If you can’t see the name of your favorite site, you can always search for templates that have been created by members of our community and add it. And for the developers / hackers out there, you can always create your own custom template too, and share it with others on the web.

We’d love to know what you think of this new feature, so please leave your comments here or in our forums.

Happy Finding,

Olivier