Vuze Blog

Vuze 4.0 is Here!

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

- Winston Churchill

Over the years, we’ve been working to turn Vuze into the easiest way to find, download, and play high quality and especially HD videos.

On this road, we’re continually coming up with new features and moving as fast as possible to get them into your hands – though neither our speed nor execution lives up to the “perfection” cited by Mr. Churchill.  In fact, our speed occasionally led us to bolt features onto the existing interface in less than optimal ways, and to push core functionality into hard-to-reach back corners of the product (aka “advanced tab”).  As our users, you’ve told us loudly and clearly which changes you’ve loved (which has been great) and which you’ve hated (which we’ve tried to learn from).  With your feedback in mind, we decided a few months back that the time was right to re-think how the various parts of Vuze should fit together to form a great product.

Today, we launch Vuze 4.0, which has been directly inspired by your feedback.  In this release, you’ll find a few key things:

• First, you’ll find a dramatically streamlined and redesigned client.  All the features you know and love are included in the new design.  We’ve simply focused on improving usability and ease-of-use.
• Second, you’ll find new subscriptions functionality.  Now, you can easily find subscriptions related to content in your library, in the Vuze Network, or create your own subscriptions using Vuze Search or RSS.
• Third, those of you who use private trackers will find that our powerful meta-Search functionality now supports logins with user ids and passwords.  (And if you haven’t yet tried our new Search, you should definitely check it out.)
• And finally, we’ve made some major improvements to our emerging content platform, the Vuze HD Network, to make it easier for you to find videos that interest you.

What are you waiting for?  If haven’t done so yet, you can click here to download Vuze 4.0.

We’re really excited about these changes.  Let us know what you think as you dive in and take the newest Vuze out for a spin.  We’ll continue to refine and enhance Vuze for you, based on your comments.

Gilles

The next step towards an open and free Internet

FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin’s conclusion last week that Comcast had been improperly blocking bittorrent traffic was, for us, a major milestone in what has been an exciting journey that began in November of last year.

We had known for some time that ISPs were throttling bittorrent traffic, and we realized that our vantage point on the industry put us in a unique position to stand up for what’s right. So we decided we had to take action. We filed a petition with the FCC asking them to put in place clear rules on the issue of ISP network management practices.

Since then we have testified at an FCC hearing at Harvard, attended a second hearing at Stanford, joined with our community to monitor traffic throttling practices, and published our findings. All along the way, we have been overwhelmed by the support we have received from our community of users, from their comments in forums to their participation in collecting data with our plug-in.

So, we were thrilled to learn of Chairman Martin’s conclusion and to hear that he agreed with our cry of “foul!”. We were particularly pleased that Chairman Martin asked Comcast to be transparent with consumers about their past practices and future plans for network management. From the outset we have said that, to be fully effective, rules must be accompanied by a requirement for transparency into what ISPs are actually doing.

The Chairman’s statements do not yet represent the view of the full Commission. However, we hope the other four Commissioners have the courage to follow Chairman Martin’s lead and adopt a decisive order condemning the use of the “man in the middle” technique and other similar network management tactics. And while we await the Commission’s decision, we will continue to push for the rules we believe are required to create an open and free Internet that will benefit consumers everywhere.

Jay and the Vuze Team