Building a BitTorrent Rig with the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus

Vuze BitTorrent Software

LR Editors Note: Using P2P and file-sharing software to distribute copyrighted material without authorization is illegal in the United States and many other countries. Legit Reviews does not encourage or condone the illegal duplication or distribution of copyrighted content.

There are quite a few BitTorrent clients to help you find, download, and play HD content from the web. Vuze is Azureus descendant, one of the most popular BT clients ever to be downloaded. The newest version of Vuze makes it very simple for first-timers to get up and going.

Vuze is a Java-based BitTorrent client that has a ton of options for those wantint to download and seed (upload) information. It contains a very good and customizable search engine, a subscription service that enables you to automatically find content or episodes whenever there is something new available.

After getting your content, Vuze can even help you stream your content throughout your home or office. There is even a way to play back your content on your Apple iPhone, iPod, iPad, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, PSP, or TiVo. You can just drop-and-drag the media into the device icon and Vuze will automatically know what each device settings should be so no more trying to figure out which is the right screen size for your iPod or what audio is best to transcode for your PSP. Vuze works this out for you automatically.

For those of us with set-top media boxes or DLNA supported televisions, Vuze comes with a UPnP Media Server plugin. Enabling this, allows Vuze to show up on devices that can access UPnP Media Servers. Overall, Vuze is feature-rich for the beginner and the advanced user. This is why we chose piece of software as the heart of our BitTorrent machine.

You will notice that the install files arent very big to begin with and
once you finish the installation process, the Vuze folder takes about
20meg of space on your hard drive.

Once running, there is a Vuze Installation Wizard that comes up. Vuze
tries to help you out by testing your internet speed and apply them to
the program. When torrenting, you dont want to just peg your internet
speeds and become a bandwidth hog. Vuze will look at your max
upload/download speeds and suggest a setting for everyday use. What is
nice is that Vuze can throttle your bandwidth according to what others
are doing on your network.

After Vuze gets a general feel for your network speeds, it asks you
about your proficiency with Vuze and BitTorrenting in general. Choose
Advanced so that we can see all options and customize them.

We want to make sure Pause Downloads on exit and Resume paused
downloads are checked, just in case that 50 GB file doesnt finish
downloading and you need to shut down your machine and start up later.
Checking this option will help prevent your partially downloaded file
from being corrupted or lost.

Under the Connections option, we choose the TCP and UDP listen port to
use with Vuze. This is very important as some ISP and BitTorrent sites
disallow or regulate traffic on default ports. We chose 49200 as our
port number to use. Later on, we will make sure that our router allows
connections from the outside world through that port for this machine.

The Transfer tab contains multiple options for managing how many
connections and the speed of which you upload and download data. If you
completed Vuzes initial speed test, you will see the results in the
Global Max Upload tab. Of course you can adjust any of these settings,
but for us we like using the Automatically adjust settings… options
to keep things simple and easy.

You can also assign where your Torrents data and multimedia data will be
stored. Since we have a Network Attached Storage drive, we will point
to it for the data we are downloading. Ive unchecked the Automatically
download to default directory since I like to tell Vuze where to put
my downloaded files.

I limited the number of read/write files to approximately 500 since
opening an unlimited amount of files for transfer can again bog the
system down.

Under Interface->Display, we make sure we uncheck Suppress File
Download popup dialog to make sure Vuze shows us the options that we
have for downloading data each time.

Vuze can act as a UPnP server and allow your multimedia content that you
have download to be streamed over your local network with either a
set-top box like the WD TV Live, or with a feature-ready television. By
default this feature is off and no media will be made available. If you
think you might want this or need it, go ahead and check the Enable
UPnP box.

We are now almost finished setting up Vuze for use. We still need to
configure the Vuze search engine as well as our router settings.