The other day I uploaded a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin to Debian, version 2.14-4, to fix a few packaging issues. This plugin extend VLC allowing it to stream videos directly from a bittorrent source using both torrent files and magnet links, as easy as using a HTTP or local file source. I believe such protocol support is a vital feature in VLC, allowing efficient streaming from sources such at the 11 million movies in the Internet Archive. Bittorrent is one of the most efficient content distribution protocols on the Internet, without centralised control, and should be used more.
The new version is now both in Debian Unstable and Testing, as well as Ubuntu. While looking after the package, I decided to ask the VLC upstream community if there was any hope to get Bittorrent support into the official VLC program, and was very happy to learn that someone is already working on it. I hope we can see some fruits of that labour next year, but do not hold my breath. In the mean time we can use the plugin, which is already installed by 0.23 percent of the Debian population according to popularity-contest. It could use a new upstream release, and I hope the upstream developer soon find time to polish it even more.
It is worth noting that the plugin store the downloaded files in ~/Downloads/vlc-bittorrent/, which can quickly fill up the user home directory during use. Users of the plugin should keep an eye with disk usage when streaming a bittorrent source.
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