Transmission is a BitTorrent client which features a variety of user interfaces on top of 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 ...

back-end. Transmission is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

licensed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

, with parts under the MIT License.

Features

Transmission allows users to quickly download files from multiple peers on the Internet and to upload their own files. By adding

torrent file In the BitTorrent file distribution system, a torrent file or meta-info file is a computer file that contains metadata about files and folders to be distributed, and usually also a list of the network locations of trackers, which are compute ...

s via the user interface, users can create a queue of files to be downloaded and uploaded. Within the file selection menus, users can customise their downloads at the level of individual files. Transmission also seeds, that is, it will automatically share downloaded content. Transmission allows the assigning of priorities to torrents and to files within torrents, thus potentially influencing which files download first. It supports the

Magnet URI scheme Magnet is a URI scheme that defines the format of magnet links, a de facto standard for identifying files (URN) by their content, via cryptographic hash value rather than by their location. Although magnet links can be used in a number of con ...

and encrypted connections. It allows torrent-file creation and peer exchange compatible with Vuze and μTorrent. It includes a built-in web server so that users can control Transmission remotely via the web. It also supports automatic port-mapping using

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, peer caching, blocklists for bad peers, bandwidth limits dependent on time-of-day, globally or per-torrent, and has partial support for IPv6. It allows the use of multiple trackers simultaneously,

Local Peer Discovery The Local Peer Discovery protocol, specified as BEP-14, is an extension to the BitTorrent file-distribution system. It is designed to support the discovery of local BitTorrent peers, aiming to minimize the traffic through the Internet service ...

, Micro Transport Protocol (μTP), and UDP tracker. It does not support directly subscribing to RSS feeds containing torrent files for automatic download, but third-party add-ons can supply this functionality. macOS-specific features include Dock and Growl notifications, automatic updates using Sparkle and Universal Binary (up until version 2.22).

Development

Transmission 1.60 and later removed support for Mac OS X v10.4. Currently, Transmission 1.54 is the last version that runs on Mac OS X 10.4. Although it is possible to compile later versions from source, either by downloading from the project's website or using a package manager like Fink or MacPorts, it is unsupported and any bugs specific to 10.4 will not be fixed. Starting with Transmission 2.30 an Apple Mac with an

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

CPU is needed;

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

-based systems are no longer supported natively. The Transmission back-end (libTransmission) also serves as the basis of the Transmission daemon. The daemon supports a web front-end called Clutch. Older versions have been ported to form the basis of the update system for the video game ''

Metal Gear Online ''Metal Gear Online'' was a stealth third-person shooter video game for the PlayStation 3. It was an online multiplayer spin-off of the ''Metal Gear'' video game series. The starter pack of ''Online'' was available worldwide bundled with '' Metal ...

'' on

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

, as well as the backend for

ImageShack ImageShack is a subscription-based image hosting website headquartered at Los Gatos, California. Although ImageShack always had a subscription service, the majority of its revenue was originally produced from advertising related to its free im ...

's BitTorrent service.

Distribution and ports

A portable version is available on PortableApps.com.

Ports

Transmission is a set of lightweight BitTorrent clients (in GUI, CLI and daemon form). All its incarnations feature a very simple, intuitive interface on top on an efficient, cross-platform back-end. There are several transmission clients for different operating systems including

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

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 ...

and

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users an ...

ZETA Zeta (, ; uppercase Ζ, lowercase ζ; grc, ζῆτα, el, ζήτα, label= Demotic Greek, classical or ''zē̂ta''; ''zíta'') is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived f ...

. Each operating system front-end is built using native widget toolkits. For example, transmission-gtk uses the GTK interface, transmission-qt the Qt interface, and transmission-cli a

command-line interface A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

. Transmission-remote-cli is an ncurses interface for the transmission-daemon. Python-transmissionrpc is a Python module implementing the JSON-RPC protocol for Transmission. An unofficial

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

of Transmission using a

(CLI) on iOS was accomplished on 3 March 2008. In November 2010, iTransmission, another unofficial port, was released for jailbroken iPhones sporting a

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

that is capable of downloading directly to the device over WiFi or 3G. A Transmission remote was released for Android, with the name of ''Transdroid'' but does not currently support downloading directly to devices. On

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 ...

, Transmission-Qt can be built with MinGW, the daemon and console tools can be built with

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin in ...

, also there are two third-party GUIs: transmission-remote-dotnet and Transmission Remote GUI, as well as unofficial full builds of Transmission's Qt Client., There is also an unofficial full build of Transmission daemon which can be run as a

Windows service In Windows NT operating systems, a Windows service is a computer program that operates in the background. It is similar in concept to a Unix daemon. A Windows service must conform to the interface rules and protocols of the Service Control Manag ...

. This same unofficial full build of Transmission daemon running as a

can be used for direct

streaming Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content i ...

of the downloading file(s). A port for all platforms enhanced with streaming of the downloading file(s) is located 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 ...

. It is also ported to the Maemo OS of the Nokia N810 internet tablet and N900 smartphone as well as to the MeeGo/ Harmattan OS of the

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

N9 and N950 smartphones, on which it does download the torrents to the device.

Website breach

In March 2016,

Palo Alto Networks Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is an American multinational cybersecurity company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The core products is a platform that includes advanced firewalls and cloud-based offerings that extend those firewalls t ...

reported that Transmission's official website was compromised and tainted

.dmg DMG may refer to: Organizations Entertainment * Dames Making Games, a Canadian non-profit organization that encourages the participation of women, non-binary, femme and queer people in the creation of video games * Davidson Media Group, an Americ ...

files were uploaded to the site, using an Apple Developer signature to bypass the OS X gatekeeper feature. The tainted packages installed a ransomware application (a variant of

Linux.Encoder.1 Linux.Encoder (also known as ELF/Filecoder.A and Trojan.Linux.Ransom.A) is considered to be the first ransomware Trojan horse (computing), Trojan targeting computers running Linux. There are additional variants of this Trojan that target other Unix ...

, but recompiled for Mac, known as

KeRanger KeRanger (also known as OSX.KeRanger.A) is a ransomware trojan horse targeting computers running macOS. Discovered on March 4, 2016, by Palo Alto Networks, it affected more than 7,000 Mac users. KeRanger is remotely executed on the victim's comp ...

) that encrypts the user's files and attempts to force users to pay 1

Bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distr ...

(worth roughly US$404 at the time of the attack) in order to get the decryption pack. The Transmission website advised Mac users to immediately upgrade to a new version that removes the malware-infected file. Apple revoked the developer certificate that was used to sign the tainted package, and added the package's signature to the XProtect anti-malware system.

Reception

Transmission is the default BitTorrent client of many

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

and Linux distributions, including

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

Mint MiNT is Now TOS (MiNT) is a free software alternative operating system kernel for the Atari ST system and its successors. It is a multi-tasking alternative to TOS and MagiC. Together with the free system components fVDI device drivers, XaAE ...

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both side ...

, Puppy, Zenwalk, and the

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

flavor of openSUSE. Fon ships its routers with Transmission pre-installed. '' CNET'' editor Paul Huges praised Transmission for its "simplicity, lightweight, as well as being feature-packed" and as of April 2017 the software ranked third in P2P downloads for Mac on ''CNET''.

Notes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Transmission (Bittorrent Client) 2005 software BeOS software BitTorrent clients for Linux Cross-platform software File sharing software that uses GTK File sharing software that uses Qt Free BitTorrent clients Free software programmed in C MacOS file sharing software Software that uses ncurses Software using the MIT license Unix Internet software