While millions of people still use BitTorrent every day to download videos, increasingly streaming sites have become more dominant for online entertainment. Nearly every video file available via BitTorrent can also be streamed online somewhere, for a payment or totally free.
While BitTorrent was one of the first technologies to enable the easy downloading of very large video files, it now has some catching up to do. The masses want their video and music on demand, and if BitTorrent wants to remain the big player it is today it has to deliver just that.
To this end, during recent years many BitTorrent clients have introduced streaming functionality, and there are also a few web-based services that offer similar capabilities. The Torrent Stream Magic Player is a new streaming service that sets itself apart by offering a true video-on-demand look and feel through a browser add-on.
Developed by a team of Russian coders the free add-on, bundled with a windows streaming application (Mac and Linux will follow this autumn), adds a “view torrent online” option to the browser’s context menu. Once the add-on and app are installed and configured all the user has to do is right click on a .torrent link and a fancy player slides into the browser.
Torrent Stream Magic Player
Providing the user has enough bandwidth and the torrent file is well seeded, the video or music track starts to play in just a few seconds. Additional controls also give the user the option to manage a playlist and pause the torrent file whenever needed.
The add-on is in an early stage of development and the developers told TorrentFreak that many new features will be added in the near future. Aside from obvious bugfixes users will get the option to style the player into a more personal look. The team is also working on decreasing buffering times to allow for even more instant gratification.
And then there’s another upcoming feature that will be a bit more controversial. The developers are working on an upgrade that will allows users to get relevant streams from various movie and music portals that don’t offer content themselves. This ‘magic button’ will appear when users browse a compatible site such as IMdB, and it will bring up suggested content to stream directly.
We tried the add-on and can confirm that it works as promised. Although the add-on can be improved on some small points it doesn’t have the clunky feel of some other browser-based torrent streaming solutions. It works well with both videos and music and is definitely worth a try.
Interested readers should be aware that aside from streaming, data is also saved on the local computer and has to be removed manually. More information, tips and tricks are available on the Torrent Stream Magic Player website.
