Torrific, Turn Torrents Into Direct HTTP Downloads

Bittorrent offers a very popular way of downloading files from the Internet, or even a local network. The protocol is however very dependent on the seeders, that is the users or servers the complete files are distributed from. Users can speed up downloading and seeding of files with so called seedboxes, which are dedicated servers that usually have a much larger throughput than the lines of the clients.

Torrific offers an interesting alternative to using seedboxes or downloading torrents directly to a local computer service. The free service can be used to create direct HTTP downloads of torrents. It basically works like this. The user adds a torrent file to the system. Torrific then uses its server to download the torrent, and make it available for download to the user of its service.

There are a few benefits of this, with the two most prominent ones the following: HTTP downloads are usually a lot faster than downloads from Bittorrent, and that's true even with the added time that the downloads take before they are ready and available at Torrific.

The second advantage is that the user's IP address does not appear in the P2P network at all. Torrific does all that, and it will be very interesting to see how they handle downloads of copyrighted media.

The download progress of each torrent that is added to the service is displayed on the user's profile page. Having said that it should be noted that user accounts are mandatory but easy to setup and without verification whatsoever.

Torrents can either be added directly by pointing the service to a torrent url, or by using a keyword search, which makes use of a custom Google search form. It usually is faster to locate the torrent directly though, especially if the user has a few favorite sites for torrent downloads.

Email notifications can be configured, which dispatch an email whenever a torrent has been downloaded completely by the torrent downloading service.

Some torrents are available instantly, which is the case if another Torrific member already requested it and if it still resides on the servers of the torrent downloading service. The developers state that files are usually stored for a limited period of time, due to storage limitations. This currently seems to be less than a week. The oldest torrents expire first to make room for new torrent requests.

Premium accounts are available, which offer benefits like no wait time for large torrent downloads. The service is currently in alpha, and offers unlimited downloads for free users. It is likely that this is going to change over time. Everything else would simply be unreasonable, considering that the service has to pay for the bandwidth used by its users and the downloads of the torrents.

Check out Torrific if you want to give it a try.

Update: The Torrific website is no longer available. The latest version of uTorrent has made sharing a lot easier, I suggest you try it out as an alternative. You can also try the following two Torrific alternatives.

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