After over 6 months of work the first FrostWire 5 release is finally out with over 50 upgrades, fixes and new features.
The most important new features of FrostWire 5 are:
1. Faster and richer curated search results from the top file sharing engines of the Internet
2. The ability to send large files or entire folders to other people with a simple HTTP link
3. Improved BitTorrent Support, including creating torrents & downloading partial torrents
4. New looks and better media support by the music player
Most of these updates and changes were the product of community feedback, long debates and hard decisions made to help shape the future of our file sharing community.
Let’s review each one of these in detail.
Faster, cleaner search results
The number one complaint from our user base was spam. Without much development muscle in our community after LimeWire was shutdown, all of our updates and heuristics were unable to upkeep with the never ending battle against spam. Power users were able to fine-tune their FrostWires with what we had provided, but the mainstream users were falling constant victims of spam and fake search results.
With the landscape of file sharing shifting to BitTorrent we saw the opportunity build up on it’s strengths and to make the BitTorrent experience a lot easier and simpler, one that your mom can handle.
We dropped Gnutella search and replaced it with the curated indexes of major HTTP BitTorrent Search Engines (and we’ll keep adding more with each release). The results are instant search results, and no spam or fakes.
As always, a portion of users might still have to go through a bit of a learning curve transitioning to a BitTorrent only application. First-time BitTorrent users might not initially realize that most torrents contain more than one file, for example, or know that you can selectively download files from a single torrent. We’ve included all sorts of tools to let users filter search results and filter the content inside torrents as well.
FrostWire 5 combines the search results of all of listed engines in one place so you don’t need to leave your FrostWire window and figure out which torrent search engine to use. When you start a download, FrostWire will show you from which webpage the torrent came from, giving the search engine a deserved page view for each download started from FrostWire 5. We hope this will foster more competitiveness in the BitTorrent indexing community and more even better indexed content. As those search engines see what kind of searches are coming in, we believe that they’ll start adjusting their practices to attract more FrostWire users to download their torrents and both, the torrent indexing community and the torrent content consumer, will benefit from FrostWire 5 fully entering the BitTorrent community.
Send large files and folders
We think one of the biggest, most common and at the same time the simplest problems on the Internet is sending large files between computers. If you often work with large files (and files are getting larger and larger as computing gets better, storage cheaper, cameras have better image resolutions for both video and stills) and you need to send them to your clients, friends, coworkers or family, email just may not be an option.
What’s the alternative?
There are many services where you can upload your files for others to download. The problem is, which service do I use? Many of the free file upload sites are simply too difficult or even close to impossible to use because they are overloaded with deceptively placed ads, pop-ups, timeouts and other file size and bandwidth limitations. They also constantly nag you to purchase paid versions, making it extremely frustrating for free users. There are of course paid and enterprise alternatives that do work, but not everybody wants to or simply can pay for the subscription. The services simply cannot allow free accounts because of the high storage and bandwidth costs.
Because FrostWire works on the distributed BitTorrent network, you can literally grab terabytes of data and make them easily available to friends and family right from your computer at no cost. Best of all, the more people you share this data with, the faster they can download. They will collaborate with each other as they download the pieces and pass portions of the files along to others.
You can have your latest and greatest HD Viral Video, in all it’s quality and glory, sent to millions of computers just by sending out a link that FrostWire will create for you in seconds. The receiving parties will need to use FrostWire, and they will be able to pause/resume the download and help you seed the content for others. Yes, you can distribute a file to millions of people, right from your computer. No need to sign up to any service and no need to pay for anything (maybe excluding your Internet connection!) FrostWire 5 allows you not only send a file, but to send entire folders of content. No more limits on file size, type, video duration or quality! You can start a revolution right from your home computer – the possibilities are unlimited!
The process is super simple. All you gotta do is drag and drop the file or folder you want to send onto the FrostWire window, and FrostWire will, under the hood, create and seed a torrent for you. It will then give you the option to Copy the text with a HTTP link or a Magnet link that you can later send to your friends and family. There’s even a Send to Twitter option in case you have something important to share with the world.
Improved BitTorrent Support
We rewrote our BitTorrent integration with Vuze’s core, a powerful, stable and fast BitTorrent core library, from scratch. We also added many features related to BitTorrent that FrostWire 4 didn’t have.
Some of the new features include easy torrent creation (both decentralized torrents and tracker based torrents), sending large files and folders (which, as we have explained is also done on top of BitTorrent, but the technology aspects have been hidden from the user), being able to filter and download individual files from torrents, easy magnet link creation, DHT support and more.
New Looks & Better Media Support
We removed of the old skinning system and integrated a technology called “Substance” that allows us to paint the FrostWire interface however we want. It also adds a nice animation effects to improve the user experience. FrostWire 5 comes with over 25 new substance skins.
We are in the process of designing a beautiful new skin for both our desktop and android products to give you a more uniform experience across the platforms and are planning some major UX updates to Library Tab, but that’s scheduled to come out in the following releases.
We’ve also given our barbed wire sphere a well deserved make over, we hope you like it too.
The FrostWire 5 installer dropped about 50% of it’s size when compared to FrostWire 4, so we decided to use the space we had lost for something very useful and we tackled another part of the software that was not performing up to our standards – the media player.
Library Tab, but that’s scheduled to come out in the following releases.
We’ve also given our barbed wire sphere a well deserved make over, we hope you like it too.
The FrostWire 5 installer dropped about 50% of it’s size when compared to FrostWire 4, so we decided to use the space we had lost for something very useful and we tackled another part of the software that was not performing up to our standards – the media player.
The old media player was a 100% Java MP3 decoder which wasn’t 100% compatible with all mp3 files. We have decided to bring a project on board that knows how to playback all media well, so now FrostWire comes with a binary build of mplayer that supports the most popular audio codecs flawlessly. For now we’ve decided to leave video playback out of the picture to keep the size of the installer to the bare minimum.
The Future
This release of FrostWire 5 is merely a beginning of many ideas that can and will happen on top of the BitTorrent network. We believe that BitTorrent is a great technology that is being majorly underutilized. In time, we’ll show you what we mean, just stay tuned.
Follow @frostwire on Twitter.
BitTorrent Magnet Links Support
Now, not only will .torrent files survive in the Gnutella network, but they will be fully searchable [in gnutella] and ready to aid in BitTorrent downloads may those torrents ever be removed from web based indexing services.
If you’re not getting enough search results from your peers, or you are seeing too many spam and fake results, it’s a good idea to Refresh your connections. FrostWire will fetch a list of healthy and recently crawled ultrapeers willing to take more peers.
Official FrostWire Blog 