Fun stuff with Nokia N900: P2P/ Bittorent downloads and Xvid/AVI movie playback

Before I checked this out, I thought that P2P/BitTorrent clients on smartphones was one of the things the people just did not do.

I guess, I was wrong. It seems that every major mobile platform has one.

On the other hand, since I use Bittorent mainly to catch up with the U.S. shows, like Lost, FlashForward, Mentalist, etc;  that are still not available here, in Eastern Europe, I never saw a reason to try one on my smartphone.

So far, even the handsets with enough screen real  estate, to consider watching a movie on it, required some serious video transcoding in order to be able to watch the thing. So it was a much more easy thing to do on my PC.

But with Nokia N900 feeling more and more like a small computer in my hand, I thought I’ll give it a try.

And it worked! I was able to download  Xvid/Avi formatted show episode of CSI from P2P site and watch it on my Nokia 900.

Well, it wasn’t glitch free, or seamless. But it was pretty easy to do. All I needed was to download and install Transmission P2P app (beta version only, for now). And find a torrent to download. That’s it. I clicked the link to the torrent, was asked whether I wanted to open it with Transmission, said yes, and the download started. When it finished downloading, I checked the new “Downloads” folder with file manager. The new show episode was there and played without a hitch.

The whole process was a bit buggy, and I managed to crash the system a couple of times. But that’s what you can expect from beta version of app and unfinished firmware. It was also very resource intensive. P2P download slowed down the multitasking capabilities of Nokia N900 to the point of being unusable. While it still worked, getting to app dashboard and starting other apps took tens of seconds.

I used my home Wi-Fi for the download. And it was pretty power hungry. A single download of 40 min, 380 MB episode, consumed about 15-20% of my battery in about 30 minutes.

Still, the main thing is that it worked. The bugs will be fixed eventually. And, if during my travels I’ll find myself with nothing to do, few hours to kill and  Wi-Fi or more generous HSDPA connection, I’ll know what to do.

Here’s the video I took of the whole P2P download process on Nokia N900:

And yes, I know, this pirating stuff is not exactly within the limits of the law But, they won’t give us a single legal way to get any digital content here, so,  frankly, I  do not care much.

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