On July 10, 2009 the movie Brüno will be released in cinemas worldwide. Actor Sacha Baron Cohen (of Ali G and Borat fame) will play yet another funny character – if you liked his previous appearances, you’ll love this one!

Digg Dialogg is doing an interview with Brüno next week, and we will post the interview on June 30 here on Mininova. That’s not all: you can submit your questions to Bruno, and the top rated questions will be asked!

That’s it for now – keep watching Mininova on June 30!

–update–
The interview with Brüno has been published.

Cheers, The Mininova staff

It has been a while since Mininova has undergone some changes, but today we’re releasing some new features, including:

• A layout update, the top advertisement banner is gone.
• An improved search field with the possibility to restrict your search to a specific category.
• The search results are also improved, including the highlighting of the results (example).
• New buttons on several pages (thanks to a technique described by Google developer Douglas Bowman).
• Instead of creating a torrent file and seeding your data, you can now use VIPeers for uploading. VIPeers is a free service that will create a torrent file, seed your content and send you back to the Mininova upload page, where you can fill in the details.
• “Remember me” checkbox on the login page, the possibility to remain logged in, even when you quit your browser and connect via another Internet network. Although this may be very useful, do not use this option on a public computer (in a library or so).
• New servers to keep up with the growing number of visitors. These servers will be installed in a few days.
• Some bug fixes.
• We moved to a new office location in downtown Utrecht, The Netherlands. We used to rent a small office space at Regus, but we had a very bad experience (note to startups: do NOT rent at Regus! They will try to nail you with the agreement). We are happy with our new office inside a classical building alongside the city canal. See our contact page for more information. We’ll put up some more pictures on Picasa.

We hope you will enjoy these changes! Let us know if you experience any problems.

The past few weeks, we have been working on our side project, the video-site Snotr.com. Launched in July 2007, Snotr is a website that publishes hand-picked funny videos on a daily basis. Videos can be submitted by everyone and a moderator team chooses which ones get published.

During the first few months after its launch, Snotr was linked on the frontpage of Mininova. Right now, it has quite a lot of regular visitors and the traffic keeps increasing. Some videos have already been viewed more than a million times!

A big improvement is the new video player, which supports viewing videos in fullscreen and works just as you would expect of a video player. Another interesting feature is m.snotr.com, the mobile version of Snotr we’re lauching. If you have a mobile phone with Internet access, you can watch all Snotr videos on-the-go. If you want to post comments, rate videos, etc. you still have to navigate to the desktop version of Snotr.

Other improvements, as listed on the Snotr frontpage, are:

• Statistics on the right side of the frontpage.
• New smilies: and .
• Voting on comments.
• A Snotr toolbar, for easier watching and submitting.
• A Twitter page, so you can stay up to date.
• Subscriptions, receive an email with the best videos periodically.
• Snotr TV, watch videos continuously (for example on your TV).

I you haven’t checked out Snotr yet: make sure to visit the website.

We’re currently working on Mininova, more news about that is coming up in a few days. Stay tuned for a new blog post!

We would like to update you about the following matters.

Lawsuit

First of all, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN has announced to begin a full proceedings lawsuit (Dutch terminology: ‘bodemprocedure’) against Mininova. BREIN demands that we implement a filter on Mininova and take responsibility to prevent possible copyright infringements being taken place by our users. We discussed this matter with BREIN for a long time, but we couldn’t agree as their demands are both disproportionate and invalid.

The lawsuit will likely take several years and will take place in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Our case will be defended by Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm of KaZaA fame and VIta Zwaan. We will proceed to court with full confidence, and defend our unique position in the BitTorrent world and our current copyright policy. The court decision will be important for many other community-driven websites, like Google and YouTube.

As a side note: please know that we do not provide user information to third parties. For you as a Mininova user, nothing will change for now. More press coverage: English or Dutch.

5 billion downloads

In other news: we passed the mark of 5 billion (5,000,000,000) torrent downloads yesterday. The previous mark, 4 billion downloads, was reached in February this year. TorrentFreak has full coverage on this story.

Stay up-to-date

Do you like Mininova and want to stay up-to-date with the latest news and development? Besides checking out this blog, you can now get your latest news from our Facebook group and Twitter page. See you there and till the next time!

So what exactly is Snotr? From the Snotr FAQ:

Snotr is a source for short and funny or interesting videos. Everyone can submit a video, which will be reviewed by our team. If we accept your video, it will be listed on the front page and other pages. Users can rate videos and post comments to share their opinion with others. Please note that we try to keep this website family-safe, so adult submissions are not allowed.

Some of the unique features of Snotr (compared to the other “funny videos” sites out there) are:

• Clean interface, no adult content, SFW
• High-quality videos
• Real-time video resizing (just drag the video-size slider)
• Audio volume leveled (no need to change the volume for every video)

So to be clear: Snotr is NOT a YouTube/Metacafe/Dailymotion/whatever killer, if you’re looking for a place to dump your videos, stick to those sites. But in case you have some spare time to spend (*cough* work *cough*), try Snotr

See you there!

Update: For those who are wondering what the name ‘Snotr’ means: it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s just a catchy name.

P.S. If you spot any bugs, please post them here.

Nowadays, there are quite some projects and extensions to add BitTorrent capabilities to browsers, so I figured it’s time for a round-up:

Opera
Opera was the first browser to support the BitTorrent protocol. Their BT support is quite solid, but not very advanced and doesn’t support some well-known BT extensions. In short: nice for new users, but not for regular downloaders.
Pros: Nicely integrated, multi-platform.
Cons: No advanced features (missing DHT, peer exchange, encrypted transfers), not open source.

BitFox
BitFox is a quite new extension for Firefox, made by the student Joshua Hendo. The backend of the extension is based on Rasterbar’s libtorrent, so it supports quite some advanced BT features. The project is in a VERY early stage of development, and can only be obtained from SVN, so I haven’t tested it yet.
Pros: Open source, using libtorrent, so a quite solid backend (including DHT).
Cons: Not usable yet, early stage of development, seems to run only on Windows & Linux.

FireStorm
FireStorm is quite similar to BitFox, it’s an extension for Firefox and still in pre-alpha development stage. They use the Mainline client as a basis, so they will probably support most BT extensions/features.
Pros: Open source, using the Mainline reference client as a backend.
Cons: In pre-alpha development stage, not usable yet, interface is quite ugly.

FoxTorrent
FoxTorrent is a project of the company Red Swoosh/Akamai, these guys have the funding and expertise to build a nice Firefox extension. This extension isn’t that well integrated in Firefox, clicking a torrent basically opens a webpage to the webinterface of an external application. The advantage is that closing your browser doesn’t stop the torrents from downloading.
Pros: Open source, torrent streaming/progressive downloading support, continue downloading even when browser is closed.
Cons: Not very well integrated in Firefox, no advanced features (missing port mapping, DHT, peer exchange, encrypted transfers).

AllPeers
AllPeers is also funded by a company, so you would expect a nice client. The whole interface looks very nice and clean, but they’re more focussed towards sharing URL’s/images/etc than downloading torrents. In the current stable version (0.60), there is not an option to download a regular torrent. They do have a My Torrents tab in the beta version though.
Pros: Clean and professional interface, also available as a bundle with FireFox
Cons: Not open source, no regular torrent support (yet), no advanced features (missing port mapping, DHT, peer exchance, encrypted transfers)

Wyzo/FireTorrent
Wyzo/FireTorrent is very new, they released their first public version a week ago. The difference between the two is that FireTorrent is a BitTorrent extension for Firefox, while Wyzo is a full-featured customized Firefox browser including the FireTorrent extension. These guys managed to integrate BitTorrent support seamlessly in the Firefox download manager. FireTorrent also has the most advanced BT features of all the projects mentioned here. The Wyzo browser has some cool advantages over Firefox, like direct searching on social sharing networks (including Mininova) and Alexa/Pagerank integration.
Pros: Seamless Firefox integration, available as a bundle with Firefox (Wyzo), has all advanced features (including port mapping, DHT, encryption, peer exchange, STUNT).
Cons: Not open source, Mac/Linux version not out yet – will be released in a few weeks

Conclusion
Of all the projects reviewed above, I think Wyzo has the most potential. This browser supports all the nice BT features/extensions and makes downloading via BitTorrent as easy as a regular HTTP download. Does Wyzo beat the “good old” µTorrent and Azureus? Probably not, but I will definitely recommend new BitTorrent users to install this browser.

References
Our friends at TorrentFreak have more background information on some of these projects: BitFox, FireStorm, FoxTorrent, AllPeers, Wyzo/FireTorrent.

First of all, the new website: it took a while, but it seems that the new server setup is working fine now. We still need to fine-tune some areas, which will happen next week. Thanks everyone for reporting bugs and glitches!

Some people noticed that specific search queries return wrong results. For example, searching on “French” only returns old torrents. We hope to fix this issue in a few days. Update January 6: this problem is solved now.

Some other people reported that searching for “bla” does not return results for torrents with the name “blabla”. This so called “prefixed searching” is not possible yet with the new searching backend (Sphinx), but we hope to have this fixed somewhere in January. Update January 8: and this problem has been solved as well.

Enough about technical issues, on to the good news: several news sources (BBC, CTV, Torrentfreak) reported that “Mininova” was the ninth most Googled term in 2006. It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!

And now for something else, the guys over at BitLord have released a TV show for the BitTorrent community. Mininova also plays a prominent part being the sponsor of the Torrent Top List. The guys at BitLord told me the first episode would be a first attempt at a show so they will improve it as time goes. But I have to say, the first episode is a nice start. Make sure to download the first episode here.

OK, that’s it for now… have a nice year-end and till next time!

I thought it would be fun to play another game together..

This time it’s the great game Trackmania Nations.

Download the game here, here or from a HTTP mirror.

After you have downloaded and installed the game, you can find it in the server list @ NED with the name “Mininova Trackmania Server!”.

Alternatively, you can connect to “etc.mininova.org”. For more info on how to connect to a specific IP, take a look here.

Greetz

Quote from Opera:

Opera does not encourage the use of BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP protocols for downloading illegal, copyright infringing material.

Note how they see BitTorrent as just another protocol and not something specially used for filesharing.

The Opera downloads are now also available as a torrents

Here is a list of some of my favorite paintings.

Update: 23-12-2005

Added 2 new images mailed by mazin.