qBittorrent 4.6 launches with I2P support

A new version of the open source Bittorrent client qBittorrent is now available. The new qBittorrent 4.6.0 is a major upgrade and the first since November 2022 when qBittorent 4.5 was released.

Existing users may select Help > Check for updates to check for the update or Help > About to display the current version. The new release is also available on the official project website.

Note: Windows Smartscreen may block the installation by default. This happens when a file is new and unknown to SmartScreen. You can bypass this to continue with the installation of qBittorrent 4.6.0.

qBittorrent 4.6: new features

The main new feature is support for I2P, the Invisble Internet Project. It uses a fully encrypted privacy network layer to hide user activity and locations. The network does not use servers. Peers contributed "a portion of their resources" to other network particpants.

The maintainers promise that "non one can see where traffic is coming from, where it is going, or what the contents are" when the Invisible Internet Project is active.

The official release notes list a good dozen additional features. Some of these expose new options to the Settings or new user shortcuts.

The three new exposed settings are:

• FEATURE: Expose 'socket send/receive buffer size' options (Chocobo1)
• FEATURE: Expose 'max torrent file size' setting (Chocobo1)
• FEATURE: Expose 'bdecode limits' settings (Chocobo1)

Interesting from a user perspective is the ability to move newly added torrents to the top of the queue and an editor for the default theme. Another handy option is to sort torrents by save path. Useful to torrent users who save torrents to different drives or folders.

Other than those, downloading via RSS has also received several enhancements. The new version of qBittorrent supports editing RSS feed URLs, which is helpful when a source switches domains or servers.

The optional web user interface has a new option to rename multiple files to make these operations comfortable. There is also support for subcategories and a log viewer. Speaking of logs, qBittorrent adds entries to the logs when duplicate torrents are added. Filtered port numbers are also shown in logs now.

You can check out the full changelog here. It lists a good dozen bug fixes and several other improvements to the torrent client.

Closing Words

QBittorrent 4.6.0 is a major upgrade for the torrent application. The main feature addition is experimental support for I2P, which promises to add another layer of anonymity.

Now You: which torrent client do you use, if any?

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