I think the reason for this was rather obvious: Australians represented a disproportionate number of the people who regularly download TV shows from torrent sites and other sources. Obviously having to wait a year ore more to find what happens in your favourite show when you could find out inside a day is not something a lot of people are going to put up with. Personally I’m one of the people who downloads quite a number of TV shows from various other countries (mostly Japan and the US) but if I have the option of watching a HD broadcast while not eating up my bandwidth I will definitely take it. I have so many shows I enjoy watching that I don’t mind waiting that extra week.

Not every show gets this kind of treatment of course but the ones that do are usually advertised heavily. From the ones I watch there are: House, Life, My Name Is Earl and Heroes. Less popular shows like Smallville and Numb3rs are not so lucky. Still, I think this is definitely a step in the right direction. The only problems I can see are that scripted TV shows are a dying breed and that television itself is a dying medium that in the near future will be superseded by high-speed internet connection with streaming video, such as the increasing available IPTV.

Have any readers made the switch back to actual TV or do the delays and need to stick to a scheduled time still make you prefer downloads?

So far, the supported features are: authentication with username/password, viewing of the queue, uploading new torrents (from a local file or a URL), auto-refresh and pausing/resuming downloading. This enough for basic administration but one rather essential feature that is missing is the ability to change the queue position of torrents, such as to move something up or down. There are also no settings available so it relies on you having the system set up beforehand and not wanting to change anything.

Another key problem with running WebUI on Deluge is that the program itself requires a full desktop to be running as it requires GTK+. This means that you can’t run it on a server that has been set up to run a minimal set of software daemons from the shell. There’s no real reason why a torrent program needs a graphical interface so maybe a “headless” mode will be enabled on Deluge in future versions.

One interesting design decision made is that images and stylesheets are in a different directory to the templates. From the sounds of the directory they’re in (static) the intention is to have the unchanging components served from a different directory which could theoretically be on a completely different server. This is good practice for high traffic sites and is a common way of optimising a web site but I have to wonder why it was employed here. I assume that a personal interface to your BitTorrent client would not qualify as a high traffic site and the templating system is extraordinarily handicapped by having stylesheets and images in a different directory that is not related to the template in any way.

I would like to take a look at the plugin further and see if some improvements can be made, such as allowing full AJAX operations. I think using AJAX refreshes would be particularly beneficial as full page refreshes are terribly wasteful in terms of bandwidth and not very nice from a usability point of view. Other improvements should just be a matter of changing the template – for example, making the layout fluid rather than fixed width.

The WebUI plugin for Deluge does look promising and could eventually replace Azureus as my BitTorrent client but there are some important problems that would need to be addressed first.