The torrent phenomenon is one of the most hyped about in the world of technology among Peer to Peer (P2P) users. It consists of sharing large files, like movies, software, or games anonymously and quickly with other peers. The file you want to download is cut up into small segments shared by users, creating what is called a swarm, and does not go through a central server, significantly reducing the bulk of file transfers, The Bittorrent client is actually the first P2P application to use this technology and became immensely popular when it was released. Torrents are considered by online users as a great way to download recently released movies or tv shows.

Thanks to a straightforward, uncluttered interface Bittorrent appears as a friendly torrent client that beginners will feel comfortable with. We particularly appreciated the integrated search box to look for files on the bittorrent website. Once you’ve found the torrent you want, download it to your PC, open it up inside Bittorrent and let the client do its job. The speed at which you download will depend on the number of seeds, that is people who have the complete file and are sharing it. The more seeds there are the quicker files will download.

You can set multiple torrent downloads and the downloading speed is fairly quick. It’s easy to configure the client and we suggest choosing the right port and setting upload and download rate limits to avoid hogging your bandwidth. It’s also good to set your downloads by priority to monitor more precisely how your torrents are doing.

Compared to the exhaustive Azureus, Bittorrent is very simplistic. It doesn’t provide half as many statistics and doesn’t let you customize the interface. Integrating a search box is a great idea, but it limits searches to the bittorrent website, not considered the most thorough source by torrent aficionados.

If you’re a newbie to the torrent world, Bittorrent is a good bet. It’s safe, stable and sharp. Associated with the huge database of legal torrents that is the bittorrent website, it makes for a very rich P2P experience. Advanced users will probably frown upon its lack of options but others should give it a try.

Download BitTorrent 6.1.1 in Softonic

The Google Desktop application allows users to search their desktop content quickly and easily. Praised for its ingenuity and criticised for its intrusiveness, Google Desktop brings the power of Google’s search engine technology to your PC.

After installing the application, you’ll have to give it some time to index the files on your PC, including emails, photos, chats, contacts and calendar events. Google Desktop will index the first 10,000 words in the first 100,000 documents on your PC. The application supports the majority of file types and you can decide which ones to index, or omit protected files, using the preferences menu.

In its latest version, which is compatible with Windows Vista, Google Desktop has been given a new transparent look, providing a pretty sleek feel to your PC. Your search results will appear in your browser (in the familiar Google web page format) and a small preview button allows you to view results without actually clicking on the corresponding link. Results are as precise as we’ve come to expect from Google searches, however we were slightly disappointed to learn that the application doesn’t offer logical 'OR' support or substring search. On another note, Google Desktop is not limited to your PC as you can cross index content from multiple machines and share some panel items with your friends.

Google Desktop is not only about search, though. Joining a marketplace already occupied by Apple’s Dashboard Widgets and Yahoo! Widgets, Google Desktop can be fitted with any number of little gadgets. These mini apps perform all kinds of functions, from fetching your mail to jotting down notes or checking up on your local weather. There are hundreds of gadgets to choose from to customize your desktop bar. Our personal favorites are: Google Translate, the Skype plug-in to check your credit and call your contacts, “Am I Blocked” to find out who’s blocked you on IM, Workspace to quickly move between tasks, System Stats to monitor your PC and Games, a selection of Flash games like Tetris and Moonlander.

When running, we found Google Desktop to use up around 30 MBs, but that can quickly increase if you add more gadgets to it. The application is also constantly re-indexing your files to incorporate your modifications and new elements. However you should rarely feel your PC slowing due to indexing.

When you’re dealing with Google, however, you know the main criticism will be about security. Because Google Desktop indexes all your documents, you’re basically opening up your PC and all your personal files to the Moutain View company. What some users fear is that Google could one day take advantage of that access or that a bug in the application would allow malicious users to infiltrate your PC and steal information.

While the intrusiveness of Google Desktop will give some users pause for thought on installing the app, Google Desktop is highly effective and simple to use. The gadgets you can add to its sidebar may not all be essential, but many of them are quite fun and original and let’s face it, the sidebar looks good. Give it a go if you think your PC is a mess and you need quick access to anything.

Download Google Desktop 5.8.809.8522 in Softonic

Nothing helps you get through a tough day at the office than a good old-fashioned viral email. Whether it’s funny, stupid, interesting or just plain sick, receiving a forwarded video, picture or text document is the highlight of the day for many a tortured office drone. Now, thanks to the rather unique MetaCafe, you don’t even need to wait for your pals to throw this spirit-lifting material your way.

The basic premise of the software is that it automatically trawls the web for popular viral items including movies, images, games and other time-wasting files. Within just a few minutes of firing up the app (or allowing it to load automatically on start-up) you’ll be presented with a series of the hottest files doing the rounds on email at the moment. Each item comes with a preview thumbnail and a brief description of what it’s about. You can then choose to download and play any movies, or view images within the MetaCafe interface.

The simplicity of this program is quite staggering and it makes it as easy as possible to siphon the stuff that’s likely to appeal to you. The categories (video, images, games, and other) can be customized so you only receive items that are of interest to you, such as funnies, news-related, sports-related etc. There’s a very helpful idiot’s guide that appears when you launch the program and the online help is particularly useful.

Other useful features include a ‘TV mode’ for viewing videos in full-screen with movie player controls, and the ability to forward links to the items to your buddies from within the program. You can even submit your own files to MetaCafe if you’ve been forwarded a particularly good file that you want to share with the rest of the user base.

Generally, the operation and performance of MetaCafe is very slick but there are a couple of things that bugged us a bit. For instance, it can take a while for the program to find new items when you start and this is made more confusing by the fact that there is no progress bar to show you that it's actually doing something. You should also be careful to ensure that the adult content filter is checked, as some of the material can be a little risqué for youngsters or the faint of heart.

Despite these minor glitches, this is a very original software concept that will help brighten up your day and amuse your friends and family to boot. Just don't let the boss catch you playing around with it.

Download MetaCafe Pro 1.2.28 in Softonic

Online TV Player lets you watch 850+ free Internet TV and listen 1500+ free online radio stations on your PC. It allows watcher to watch directly into TV without having to experience the annoyances of a Web site (like slow-loading pages and pop-up ads).

No additional equipment required. Online TV Player support both Windows Media and Real Video. You can play most of stream formats in one program. It can set the screen window to any size that you want. It supports full-screen mode too.

Download Online TV Player 4.6 in Softonic

Watching television is no longer a dining-room activity. With the number of available online TV channels constantly increasing, chances are you'll end up watching TV on your computer rather than on a TV set.

Internet TV is the perfect tool to watch television on the PC. This free app gives you access to more than 5,000 TV channels that stream content over the Internet. Among such a wide offer you'll surely find something you like, from news to sports, from music to documentaries, from religion to education.

Using the program is a piece of cake. Simply select the channel you're interested in and click on the "Play" button on the right-side screen. After a few seconds of buffering, the show will start. I have to say most of the channels I tested worked perfectly fine and only a few failed to start, most of them when I tried to filter contents by country. Apparently it's better to just leave the "All countries" option enabled. Also, when a channel didn't work sometimes it showed music instead, so in the end it wasn't that disappointing.

Internet TV lets you add your own Internet TV channels, if you know any that's not currently on the list and provided you have all the necessary data. A Favorites list completes the array of included features.

Internet TV is a basic viewer with which you can access thousands of streaming TV channels worldwide. Perfect to have a sneak peek at how television looks like in other countries and other cultures!

Download InternetTV 7.12 in Softonic

Esmas Player is a truly multimedia application that provides the user with almost any tool they may need to enjoy image, music and video files on the computer.

The program's interface is suspiciously similar to that of iTunes, which makes us wonder why is it that developers weren't able to come up with a more original design. Similarities to iTunes don't end here, though: as you'll see, you can organize your library, play your favorite songs, edit tags, listen to podcasts, synchronize contents with your portable music device and even buy music online. Some people may find this resemblance somewhat uncomfortable – like a cheap imitation – but it's also a way to make the program look familiar and be easy to use from the very beginning.

Leaving comparisons aside, Esmas Player goes a step forward and also enables you to organize photos and videos, and also features extended functionality such as a disc burner, a DVD player and support for online TV channels and radio stations. During our tests, however, I had the impression that some of its functions were not properly implemented or at least not as easy to use as I expected. Also, though the program's language can be set to English, both the installer and documentation haven't been translated from Spanish yet.

In all, Esmas Player works fine as an all-in-one multimedia organizer, but it still needs some improvements in usability – as well as adding the necessary distance between iTunes and itself in order to avoid odious comparisons.

Download Esmas Player 11026 in Softonic

It seems that everyone is slowly starting to realise that the future of video broadcasting lies online rather than inside a television.

Following the success of Joost, Babelgum and VeohTV, Adobe decided to get in on the act with the release of the Adobe Media Player. The philosophy of the software giant is that if you use a browser to navigate web pages, why shouldn't you use one to view multimedia too?

The result is basically a version of Joost as seen through the eyes of Adobe. Now out of beta release, the app provides an interesting and immersive way of watching videos online. Navigation is very smooth and feels natural and there are a number of features and services that make it easier to eyeball TV more effectively. For instance, you can create a list of favorites, and keywords add ratings to Flash video, build playlists and use the Dashboard-style interface to check out the latest episodes of your top shows. You can also now subscribe to RSS feeds that tell you when new episodes are online.

Content is king though, of course, and version 1.1 of Adobe Media Player adds a lot more episodes and channels from a broad range of genres. At the time of writing, Adobe estimates that there are around 25,000 episodes available through its media player. Adobe has even partnered with Sony Pictures to offer some movies through the service, such as Jerry Maguire and Men in Black. I was also impressed by the speed and quality of the videos.

One of my main qualms with Adobe Media Player though, is that many of the episodes are not available outside the USA. Fine if you live there, of course, but for those of us in other lands it's so frustrating to see a show you want to watch only to discover it's not available (of course, you don't find this out until after an advert has played in the player).

Glossing over the unavailability of some programs and channels, Adobe Media Player is making all the right strides to becoming the best place to watch TV online.

Download Adobe Media Player 1.1 in Softonic

Online Live lets you watch 3645+ free Internet TV, on demand videos and listen free online radio stations. The live television channels database is the biggest worldwide. No additional equipment required. Online TV Player supports Windows Media Player. You can play most stream formats in this program.

Download OnlineLive 6.3.41 in Softonic

anyTV lets you play TV channels and radio stations that stream their contents on the Internet. The program features a huge list of channels from hundreds of countries around the world.

The list is divided into TV channels, radio stations and videos, the latter being presumably videos from web pages about the most diverse topics. Lists can be filtered according to several topics and also arranged by rating, bitrate or genre. In spite of that, sometimes the channel list is difficult to manage especially when it's too long. One feature I missed, for example, is being able to jump to a certain part of the list by pressing its first letter on the keyboard.

anyTV looks very promising: a nice interface, hundreds of TV channels to watch and radio stations to listen to, a Favorites system, the possibility to rate channels… unfortunately while testing the program we found way too many channels that didn't work well or didn't even load at all. And what's worse, the program didn't show up any error message to let us know if we were missing any codec or other necessary component.

Watch streaming TV channels on your computer without any additional hardware.

Download anyTV 2.20 in Softonic

If you're tired of always watching the same channels in your TV set, why not try channels from other countries that stream content on the Internet?

This is precisely what you can do with PCShowBuzz, an Internet TV tuner that allows you to watch hundreds of TV channels from all over the world. Channels are classified by country and also by genre, so it's easy to find something interesting to watch. There's also a button for radio stations, but apparently this function is currently not working. The program features some advanced tools as well, such as a bookmark manager to save your favorite channels and the ability to schedule channels for playback or recording (with a third-party tool).

As for other similar tools, image quality depends on several factors: your Internet connection, your computer specs and also the channel's features. Generally speaking PCShowBuzz worked fine during our tests, though I found it a bit annoying having to wait until the whole buffering was finished in order to start playing a channel.

PCShowBuzz lets you watch online TV channels from many different countries and genres right in your computer.

Download PCShowBuzz 1.20 in Softonic

If you've ever wanted to have a look at foreign television broadcasts, just out of curiosity or to improve your language skills, now you have a chance to watch programs from Australia to Mexico and everywhere in between.

SuperTV’s interface is very basic (it consists of nothing more than a video window and a channel-selection sidebar). However, the variety of channels from all over the world is huge and, when all are working, is surely a plus in comparison to its competitors. We encountered problems in watching US and UK channels but the application didn't display any message to explain if the programs were not shown because of copyright reasons or because of temporary connection problems.

That said, the video streaming is very slow to start and the video quality is not as good as what you can get with other programs. It's nice though to browse around channels from all over the world, even if what you can get are mostly satellite channels, so not necessarily very representative of the television you could get in a specific country.

Unfortunately, not yet a substitute for your satellite subscription but it could be an interesting introduction to other countries’ TV channels.

Download SuperTV 5.32.3 in Softonic

If you'd like to see what TV and radio are like in other countries, the best option is to take a look at channels that broadcast content online, with an application like InteresTV.

This app, whose name seems to have been misspelled, lets you browse radio and TV channels from all over the world. It features an original interface designed like a TV set, but unfortunately loaded with ads from Google.

The most striking feature about InteresTV is the huge number of channels it includes - more than 3,200 – from dozens of countries all over the world. Of course, this doesn't mean they're all perfectly working, but having such a wide range to choose from makes up for the odd malfunctioning channel. On the downside, the channels are listed on a never-ending drop-down menu on top of the interface, which makes the list quite uncomfortable to use, and the program lacks advanced options you can find in similar tools such as support for bookmarks or the ability to record channels.

InteresTV lets you take a sneak peek at TV and radio channels from all over the world, though is not as complete as other similar programs.

Download InteresTV 1.0 in Softonic

With YouTube and other sites providing ever increasing amounts of video content, it's easy to lose track of all the clips you've downloaded - that's not to mention all your DivX films.

Personal Video Database is a very simple but functional database that gathers together all of the clips on your hard drive that allows you to catalogue them in some kind of meaningful way. perhaps the most aesthetically beautiful or complete in terms of functionality, but it works and All the basic features you'd expect such as cataloguing by genre, title, rating etc are there plus there's even a rudimentary online database check that can verify what your film or clip is based on keywords. This even extends to importing cover art of films and TV shows if necessary or available although you can disable this retrieval feature as it can take some time. If you want to expand it the program, you can do so via plugins that are included in the installation package although most of these plugins just extend the information retrieving functions.

It's not the best looking program in the world and it doesn't come with any outstanding features but its fast, lightweight and does what it's supposed to.

Download Personal Video Database Portable 0.9.8.10 in Softonic

Sometimes an image is worth a thousand words, and this is why videos are usually the handiest way to share a tip o create a tutorial.

Screen recording is child's play with TipCam. This program enables you to capture any activity that takes place on your screen and save it as an online video that you can share with anybody. You can show off your latest battles in your favorite game, or help a customer that needs assistance with a particular software application.

TipCam is very easy to use. You can enable, pause and resume screen recording with hotkeys, plus make the "camera" follow your mouse with its pan/zoom function, although there's no possibility to define the size of this zoom.

On the downside, the program only saves videos to FLV. That said, if you want to publish them online, you can use the developer's website - after signing up for free. While this can be a good way to share them, I'd still prefer having a wider format variety to save my videos.

With TipCam you can easily record any activity on your screen. Unfortunately videos are saved only in FLV format .

Download TipCam 1.0.55.1795 in Softonic

Make no mistake: the media industry has changed significantly in the last couple of years. Big corporations are now starting to consider the possibility that their traditional business models could well be about to crumble around them. Newspapers are facing the blogging threat, podcasting is the cool alternative to radio, and now the big TV stations must be starting to sweat a little following the dawn of free online video services such as YouTube, Joost and the one we're about to review: Miro.

After a few months in beta stage, Miro has reached version 1.0, which is considered as a new milestone in the production and development of video and TV content for the Web. Miro is defined by its developers as "the open-source Internet TV platform". In fact, it's been built by a non-profit organization called the Participatory Culture Foundation, which aims to bring together a community of broadcasters to create, what it calls, an 'Internet video ecosystem'. But besides all these elaborate definitions, Miro is simply a great application to watch online videos.

You could now be wondering what's the point of using Miro if you can get those same videos from other places? Well, Miro makes the process faster and much easier. The program uses open protocols to let you subscribe to video channels and video blogs that are fed in via RSS, and uses BitTorrent to download the files. You can also watch videos from Youtube and Dailymotion, or use it to subscribe to a Youtube channel you like, for example. The program supports video playlists and can resume playback just where you stopped.

The inclusion of the 'Channel Guide' is a welcome one, as it helps you get started with the program and also lets you search and browse the various channels effortlessly. Not only can you browse through the existing channel list, but you can easily add new channels simply by clicking a button to subscribe. There are more than two thousand channels available, and all of them are free. Beware, however, that the video quality may vary from one channel or video source to another.

Another great benefit of Miro is that it can handle a wide variety of video formats and, as a good open-source project, it ignores DRM and patents. These and other interesting features are used to compare Miro to Joost, but I think there's no reason for this comparison: they're just different applications with different purposes. In any case, Miro's first public release is an excellent example of how video content from different sources can be integrated into one single application and served directly to your PC in a fast, easy and elegant way.

Download Miro 1.2.4 in Softonic

Celtx is a comprehensive software package designed for people who work in the Film, TV, Theatre and New Media industries. It combines full-feature scriptwriting with media rich pre-production support and enables online collaboration.

Prior to Celtx, projects were completed using slip sheeted, paper based scripts maintained in bulky three ring binders that included hundreds, sometimes thousands, of attached pictures and hand written notes. Project information, in other words, could only be shared in paper form.

Scripts written or imported in to Celtx can be broken down digitally and, for the first time, easily shared with others to foster collaboration and creativity during the pre-production and production phases of film and TV making.

Download Celtx 1.0 in Softonic

With 3webTotal TV & Radio Tuner you can watch 896 live television channels and listen to 3800+ online radio stations.

Live online television and radio are growing. Every single day at least a new radio station or TV channel come "live" on The Net. We are here to offer you our best effort in searching, selecting and adding those stations to our lineup.

3webTotal TV and Radio Tuner has TV channels from 104 countries and radio stations from 148 countries.

Download WebTotal TV & Radio Tuner 5.5 in Softonic

When you first encounter PPLive it seems like someone’s playing a sick joke on you. Upon first installing the application you’ll almost certainly be thinking this is the most annoying, pointless program you’ve ever seen and will be ruining the time you wasted downloading it. The reason for this being is that at first glance it just looks like a very poor media player and the entire interface is in Chinese.

These problems are made all the more frustrating by the riches promised by the program. The shareware app boasts to offer you the ability to watch free television from across the world on your PC, including live sport, live news, the latest episodes of top dramas and comedies, and a host of brand new movie blockbusters. The software integrates advanced peer-to-peer technology so it can provide the users with the smoothest TV programs with no interceptions, meaning every user becomes a broadcaster, saving the cost of traditional streaming media.

Not being fluent in the Eastern language and uninspired by the drab GUI we were all set to uninstall and even thought about removing the program from the Softonic site altogether to save you visitors from the worst ten minutes of your life. Then something happened – after stumbling across a site devoted to PPLive we realized that was a way around the frustration.

ESSENTIAL USER TIP: How to change the interface to English

By loading up the PPLive TV Engine and right-clicking on the fourth option from the bottom (the one that looks like a squiggle) you’re presented with the chance to change the interface into English. Hallelujah! Unfortunately, opening the Channel List menu gave us even more Chinese to try and decipher but luckily the Football4Less site contains the full list online, as does the PPLive site.

The list of streaming feeds is pretty comprehensive, and although many are in Chinese, it’s possible to dig around and find some great programs such as Desperate Housewives, English Premiership football games, American Idol, WWE wrestling, and a host of new films . Clicking on the link in the ‘Currently’ category on the listings page brings up the schedule of programs for that particular channel for the day, although many repeat the same show or movie all day. You can also search channels by category, such as sports, movies, news, cartoons, etc.

The task of finding western movies and shows is made all the more tricky by the Chinese-to-English translations of the programs, which can be a little baffling until you get used to it. To give you some clues to start with: Friends is known as ‘Six person of like’; Desperate Housewives becomes ‘Crazy Housewives’, and Brokeback Mountain is curiously known as ‘Breaks arm mountain.’

Clicking on a show will open your media player and begin playing the show or film from the start. You can choose to use the built-in media player (which is rather limited in features), or open in Windows Media Player or Real Player. The program uses P2P technology to share TV shows, so the more people are online the faster and more reliable the access will be, and we were pleasantly surprised by the speed in which most of the streams are buffered and the quality of the video. Unfortunately, like many P2P apps, the program turns out to be riddled with malware which installs itself in your temporary drive - so be warned!

Although it’s about as easy-to-use as a rubber saw, PPLive is certainly worth investing a bit of time and patience in if you want to watch TV for free online, and once you’ve figured it out it becomes a very addictive way to spend your time.

Download PPLive 1.9.21 in Softonic

Watch over 853 television channels all over the world with TeleStreamer. The application streams all online video content that TV channels make available on the web. For each country then, you'll probably get satellite channels rather than the national ones, but you still have a really large choice, with many news channels in nearly all the languages in the world. It’s also a good way to have a general idea about how TV formats are elsewhere; bear in mind though that maybe you will not have access to the most popular programs.

The GUI is very simple and clear. There is a list of nationalities with TV channels associated and you just have to double click on the one you want to watch. Not all the programs will work, but this may also depend on the availability of the content provider’s server. When you manage to connect to a channel though, the sound and the video quality are fairly good and you can either watch the program in windowed mode or, by double-clicking on it, enjoy the full screen mode.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to pause the stream, as the program doesn’t store data on your hard disk. It is a big limitation considering that it’s a very easy function to have on PCs and it’s the real plus in rapport to traditional broadcasted TV.

Although you can’t have any control when watching a program, TeleStreamer allows you to watch 853 channels all over the world, both to practice your language skills and to see what’s going on in Africa, Iraq or Suriname, if you know where that is.

Download Tele-Streamer 1.0 in Softonic

ChrisTV Online! is software for Windows which brings to your desktop a large number of TV channels, radio channels and other kinds of video/audio content broadcasted on the Internet (like music video clips, movie trailers, public webcams, etc) using only your Internet connection and no other dedicated hardware. Having a channels' database with 800+ TV channels and 600+ radio stations from more than 100 countries, ChrisTV Online! provides you access to those channels and more than that a professional user friendly interface to watch and listen high quality video/audio content from the Internet.

The channels database is updated on a daily basis, so you'll benefit of an increased number of updated channels' streams every time without any effort. An outstanding feature of ChrisTV Online!, which you will not find in a similar software product, is the frame display mode which lets you watch video played content in a custom or predefined size frame window. This frame video window can be dragged in any place of your desktop and in combination with 'Always on Top' feature gives you the option to work on your computer and watch your favorite show in one corner of the screen.

The ChrisTV Online! interface offers you fast and easy access to all channels available in our database through the Channels List panel, where you can Group channels by Country, Type, Category, Language, Station Name. To gain fast access to your favorite TV channel or Radio station, you can add them to ChrisTV Online! Favorites List, which provides the same grouping feature as with the Channels List.

Download ChrisTV Online! 2.99 in Softonic