BitTorrent is already an important tool for millions of people who prefer their television on-demand, but integration with traditional TV-sets is still lacking. This is about to change though, as the Tribler team announces version 5 of its next generation BitTorrent client.

Researchers from the Tribler P2P team at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, have been working on their next generation BitTorrent client for a few years now. The initial releases worked well and innovative features were introduced frequently, even though the UI was still a little painful on the eyes.

Today the Tribler team releases the test builds of their V5 client. To silence some of the critics and to ensure compatibility with standalone devices they have redesigned the user interface, which is now much cleaner so it can be easily navigated with a remote control.

When you launch Tribler all you have to do is put some keywords in the search box and you can download torrents instantly. The search results are ranked by relevance and torrent quality, and if the torrent is well seeded you can play it instantly without having to wait for the download to complete.

Another key functionality of the new Tribler client is that the torrent search is fully distributed, meaning that the torrents come from within the network of peers and not from a torrent site or a central server. This could potentially make BitTorrent indexers such as Mininova and isoHunt obsolete.

The downside of this type of search is that it is impossible to remove or moderate fake files. In order to solve this problem the Tribler team will soon launch moderation and playlist features.

“We aim to make P2P easy to control and use. The power of P2P can be included in every television if we solve this issue,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “We are continuously working on simplifying P2P and are moving towards making it suitable to operate with a remote control.”

The scientists behind Tribler are part of the EU funded P2P-Next project. They work together with the BBC and several other European television broadcasters, as well as hardware developers such as Pioneer.

Tribler’s new interface

A test release of Tribler 5 is available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. Tribler’s Johan Pouwelse encourages everyone to give it a try, and provide feedback so the team can improve the client and help to bring BitTorrent to your TV as quickly as possible.