20120522

How To Prioritize File Downloads In uTorrent


When you load a torrent with multiple files into the uTorrent Bittorrent client, you will notice that uTorrent by default will not prioritize any file in particular. While that may not be an issue most of the time, especially not if the torrent is well seeded. There are however situations where you may want to prioritize files in the program, for instance when you download a media file that you want to preview this way. You could do that by downloading the beginning of the first file right at the start, to preview the media file that way.
Another reason for downloading files in priority is if you want to have them available at the very earliest moment. Instead of download files left and right without order, you might want to download files one by one instead so that you have the complete file on your hard drive. This may be important for accessing as soon as possible, but also if you fear that the original seeder might shut down the seeding. Instead of being left with incomplete files, you would have at least some finished files on your computer.
The Bittorrent client uTorrent offers several configuration options, some automatic, some manual, that you can use to prioritize file downloads in the client.
Probably the biggest option that you have at your disposal are only available manually, unfortunately. You can highlight specific files in a torrent and change their priority. The client by default supports the three priority ratings high, normal and low, which you can increase to 15 with a click on Options > Preferences > UI Settings > Use fine grained file priorities.
utorrent prioritize by file order
The second option, still manual, is the Prioritize by file order option that you see in the screenshot above. This basically prioritizes downloads based on the order of files in the file listing. If you select all files, uTorrent will try and complete the first file before it jumps to the second, then third, and so on. There is unfortunately no option to automate this setting in uTorrent.
bt.prioritize_first_last_piece
Open the preferences again, and select Advanced this time. Here you find several advanced configuration options. Locate bt.prio_first_last_piece here and set its value to true. This is an automatic setting that makes uTorrent prioritize the first and last piece of a file over everything else. Keep in mind that this does not necessarily mean that the whole file will be prioritized. It is mainly there to provide users with a way to preview media files as soon as possible.via[ghacks]

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