Staska from Unwired View lives in Lithuania and the poor guy can’t get the latest TV shows and movies from America, so he has to resort to piracy. I do the same thing from here in Finland, but to be honest even when I was living in America I pirated the living hell out of everything since I didn’t have a TiVo. Anyway, back to Staska, he was one of the lucky ~ 300 people to receive a Nokia N900 from the Maemo Summit earlier this month. He installed Transmission, a bit torrent client, clicked on a link to a torrent file, downloaded it, and bada boom, he hit play and it worked.
There are a few bugs. In the beginning of the video he says that N900 has no unRARing software available. RAR files are what pirates at the highest level of the scene, higher than even top sites, use to share files due to their robust integrity checks. RAR software is free, open source, and available for all platforms, so why the hell isn’t it on the Nokia N900? Lots of the torrents I grab are nothing more than a collection of RAR files. Speaking of torrents: Transmission hauls ass, downloading at over 700 KB/s, even peaking at 2.25 MB/s, but you pay for this. When Transmission is open and doing what it does best, breaking the law, it makes the N900 almost unusable. He does all of this over WiFi of course, and it absolutely slaughters the battery: a single 380 MB episode consumed about 20% of the battery in roughly 30 minutes. Worst thing about all of this, Staska admits this is highly unstable, and at one point his N900 crashed so hard he had to pull out the battery. What’s good is that this can all be fixed in software, but how long will it take is anyone’s guess.
After all is said and done, one of the most beautiful things in the world happens: the Nokia N900 plays back an XviD file natively. It’s wonderful that all of this is possible, but really, are you going to kill your battery just to pirate something on the go?