How to watch a uTorrent download that's still in progress?

Question

By default, μTorrent requests pieces out of order and tries to finish the download as quickly as possible.

How can I set it up to download pieces sequentially, from first to last, so that I can start watching right away like YouTube or Netflix, instead of having to wait until the download is complete?

Solution

In μTorrent, click Options on the menu bar. With the Options menu laid out, while holding down Shift and F2, select Preferences. This is necessary to make some hidden flags visible.

Go the the Advanced section and set the following properties to True:

• bt.prio_first_last_piece
• bt.sequential_download
• bt.sequential_files.

Set this property to False:

• bt.compact_allocation

The client will now do its best to grab pieces in order, and you can effectively stream the file as long as the download speed is greater than the overall bitrate of the media.