Ace Stream Media is a collection of tools which allow you to stream videos directly from a torrent file, without fully downloading the video first, or needing a separate torrent client.
The easiest way to do this is via the bundled Ace Player HD. It's a fork of VLC Media Player so you probably already know how to use it, but if you click "Open File" you'll find it's gained the ability to open a .torrent. We tried this, there was around a 30 second pause while the player made its connections, downloaded and buffered the first part of the video, then it started to play, just exactly as though it was a local file.
We had no glitches in playback, but this will vary depending on the video size and resolution, your network connection, how many peers you can find, and more. Even when it's playing, if you click far ahead on the video timeline - you jump from 5 minutes to 45, maybe - then you'll have to wait even longer as Ace Player HD ends its current transfers, finds the new files it needs, downloads and buffers the video again (this took up to a minute for us).
The suite also includes "TS Magic Player – an additional extension for browsers Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera", which allows you to stream torrents from within a browser.
"Ace Stream P2P Multimedia Plug-in" is a "multifunctional web-player", and "TS Magic Player – an additional extension for browsers Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera" also streams torrent files.
We're less convinced by the browser extensions (the Firefox offering is only a "test build", not available from the official add-ons site), but they did appear to work in our brief tests. If you have any problems then they can be disabled or removed in the usual way.
Verdict:
We're not sure how useful the browser extensions might be, but Ace Player HD streamed our test torrents without difficulty and didn't cause any problems with our existing VLC installation.
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