What does the 0.1% of the file contain anyway, if it’s a video and most of the data is there it might be either playable or if not it probably might be able to be repairable so it can play, albeit with minor corruption in the damaged part.
It works well with shows you want to start watching immediately. Enable sequential download, 2 minues to grab the header/footer, and you can start watching. It’ll download faster than you watch.
I wish people would adopt torrent V2 because that one missing 500 byte file can make the video unwatchable. With V2 each file has it’s own sha256 hash and can be checked and shared individually. It would also improve torrent health.
No that is not true. I’m not sure why that silly notion was spread, I’ve seen it on reddit too. Theoretically the protocol does allows for an extension for this but it’s not implemented and would need special considerations to do. And any client implementing this would not just swap files willy nilly, they’d implement some kind of permission or opt in. There are potential applications for this but not for regular torrents.
The next best alternative would be BiglyBT’s Swarm Merging feature (which works similarly, and amazingly well on v1 torrents considering it only stores a precise file size instead of a hash in Vuze/Bigly’s own DHT). I’ve been able to ‘complete’ numerous separate torrents where availability was <1.
BiglyBT already supports v2 but dunno if Swarm Merging works with such torrents yet.
Interesting. Not sure if qBittorrent supports that, I really hate switching clients :D Swarm merging for V2 should be implicit because each file has a unique hash code. So you can’t not merge.
Another thing torrent clients could do: Every torrent that is downloaded and “rechecked” automatically generates and “upgrades” a V1 torrent into a V1/V2 hybrid torrent for sharing. And when you add a normal magnet link you could get the hybrid v1/v2 torrent from others via DHT. So theoretically only one person needs to generate this upgraded torrent and it’s not up to the uploader / tracker.
Everything always downloads at full speed (limited by disc write speed in my case), so if there’s missing data you find out about it within a min or two instead of after 3 days of trying.
Usenet also includes parity data so you can rebuild missing data to an extent.
Yup, point is I find out much much sooner and can move on to a new nzb. A single ~15gb nzb takes 5min max whether it succeeds or not. I’m never ever waiting on slow seeds.
Multiple providers can improve availability, but I’ve seen no need. Everything myself or my users have requested has been found and downloaded within 25min, including re-tries. Typically it’s about 15min from user request to ‘available to watch’ email notification.
Worse case I can fallback to torrents, but I haven’t had to yet with over 31tb out of usenet alone.
Private trackers can be a bitch to get into, and you have to re-seed what you download exposing yourself to copyright claimants and/or pay for a vpn on top.
I just raw dog a usenet server for 5min/movie and I’m done. Faster, easier, and risk free.
I’ve yet to find a modern use for usenet as I’m not in the habit of downloading everything as it comes out, nor of looking for content within a few days of release. Often I’m looking for 2-5 year old content or back catalog, and usenet has been a uniform landscape of incompletes, even with two blocks on independent providers (or they were when I bought the data blocks).
For the few things I can’t find; there’s still torrents. Usenet is just my primary source, and it covers 99% of what gets requested through my systems.
Haha agreed, if we’re talking about kilobytes of missing data brute forcing is intractable.
There may be structure to exploit in the data format. E.g. if you’re recovering missing content from a book written in English, you can probably get away with enumerating only printable ASCII and 90% of the letters will be lowercase.
But practically, I am unconvinced because the information density is pretty high on the kinds of things people like to torrent.
Want to be honest here, my real pet peeve is that it shows 100%. Ever. At all. Let alone when it hangs there… That’s just insulting.
If it is 100% complete, I should not be waiting for anything. If I were ever developing an operating system I would never allow for 100% to display on a progress bar. 100% means it’s done. We advance to the next screen. Do not display it. It makes no sense.
I do often desire a “click to continue” option, especially helpful for asynchronous tasks. Start a render, and when you get back it says 100% without you having to look at the output folder, for instance. I get what you mean though, it certainly should say 100% unless it’s totally donezo. Probably lazy rounding errors in some cases (Microsoft products are the worst at showing accurate progress bars)
Oh for sure! Not trying to get on your back, just agreeing from a UI developers pov :) I seem to have misunderstood your original intent but we’re saying the same stuff I think
What’s even worse is when a torrent is stalled at around 94%, there’s exactly one seeder with a full copy in the peer list, but he has fucked up networking rules (or an intentionally choked upload because he’s a dirty leecher) so that despite having an open connection in the peer list, they never send any data…
anything under about 20kb/s is pretty much dead on the larger torrents… a lot of people will turn down their upload limits so that protocol traffic can pass but actual pieces never get sent. It’s irritating to say the least.
i had a similar one, godawful speed (i don’t remember how much, but it was measured in single or double digit kbit/s) and turned on their computer when i went to bed, and off exactly when i came back from work.
ended up leaving the computer on the whole day for a few days. this guy owes me 5 bucks.
If he's the single seed left on a torrent, chances are he's the last seed on a bunch of other torrents as well, and his bandwidth is being choked by everyone who wants his stuff.
Wouldn’t torrents be able to solve that issue because everyone is sharing with everyone else?
The last peer might only have 10kbps upload but as long as the other peers are sharing with one another everyone can pull down 10kbps because that is how fast new data is getting sent to the swarm.
Seeds fall off quickly on public trackers and the people who do long-term seeding on publics tend to end up seeding larger libraries. So you'll often be the one person in the world seeding a large number of torrents. Multiple leeches is only a theoretical help because when it finally seeds out, half the people quit immediately, some hang around to seed to the last leechers, and a couple hang around for a week or two before feeling they've done their due diligence and signing off. Things are quiet on that torrent for a month or so, and then a new leech shows up and the whole thing repeats again. It's why I stopped seeding on publics: it's extremely demoralizing to finally get copies of something out to the dozen or so people who have accumulated, only for every one of them to fuck off right after they finish.
This seems to happen alot. I always wondered if it is really a peer or some weird spoofed peer that just tries to give you hope before crushing your dreams.
For video files I always set it to download first and last parts of files first. You can watch a video fairly well with like 50% downloaded if the file has the first and last section, which contain the data about how the video is stored. It’ll have occasional glitches, but it mostly works. At 99% it’s effectively all there and you may not even notice that last 1%, let alone 0.1%.
Why do people do this? Readmes and nfo files take up literal kilobytes… even over hundreds or even thousands of downloads, at most it’s going to take up a few extra megabytes of download/storage, they’re not saving anything at all. And it can be nice when the nfo includes all the releaser’s original encode settings and stuff.
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