How do you find video info from partial avi?

[JoeBolden]

Some video avi torrent pages don't provide video technical info like codec bit rate etc.

Is there a way to partially download a file like prioritize the first and last piece then get the info first before downloading the entire file? Of course this is for non copyrighted video.

Peace, Joey

[minidv2dvd]

if it's in winrar format, you can download just the .rar or .001(if in the new format) and extract and keep broken files. then you could use mediainfo or gspot to determine other info on the video piece you have.

[redwudz]

Some P2P programs can prioritize the file download to give you file info early on. Emule can do it, but not sure about torrent programs. I don't see those options in Utorrent. You can try to play the partial file with VLC Media Player and if so, you may be able to get information from VLC in 'Tools>Media Information' or 'Tools>Codec Information." But I never had much luck. With a .rar file, even less likely.

minidv2dvd's method may work if you can download just the one .rar section.

[jagabo]

All that information is near the very start of the AVI file. Some torrent clients let you prioritize the head and tail of the file. Once the head of the file is downloaded you can usually use a media player or something like MediaInfo to view the properties. You might have to shut down the downloader though.

[AlanHK]

If a download is in progress, copy the partial file to some other name, (ending in .avi) and try to open it. (To avoid file-locking problems.)

The media player may get a bunch of error messages, but probably it will play (for a few minutes) and tell you the specs of the file.

[lordsmurf]

Incomplete files can be played with GOM Player.

[JoeBolden]

Thank you for your replies.

I found this
Under the BitTorrent protocol, clients download the rarest pieces of a torrent first. To support previewing, some clients can be configured to prioritise downloading the first pieces of each file. In uTorrent, select Options, Preferences, Advanced and set bt.prio_first_last_piece to True.

In Vuze\Azureus tools\options advanced
Transfer options
Prioritize first and last piece of file(s)

I downloaded MediaInfo a free tool and installed including windows explorer option
I set Prioritize first and last piece of file(s)tried this downloaded then stopped the torrent
opened in windows explorer and just hovered the mouse over the file and a small window showed the technical info. I open with MediaInfo and got the full details.

I tried to view with VLC but only saw 1 frame I haven't tried GOM Player yet.

I also found this "How to tell whether a DVD is PAL or NTSC before downloading"
http://suprbay.org/showthread.php?t=35878]Anonym zu suprbay.org/showthread.php?t=35878[/url]
even if is an ISO file

[redwudz]

Thanks for the info about Utorrent. I missed that option in Advanced.