Laugh or Cry?

[TugBoat]

OK, before I start, I understand that downloading TV shows is legit
I have most of these shows on VCR tapes anyway, it's just easier to DL them than to convert them.
Anyway, I've been trying out BitTorrent to DL StarTrek, StarGate, etc., seems to work fine. Then I ran into the notorious .rar file. Great. It appears to be a Stuffit file, however, Stuffit for the Mac gives an error after decompressing and the resulting .nrg image is not recognized by Toast after changing the extension to .toast, gives an Audio file. Great.

So I try out Windows in VPC. Stuffit will not even try to decompress the file. The new Stuffit that is, I had to update Stuffit to even try to use it. I even tried downloading Nero and using the Mac image that Toast didn't like. All in all, I wasted a lot of time.

So, I start researching the .rar file. You know, when all else fails....
I finally ran across UnRarX. Alright! Progress! Same thing with Toast again, unrecognized file, blah, blah, blah. But this time, when it mounts the image, I get a Video_TS folder! Open the VOB with VLC and it plays!

In GERMAN!



I don't do German. What a waste of time. At least now I know what to do next time

[galactica]

ahh the perils of downloading video files. Now you hopefully see its all the much easier to just go out and get the series on dvd yourself.

[TugBoat]

just go out and get the series on dvd
but, but, where's the fun in that?
I'll probably give up shortly, and do just that

I think my up/downs are approaching a terabyte, I should be hearing from my ISP anytime now....

another BTW. Anyone wanting to play around like this should install Throttled-0.3.2. Otherwise your uploads will flood your bandwidth and downloads will be slowed. It's always something.

[tonmischa]

For capping up/downloads I recommend Carrafix. www.carrafix.com

[deadsierra]

ahh the perils of downloading video files. Now you hopefully see its all the much easier to just go out and get the series on dvd yourself.

Thats often totally impossible. I have several examples ready if you would like. For one, I'm downloading season 3 of Enterprise 'cause I basically missed the whole season and I want to be caught up for the start of season 4. A DVD of Enterprise has been rumoured, but I assume they'll start with season 1. And for my second example, Tracker, starring Adrian Paul. Some idiot decided that it would be a better idea to mulch a bunch of episodes together and release it as a movie called 'Alien Tracker' instead of giving it a full season release. Morons. I would have bought the season too. And for example three, 'The Invisible Man'. They decided that despite it being an American show owned by Sci Fi, it only needed a season one release in Region 2. I even went to the trouble of buying the first season, but I can't even have season 2 imported. Do they (edit: The Sci Fi channel) even own any science fiction shows anymore? Oh, wait, thats right, they have a reality sci-fi show, I forgot.

Yes, I am bitter.

[TugBoat]

For capping up/downloads I recommend Carrafix. www.carrafix.com

I wasted more time on Carrafix than Janeway's german. The problem I had was that Carrafix deals on a port by port basis. I would add the ports being used, come back later, and find that my ups were pegged again.

You can run 'sudo lsof -i' in terminal and get a list of the ports being used. Sure enough, someone new would be there using an unthrottled port. I kept adding ports 'till I was blue in the face, had about 100+ ports added (there are what, 65535 ports?), then had problems adding more ports, Carrafix takes longer and longer to launch and uses more and more processor the more ports you add.....

I had the same problems with Carrafix on two different machines. Then I bit the bullet and installed Throttled. Challenging for those Terminal illiterate people like myself, but I prevailed. Problem solved. No more hassle, and it works with basically zero percent of processor/memory use. The startup item is sweet

What the heck happened to http://www.torrents.co.uk/ They've been down for days

[decay]

this is veering into off topic, but if you use Azureus (bit torrent client), you define ONE port #, and that's the only one used. speeds are just as fast using 1 port as the "official" BT client using a range.

dk

[deadsierra]

this is veering into off topic, but if you use Azureus (bit torrent client), you define ONE port #, and that's the only one used. speeds are just as fast using 1 port as the "official" BT client using a range.

dk

Azureus is an excellent piece of software. Kinda too bad its so unmac like, someone should write a nice cocoa interface for it.

[TugBoat]

...but if you use Azureus (bit torrent client), you define ONE port #...

You can define the ports in BitTorrent also. Too bad people assign whatever port suits them. If they all assigned the default port(s) there wouldn't be a problem. Are you sure Azureus only allows one port? Next time you've got about 35 peers, open Terminal and type sudo lsof -i. I don't have an issue with BT since installing Throttled, it's global, takes no resources, and is launched automatically at boot. It runs completely in the background, and performs flawlessly

Let the suckers choose whatever neat sounding port name they want, I'm covered :P


OK, I just downloaded Azureus. Looks interesting, although I had to stop and check that I wasn't running VPC. Could have sworn I was looking at XP :P
I'll give it a shot.


Later;
Well, Azureus (java_swt 1721) is set to use one port (6881) but connects to peers on whatever port they're using.....just like BT. Some of the ports my Azureus is using;
java_swt 1721 >6881:6881:6884:6881:6881:6881:irdmi:6884:6881:688 1:33333
:6881:6898:6889:6881:6881:6886:49152:6881:6881:688 1:42840:6881:6881:6881:6882.
irdmi is port 8000. I'm still not sure why Terminal lists some ports by name instead of number.
Azureus does offer other features over BT, I like it.
Nice to know about that upper right hand button in BT, I'll leave Throttled installed just the same

[thoughton]

As well as using something like throttled you can also click on the button in the top right of the BT window where you can set the UL cap for each item.

[miksu]

Well, German isn't that difficult, except for their accusative and few other word forms. It might be worth studying, since 120 000 000 people speak it in Europe They even tend to dub everything into German, unlike Scandinavian countries, where everything has subtitles and original sound track. You are likely to find some german content, since it happens to be lot spoken language

[thoughton]

How do you say "Please stop waking up at dawn solely to reserve the sun loungers"?

:P

[terryj]

Actually, you should look at Mac Par Delexue...
it unarchives .RAR files, and can handle
.par files ( which many people are using
to recover broken .rar archive pieces).

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14338

[deadsierra]

How do you say "Please stop waking up at dawn solely to reserve the sun loungers"?

:P

Say it with violence.

[mhar4]

Well, German isn't that difficult, except for their accusative and few other word forms. It might be worth studying, since 120 000 000 people speak it in Europe

I once joked to a German-speaking linguist friend that German was just English with a silly accent, and he pointed out that in fact English was just German with a silly accent.

[TugBoat]

Man, what have I started....
Hey, I'm still trying to learn the English language. If I ever do that, I might consider German.
I wouldn't hold my breath, my neXt need is to learn uniX 8)

I have been playing around with Azureus and I really like it, I even RTFM. After RTFM I found a way to promote good will;



Don't ya just love the purdy flags?
And checkout the DL speed. I never got that with BT :P
And I did get MacPARdeLuxe at the same time that I got UnRarX20. Since I used UnRarX20 first, and it worked, I haven't tried MacPARdeLuxe yet.
Good Day

[thoughton]

Nice flags, I've never noticed that in Azureus. But the javaness of it all does my head in. And look at all those evil American pirates

There's another nice BT client out there somewhere. It's just called 'BitTorrent@ exactly the same as the official one (smart developer or what? :P) but it's by a guy called SK or something.

Edit: Just googled for it. I think he's renamed it to TomatoTorrent (what a great name!)

[terryj]

My ?'s:

1. Is this better than Usenet?
sue ME, but I've always have been a usenet
junkie...

2. Is it more stable than Usenet?
I've tried Limewire/Acqulite, and
Acquisition ( I know, not even the
same as a Torrent client), but
sticked with Usenet because of
stability of the client (Thoth),
and ability to find stuff.

3. What would be the best torrent
client to use, that is fast, doesn't
hog much memory or system
resources, and is low cost?

Sorry, if the ?'s seem like newbie...
as i said, I don't know a lot about
torrent/P2P, but I can pretty much
get my way around on video...

[thoughton]

If you're already comfortable on usenet I wouldn't bother with BT. BT is less hassle, dont have to join multi part files etc, but not quite as likely to max your bandwidth. A popular torrent can take up quite a lot of CPU (maintaining connections to hundreds of different IPs at once). By 'quite a lot' I'm talking 10-20% on a low end G4. Still very usable. On my low-mid range PC it's a lot worse, downloading a popular item on BT can slow the whole PC down to a crawl (windows take 10 seconds to open, etc).

[miksu]

How do you say "Please stop waking up at dawn solely to reserve the sun loungers"?

:P

Well, Babelfish says it's:

Stoppen Sie bitte, an der Dämmerung nur aufzuwachen, um die Sonneruhesessel aufzuheben.

I think it's quite good translation, or at least Germans would propably understand what you are trying to say. It has even "um etwas zu tun"-structure ("in order to make something")

[thorsted]

I use the tomato bittorrent client, it allows you to throddle your uploads/downloads.

http://sarwat.net/bittorrent/

[milatchi]

if I remember correctly Gumby also does RAR and I have had success where UnRarX failed.

I have went back to using the original BT. I kept getting kernel panics so I did some googling and discovered that I had a bad build of Azureus. I feel sure they have amended this by now but I just haven't checked lately.