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Torrentocracy = RSS + Bit Torrent + Your TV
lerhaupt writes "I've started a project called Torrentocracy which is the combination of RSS, Bit Torrent and your Television. It's written as a plugin for MythTV (the homebrew Linux PVR project). This means you can not only easily find out about new torrents from various enclosure enabled blogs, but you can also start the torrent download process with the click of your TV remote control. Are RSS aggregators which support torrent downloads the next greatest thing since web browsers? What is the significance of hooking this directly to your TV? Here's a screenshot."
Torrents.co.uk also publishes an RSS feed of new shows, and has several links to auto-downloaders. These other downloaders don't bolt onto a PVR, which is a nice feature, but it is worth remembering that many trackers already have RSS feeds and there is _some_ software already out there.
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
I can't say that it's "do to the seeding algorithms" but it's true that there's no encryption or hiding in BitTorrent -- it's pretty fundamental to the protocol's efficiency that everyone downloading a given torrent is given everyone else's IP address so that they can exchange data. This is why BitTorrent is great for moving large _legitimate_ files, and not so clever to use for "piracy". You might as well wear a red shirt on (original) Star Trek. :-)
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"torrents should start to be paired with PAR files to create a far more robust method of fetching large files"
;-)
This doesn't make any sense. Torrents are completely reliable -- they already have block and file level hashing and automatic re-downloading of blocks in case of transmission errors, etc. The only time you won't get a complete torrent is if there are no complete copies of the file being served. Adding error correcting codes (e.g. PAR files) would make the total file larger, and only recover from incomplete torrents that are _almost_ complete (i.e. would have been complete if the PAR file hadn't made it 15% larger). Just make sure that anything you're downloading has a couple of seeds before starting the download.
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What this has to do with PAR2s are obvious: the entire effective functionality of PAR2s is already integrated into BT, automatically. It's not something that users can turn on or off, it's an integral part of the protocol.
The cause of your problem is likely that your torrent ran out of seeds before you finished downloading. Look at the "distributed copies" number your client gives you. That represents how many effective copies there are of a torrent. (Say client A has the first 50% of a torrent, and client B has the second 50%. Those are the only two peers. That's 1.0 distributed copies, since even though neither peer has a full copy, the two of them together do.) If the number is below zero, you will never be able to download the entire torrent unless a seed pops in.
As BT clients advance, this is becoming rarer. There's a "super-seeding" option of some clients which helps get out sparsely-seeded torrents as fast as possible by refusing to send the same chunk more than once.
If this is a problem for you - trying to get poorly-seeded torrents - you might want to try out Azureus. It preferentially grabs complete files inside a torrent first, and you can tell it which files to try for.
1) is not correct. When receiving a torrent you receive random packages of data from all over the file. Hence you can often watch movies when they are ~80% downloaded and you happen to have got the indexing block.
If you think about it, if torrents were purely sequential they would be very slow since if say 10 people started torrenting from 1 seed they would all be fighting over the same blocks and couldn't help each other.